Climate and the Commons

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Huni: once one island, now two

Occupy Theory has decided to set up weekly themed assemblies. Like Barcelona, only with about 39,900 fewer people: so come along, Sunday at noon in Washington Square Park. So I’m supposed to come up with some discussion ideas on climate and the commons, and thought I might try them out here. They have to be short so it can go on one side of paper. Please comment! Too depressing? Not depressing enough? Clear? not so much? what else should be here? FB, email, carrier pigeon, even here on the blog.

Ideas and Actions

1. In the seventeenth century, English revolutionaries declared “the earth a common treasury for all.” Climate change is the polite name for the one percent robbing the commons. The overdeveloped world as a whole is the “one percent” in relation to the dominated world.

2. Capitalism began with the enclosure of the commons and continues to expand today through the fossil fuel and mining industries. All these actions were and are thefts from the commons. To stop climate change, we have to stop neoliberal capitalism. It is a political choice, not an argument as to who is right or wrong about data.

3. What we call the climate and the economy are both complex systems with real effects. Since the beginning of the industrial era, what we call climate has become the product of the economy. This includes temperature, rainfall, sea levels, drought, ice melt, species extinction, flooding, and other variations in formerly stable conditions.

4. There are no longer such things as nature or the environment. You can argue if there ever were but human action in the industrial era has transformed everything that there is, from the rocks to the air: it is real in the sense that it exists and artificial in the sense that humans made it. What we also now know is that it will do so until it is made to desist.

It’s a Good Thing

1. The response to the neo-liberal destruction of the commons will open a new age of leisure for all. Automated production powered by renewable energy can sustain our needs, including modern conveniences and medicines, without the built-in obsolescence, waste and endless debt-slavery of the current system.

2. For half a millennium, priests, colonizers, industrialists and moralizers of all stripes have been bemoaning the laziness of the common people, while extolling the leisure required by the monk, the scholar and the aristocrat. Reclaiming the commons opens the contemplative life to all those who might want it and ends the necessity of pointless labor.

Another World Is Necessary

1. Agriculture and non-nomadic settlement became possible during a geologically brief window that we are now closing. You can measure it: 350 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere allowed for the climate our parents remember. Right now we’re at 393 or so. The International Energy Authority says that we’ve already used all the extra fossil fuels that will take us up to 450 parts per million at which point no one really knows what will happen. It has to stop.

2. The Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan flooded last year for the simple reason that there is now more water in the Western Pacific than there used to be thanks to climate change. High sea-level events like tsunamis and hurricanes multiply small sea-level rises by factors of up to 10,000. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change announced this in Delhi. No Western media reported it.

3. Conservative estimates predict that such sea-level rise will mean 33 million people in the U.S. will have to move, part of 250 million worldwide. That’s one in ten of the current U. S. population. Live in New York? That’s you. And me.

4. Flooding is first affecting the island cultures of the Pacific (see the island of Huni above, divided in two). Indigenous peoples have created the least emissions and are paying the highest price. One-third of the world’s existing spoken languages are found in this region. Capitalism is stealing our cultural commons as well as the air, sea and land. It’s ours and we want it back.

9 thoughts on “Climate and the Commons”

  1. In 1066 the Normans replaced the Anglo-Saxon word Frith, about kinship, with the French-derived word Peace, which is about lordship. Related to the words for friend and free, Frith was according to Groenbech the “power that makes them ‘friends’ towards one another, and free men towards the rest of the world.” While “freedom” has come to mean the absence of responsibility toward others, Frith meant the connections that make a social group strong enough to resist tyranny and other external threats.

    Without this kinship, there is no freedom. The replacement of Frith (commons & kinship bonds) with Peace (property & the absence of war because the overlords are appeased) was the colonial moment for the English language, as the Norman French had inherited the Roman imperial tongue.

