[TLDR (too long didn’t read): If you are reading this, chances are you care about HR. This Reader is about the challenge we humans face if we and weak leaders keep playing God with mother nature (this is not meant as a cliché!). For a quick overview, just read the bolded text]. Traducir/traduire los/les Readers; usar/utiliser deepl.com
–It is impossible to have healthy people on a sick planet. (Shweta Narayan, Rico Euripidou)
1. At the dawn of Capitalism, the dichotomy between humanity and nature legitimized the individual appropriation of nature totally subjecting it to uses and abuses determined by ‘the interests of development’.* Given that non-capitalist forms of property are potentially the most respectful of nature, capitalist property should not be more protected by the state than all other forms of property (peasant, family, indigenous, cooperative, communal). (Boaventura de Sousa Santos) It is further necessary to recognize that pandemics, as many natural disasters we experience, are linked to the breakdown of the balance between society and nature caused by extractive Capitalism that insists on turning nature into a commodity for the market. This is one of the major roots of the problem. There will continue to be pandemics and disasters as long as we do not achieve harmony in society’s relationship with nature. (PHM) It is humans that must change if they are to preserve nature! (Jaime Breilh)
*: Uno no vende la tierra por la cual camina su pueblo. [One does not sell the land on which its people walk]. (Graffiti in Ecuador)
2. A dangerous aspect in environmental disputes, when ‘other forms of property are not protected’, is the deceiving idea that ‘sharing value’ with communities is fair. If by sharing value we mean giving them money to compensate for environmental damage, we are in the realm of bribery and corruption of leaders, generating division among communities and encouraging clientelism. The best way to ensure communities continue to defend and to preserve their eco-systems is to make environmental information transparent, to defend their labor rights and the state improving roads, drinking water (arsenic free), as well as providing quality public health and education services. (Jan Cademartori)
Capitalism is killing the planet –and it is OK to be angry about that
–The climate crisis is not a tragedy, it is a crime.
–Despair is a luxury we cannot afford. (David Suzuki)
3. Today, I am finding solace not in hope, but in anger. Not only is it OK to be angry at the institutions and people pushing us toward irreparable ecological breakdown, it is essential. (Alec Cannon)
4. Totally related is the fact that the world’s richest are leaving the poorest all alone to deal with the global debt crisis. Without fixing the debt and poverty crisis, we will not even get close to fixing the global climate crisis that threatens us all –not to mention fixing ongoing flagrant human rights (HR) violations that keeping current paying the debt brings about… Ponder: If the countries rendered rich cannot find the decency to face and help solve the global debt crisis, what are the chances they will tackle the climate crisis?** (Mark Malloch-Brown)
**: 2023 had the hottest summer, not just in our lives, but possibly in the last 120,000 years, according to leading scientists. Yet it is likely to be the coolest we will experience for the rest of our lives. (Bono and Lawrence Summers, The Washington Post)
5. At least, if not more, and totally related is the fact that, instead of helping developing countries cope with more funds for climate adaptation, most available resources have been earmarked for mitigation only –an a-posteriori pat solution that does not address the cause of the causes, among them neocolonialism.
Decolonization is not a metaphor (E. Tuck, K.W. Yang)
6. The unprecedented ecological impact of human economic activity led to the labelling of the current epoch as ‘the Anthropocene’, which positions human action as the planetary-scale geological force that is determining today’s state of the planet. However, the overshoot of planetary boundaries is not caused by humans as such –as the term ‘Anthro’ suggests. Rather, it is being driven by a particular global neocolonial economic system that is built around and dependent on continued economic growth and injustice to the benefit of the wealthiest few living predominantly, but not only, in global North countries.
7. Research has indicated that the net appropriation of resources and labor from Southern to Northern countries through what is known as ‘unequal exchange’ represented a drain from South to North of $242 trillion (constant 2010 USD) over the period 1990–2015. Resources that could otherwise have been mobilized to meet domestic needs in countries rendered poor were/are instead appropriated to service production and consumption in the rendered-rich global North through processes such as deeply unequal trade relations, the migration of minds (brain drain), as well as the migration of human and financial capital, the exploitative business practices of transnational corporations and technological dependencies that are unfairly protected via international Intellectual Property regimes.
8. The same study found that the South’s losses due to unequal exchange outstripped their total aid receipts, including development assistance for health, by a factor of 30. Meanwhile, as widely acknowledged by planetary health scholarship, the health and economic burden of the ecological crisis is falling disproportionately on communities in the global South, particularly those who bear no responsibility for the ecological breakdown. (E. Tuck, K.W. Yang)
9. Furthermore, consider: Despite being among the world’s largest public lenders, the World Bank has been too slow to provide climate finance –and is already years behind schedule. It is not even aligned with the non-binding 2015 Paris Agreement goals, with new operations only scheduled to become aligned from mid-2023! The WB wants greater development and climate impacts to come from private commercial finance. This is undoubtedly in line with the WB’s creed that only the private sector can overcome the climate crisis despite being its major enabler, if not cause. Without any agreed multilateral definition of climate finance, governments and corporations are ‘greenwashing’ their financial and ecological abuses by labelling their financial operations as constituting climate and development finance. (Jomo Sundaram and Khoo Wei Yang)
Wrong politics and false solutions
10. It is important to understand that ‘it is one thing to walk slowly so as not to have to go backwards all the time, and another thing to give-in to the opposition, believing that this is the way to advance’. The example of those who believe you are moving forward without realizing your defeat is the expression of those who call themselves leftists and govern as if they were rightists, preferring to strengthen the economy to the detriment of the environment, where it is more important to ensure business and profitability, rather than clean air, access to water, and enjoyment in places where we can live harmoniously with other living beings. (Primera Piedra)
11. Have you also heard this?: “We demand that, from now on, you buy electric cars…” Yes, but for which electricity has yet to be produced… We have not made much progress, then, since today, the other extreme audacity consists in (naively) demanding the separation of your waste in different colored dumpsters: to save the planet!? (Louis Casado) …and on-and-on on we see these behavioral approaches that barely scratch the surface.
Bottom line: Public apathy in the face of widespread suffering is only part of the problem that climate change poses for human rights
— The order of immensity and the relevance of Gaia (our Earth’s self-regulating ecosystem) to us all ought to lower environmental predators’ ‘egoemia’ and greed.
12. Under the conditions these predators are creating, societies and individuals will be under more and more pressure to survive. Ill-conceived choices and/or pat solutions may well lead to exhaustion and moral apathy. Suffering will increase for everyone, even if the cost will be dramatically higher for those rendered poor –nations as well as individuals. People will look to governments for help. But a pervasive sense of deprivation and loss may drain our commitment to the needs and rights of others. In short, recent years have seen stagnation on our common, global commitment to HR –and climate change threatens to further erode that support. Working to shore up support for HR and right of nature movements among wider populations poses an even greater challenge we cannot continue to disregard. (Devon Kearney)
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
Your comments are welcome at schuftan@gmail.com