[TLDR (too long didn’t read): If you are reading this, chances are it behooves you. This Reader excerpts some brilliant insights of what we are (not) doing to our planet and why. For a quick overview, just read the bolded text]. Traducir/traduire los/les Readers; usar/utiliser deepl.com
—Degraded ecosystems are already showing up as degraded lives. (Sammi Landsman)
1. Faced with the existing inertia, our societies have developed a near-Pavlovian reflex: We make education about the rights of nature the number one solution. As soon as the problems enter the social consciousness, the call goes out: “We must educate.” This is what researchers call ‘educationalization’, i.e., the pervasive tendency of modernity to transform structural environmental, political and economic problems into individual educational challenges. This logic rests on a seductive but misleading premise: If citizens do not act, it is because they do not know, or do not know well enough. If we follow this logic, all it would take is more classes and pedagogy to set the transition in motion.
2. Yet this educational gamble hits a wall. The failure is not cognitive; it is systemic. If the call for knowledge goes nowhere, it is because it is based on a flawed diagnosis: We do not suffer from a lack of visibility. Climate change, for instance, is both everywhere and nowhere; it is viscous and elusive. When covered by the media, it becomes a fragmented spectacle. At the gas pump, fuel flows without revealing anything of its geological or geopolitical history; at the supermarket, merchandise appears on the shelves, stripped of any ecological trace.
3. There is thus a fundamental disconnect between what we know (the global catastrophe) and what we see (the apparent normality of daily life). Our inaction is, therefore, not the result of willful blindness, but the product of a system of structural invisibility. Organized by capitalist modernity, the system has methodically separated production from consumption, causes from their consequences, and our bodies from their environment
4. The issue here is, not to challenge the carbon footprint of the electric vehicle (often better than its combustion-engine counterpart over the entire life cycle), but to question the narrative that accompanies it. We are promised the replacement of a ‘dirty’ object (the smoking exhaust pipe) with a ‘clean’ one (the silent car). This techno-optimistic framing serves to obscure, once again, the value chain –think the extraction of lithium in Chile, or cobalt from Congolese mines, or the energy-intensive manufacturing of batteries in countries rendered rich. Pollution does not disappear; it is pushed further away, into the new extraction zones of Green Capitalism. More profoundly, the electric car helps preserve the invisibility of the automotive system itself. By focusing the debate on the engine, we normalize the colossal infrastructure required for individual mobility. We are talking about urban sprawl, land development and our dependence on cars. It allows everything to appear to change so that, structurally, nothing has changed in the way we inhabit the planet.
5. By clinging to the idea of a clean, sequential transition from one energy source to another –historically from wood to coal, then to oil or atoms– we have obscured the fundamental material reality of our history, i.e., that of energy accumulation. We have never abandoned any energy source (we still use wood…).
The dissonance between the intellect (which knows) and the senses (which do not feel) is too strong to be overcome by willpower alone
6. In these moments of upheaval, the crisis must cease to be a statistical abstraction only and becomes a physical experience. We take notice of the smell of exhausts, of the unbearable heat, of the ruin of familiar landscapes… These sensory stimulae invariably provoke a sense of shock and (not often enough) a surge in solidarity. Even when we attempt to break through this wall of invisibility through educational initiatives, the system tends to reconfigure itself to ‘neutralize’ our critiques and demands. It then often retreats into ‘education in small gestures’ (sorting waste, turning off the lights) that individualizes responsibility while leaving the infrastructure of industrial production in the shadows.
7. This all tends to transform ecology into a civic morality that, in addition to obscuring the relations of production, contributes to widening inequalities. By brutally confronting participants with the systemic scale of the disaster (without always offering political avenues commensurate with the challenge), the approach risks producing a paralyzing lucidity. The cognitive shock turns into eco-anxiety or bewilderment due to the lack of levers for collective action.
We see the problem, but we still do not see the means to act on the system, leaving us, the participants, to face our individual powerlessness
8. If education stumbles over these obstacles, it is because invisibility is not merely a pedagogical accident, but a political construct. Alongside the material and sensory dimensions, a third pillar is needed for the edifice to stand, namely, the cognitive dimension. For, despite everything, information seeps through. To maintain the status-quo, the system, not only masks physical reality; it actively engineers our political misunderstanding. For decades, the fossil fuel industry has funded vast disinformation campaigns to transform a scientific consensus into a made-up public controversy. The goal was/is not to prove that global warming did/does not exist, but to instill just enough doubt to paralyze political decision-making.
9. Media coverage of climate issues presents the crisis as a series of episodic and spectacular events disconnected from their structural causes. Citizens find themselves faced with an elusive ‘mega-problem’, one that remains both omnipresent and abstract. We are inundated with information, but this information does not lead to an in-depth understanding: It breeds fatigue and cynicism.
Bottom line
10. Climate inaction is, not an accidental breakdown in information, but the product of a system that orchestrates its own concealment. It is no longer just a matter of convincing people with graphs, but of transforming material conditions.
11. Believing in the energy transition is like believing you can change the light bulbs without altering the house’s architecture. Breaking free from inaction requires a far more radical shift. We must reject the deceiving magic of commodification-without-a-story. There is a revealing paradox that hinders this approach: Energy alternatives are often contested, precisely because they make energy visible. We oppose a wind turbine, because it makes the landscape look bad with its industrial presence; but we accept, without the blinking of an eye, underground pipelines, mega-ton tankers, or distant nuclear power plants that have the good sense to remain invisible. This aesthetic rejection betrays our attachment to the comfort of concealment.
12. We prefer an invisible poison to a visible remedy. To be able to deliberate on our future, we must first regain our sight. (H. Draelants)
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
Your comments are welcome at schuftan@gmail.com
Postscript/Marginalia
Europe: How are you doing? Very well, thank you??
–European countries maintain their green credentials partly by outsourcing environmental damage. Around 40% of EU greenhouse gas emissions are generated abroad through trade. Europe looks cleaner on paper, because someone else’s air is getting dirtier.*
*: European countries’ apparent success in reducing domestic emissions is partly achieved by moving polluting industries offshore. Europe’s air gets cleaner because factories moved to countries with weaker environmental standards. The emissions still exist. They just do not appear in European national accounts.
-The gap between rhetoric and reality keeps widening. You can claim environmental progress while your consumption patterns drive environmental damage elsewhere. Europe congratulates itself on emissions reductions that are partly accounting tricks while actual global emissions continue rising. Claims of being pro-sustainability mask serious problems as progress stalls and inequalities widen. (Rameen Siddiqui)
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