    The Magna Charta (1215) and its accompanying Forest Charter (1217) was the “Occupy” moment of the Norman invasion, because it reinstated kinship over lordship in terms of concrete relationships between people and land (forage, pannage etc.). It returned use of the forest commons to the people, and their right to a livelihood from the earth. However, this idea of the Commons came at a cost, because the commons was reinstated as an exception to the rule of lordship (the public park, private property, the dwindling lands later enclosed, the reservation) rather than the natural default practiced by indigenous peoples or pre-Norman Anglo Saxon commoners.

    So while it’s encouraging to see you link the Occupy movement to reconnection to the land, Miq’mac elder Miigam’agan reminds us we should not occupy but decolonize. And I assume that’s why Jay Taber and the IC community also link climate change to the human rights of indigenous people.

    http://decolonizepdx.weebly.com/uploads/1/0/0/7/10072122/6360991_orig.jpg

    You can’t occupy the land. That’s a colonial mindset. You have to inhabit land, or belong to it, or belong with it. Governance needs to come out of kinship with, not lordship over. Out of Frith, not Peace.

    • I agree:) I didn’t talk about occupying the land in this post–although there is some discussion of the Charter of the Forest in another post called “The Debt and the Land” so perhaps you’re referring to that? I think Occupy can have many senses: such as decolonize, appropriate, liberate, etc–and then it can also mean colonize, settle etc. There is a history to that and I have an older post about the genealogy of the term. What you say about the Anglo-Saxons is interesting because the Diggers and other English revolutionaries argued that they were getting back to Anglo-Saxon liberties in the seventeenth century. I hope you can come to the Assembly on Sunday and talk about this further:)

  2. Climate change is also a special focus of indigenous peoples as they attempt to decolonize the UN and international law. As a current issue in their long struggle for liberation, climate change is now one of many aspects of the newly established UN human rights regime on the rights of indigenous peoples.

    As this regime evolves in opposition to neoliberal colonialism, the UN simultaneously continues to aid and abet the institutionalized theft of indigenous properties of which a stable climate is arguably one. Seeking restitution for this theft may eventually lead to restoration, but in the meantime, civil society solidarity by Occupy toward indigenous liberation is a good way to go.

    Much is available on this http://intercontinentalcry.org/topics/climate-change/ subject at Intercontinental Cry, where I serve as an editorial advisor and columnist.

    • Absolutely: one way I have put this is to emphasize the right of indigenous peoples to occupy their own lands and not to be forced into becoming climate migrants. Hope to see you at the Assembly on Sunday!

  5. Thanks, Bernard–these are great comments. I have to think about how to express point 3 in way that can come over clearly but I certainly take the point. Point 2: all of us in the overdeveloped world are in some way part of the one percent, yes, as far as CO2 is concerned. Perhaps that’s overdone. I might consider going with the #1 or #4 as you suggest–great idea.

  6. I think this is a great piece, but since you ask for comments and critiques, here are a few off the cuff thoughts:
    1) You might consider focusing on one key point. Both #1 and #4 in ideas and actions seem ideally suited for that, and are especially striking as important theses.
    2) You write “Climate change is the polite name for the one percent robbing the commons.”I think of myself as part of the 99% and I also think of myself as responsible, in some way, for the harmful effects of climate change. Ethically speaking, I think it is important to more actively self-implicate on this one, if we really want to confront the basic problems. As such, I’m not sure if that particular claim does justice to the problems and complicities associated with climate change.
    3) I think that the critique neoliberalism, etc, needs to involve a confrontation with real things that are not “products” of human activities, interests, etc. Something outside ourself, which includes animals, minerals, solar systems, unexpected interactions among nonhuman elements, etc. For that reason, although I understand why you write “what we call climate has become the product of the economy,” I think that claim is problematic. I would want to better recognize non-human actors in our ethical landscape — what Stengers might term a cosmopolitical scene, where we confront something beyond our individualistic and human-interest-driven epistemologies and interests. Recognizing that nonhuman scene is also part of a critique of neoliberal, human-centered thought.

    Even so–a great and admirable text!

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