DEMOS

Al Gore’s film is not simply an objective account of the climate change that is sweeping across our ecosystem.  It is laden with assumptions, implications, values, distortion and power.  There is a real danger that this ‘sustainability discourse’ will hegemonise the intellectual frameworks of environmental movements and education.  The fact that we are disastrously warming our planet is not really an issue of serious contestation anymore (even the white house’s scientific crackpots have yielded), the crux of the argument now lies in how we are doing this and what we need to do to stop it.  Gore’s lecture is, in this regard, limp and unhelpful; he ignores the fact that the systemic dynamics of accumulation (the driving characteristic principle of our social system), acting as positive feedback loops, are fuelling social and physical degradation.  This central contradiction was clearly articulated in a seminal report (The Limits of Growth) by a conservative industrial thin-tank called the Club of Rome over 30 years ago.  Today it has been obscured and ignored in favour of the warmth and fuzziness of the win-win and endless growth scenarios peddled by Gore and his contemporaries in the ‘sustainability’ and CSR movements.  To this end it is clear that Gore, still a mover in the corporate dominated political circles of Capitol Hill, represents a narrow and historically shallow interpretation and analysis of the nature of environmental change.  If we are serious about giving young people the tools and information they need to interpret and reach objective accounts of the world then his film should only be included as part of a wider package that also offers alternative prescriptive and analytical perspectives.  Personally I had trouble sitting through the film as an adult and was lulled into an uncomfortable sleep by the monotony of the narration, as a child I may have very well thrown a tantrum…  

It is indeed bizarre to suggest that ‘the climate debate is over,’ when we still hear remarks such as this one from Chrysler’s chief economist: he called on Europeans to deal with climate change "in a step-by-step, rational way, and not play much Chicken Little". I wonder what his type of ‘rationality’ consists of, and who it would involve in the process of formulating these ‘steps’. Presumably he would be very win-win about it all, most of all advocating a series of technological fixes – the car industry’s own equivalents of the expert-driven solutions that often rule the environmental discourse, in fields from public transport (Maglev!) to energy – indeed, nuclear technology.

I am reading a book called “Nature and The City - Making environmental policy in Toronto and Los Angeles” by Gene Desfor and Roger Keil. The book criticises the dominant belief in markets and experts to regulate our environment for everyone’s benefit, arguing instead that civil political action by local constituencies is crucial for the establishment of truly beneficial policies. “When environmental policies appear to have been produced through solely technical exercises, one must be suspicious about the removal of contention from the process.” In other words, it is the making of environmental policy that's key to this argument, as well as the analysis of different actors’ presupposed roles in this process. What is, for example, the underlying conception of citizens and citizen action in the Stern report? I would question whether it is an empowering vision, one that legitimises local political action as well as global regulation efforts.