[TLDR (too long didn’t read): If you are reading this, chances are you care about HR. This Reader is about the dangers of ignoring or of downplaying the current (and evolving) social and environmental crises. For a quick overview, just read the bolded text]. Traducir/traduire los/les Readers; usar/utiliser deepl.com
–Climate and the rights of nature are, and will be, the most extreme, continuous and universal emergency that modern humans have ever faced. And we must be ready to face it. (Hugo Slim)
Global warming skepticism is part of a right-wing populist worldview that is distrustful of scientists, technocrats, activists, and members of the media advancing the climate action agenda (Michael Lockwood)
1. In autocratic right-wing political regimes, the reforms pursued often aim, not only to undermine the rule of law, but also to dilute legal protections for the environment and for those who defend it (think Bolsonaro, Milei, Modi, Duterte –and maybe soon Trump again?).
2. Therefore, pro-democracy/pro-climate activism calls for concerted proactive campaigns and litigation since democratic backsliding towards the extreme Right and the climate crisis are intertwined challenges. (Cesar Rodriguez-G, Arpitha Kodiveri)
We are in a prolonged social and environmental crisis
–“This is Earth. It will never be heaven”. (Rebecca Solnit)
3. Society is collapsing, environmental systems are collapsing, and capitalism has no solutions. The failure to stop global warming proves that competing nation-states cannot solve the most urgent problems. (Susan Rosenthal)
4. A civilization that proves incapable of solving the problems that its functioning brings about is a decadent civilization. A civilization that chooses to close its eyes to its most crucial problems is a wounded civilization; a civilization that cheats on its principles is a dying civilization. (Aimé Cesaire, Francophone Martinican poet and politician, 1913-2008)
This is thus not a time for mild reformism
5. The bourgeois green parties are unfortunately beyond weak in their dangerous inattention to the question of working-class livelihoods, social policy, and neoliberal dynamics. To overcome these limitations, it is urgently important for progressive environmentalists to build alliances with unions, labor movements and other working-class political formations that have much more political leverage, including the power of the strike.* This requires the hard work of organizing, establishing solidarities, and uniting around common political demands. It requires a strategy and it requires courage for a struggle that must be launched/continued. We must revive our original ambitions and unite across sectors, as well as with the unemployed, to secure a solid foundation for all groups that must, not only fight for structural economic changes, but also take better care of Mother Earth. (Jason Hickel)
*: Beware though, unions also need to move on the rights of nature front. How did they ever let the political horizons of the labor movement shrink down to industry-specific battles over wages and conditions, while leaving the general structure of the capitalist economy responsible for the plundering of natural resources intact? (…defending jobs…?).
Bottom line
6. Some of the people who read me have asked me, with some anxiety: what does the future of our grandchildren look like? I believe that we are transferring to them a problem that is ours and ours alone. Their future is being destroyed to guarantee ours. For the first time in history, these people who ask this feel that we are all in the same boat and that the lifeboats are not enough for everyone –and the future will get worse. Our concerns as grandparents are more revealing of our petty anxieties than the existential anxieties of our grandchildren.** (Boaventura de Sousa y Santos)
**: Here is what our grandchildren can teach us: nature does not belong to us; we belong to nature. For them, what is at stake is the end of humanity as a species, one species among the millions of species that emerged on planet Earth millions of years ago and that nothing guarantees that they will not become extinct. (As human life represents 0.01% of the total life on the planet, it is easy to imagine that the planet can continue to flourish without the presence of humans…). Our grandchildren will know how to explain to you the consequences of the impending ecological catastrophe we have reached –and they will surely conclude with a question that will silence us and make us ashamed: “Why was nothing done to prevent us from reaching this point”?
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
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Postscript/Marginalia
–Ponder a learned opinion: It seems to me that almost all mainstream proposals to rescue the biosphere, however sensible and uplifting, are flawed and indeed undermined by an underlying anthropocentricity. Take the quote of Shweta Narayan: “It is impossible to have healthy people on a sick planet”. Though this is undoubtedly true and important, it seems nonetheless to reinforce the idea that the reasonfor taking care of the natural world is that we, human beings, will suffer if we do not (as is already very evident). So, if we are really going to engage with the plight of the natural world then we need to invoke and be guided by moral principles and also, crucially, of oneness. This idea –that all living things are our relatives, or indeed that we are all parts of a whole— is very strong in Eastern religions (Buddhism; Sikhism; Shinto), but is seriously underplayed in Judaism and Christianity (I am not too sure where Islam stands on this). Christianity and Judaism seem unable to escape from Genesis (1:26) that tells us that: “God said: Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth”. This strongly implies that we are separate from all other creatures, and superior to them, and the word ‘dominion’ at least implies that we have a right to rule over them. Many Christian thinkers seek to modify this apparent high-handedness by suggesting that dominion really implies stewardship which is far better than crude exploitation, but still reflects an attitude of us and them. (Colin Tudge)