Panel 11: Paths to Liberation
THE WORLD IN 2050: CREATING/IMAGINING JUST CLIMATE FUTURES
A NEARLY CARBON-NEUTRAL CONFERENCE
Panel 11: Paths to Liberation
Citizens Building Political Will
Emily Northrop, Southwestern University
This presentation will briefly describe the history, structure, values, methods and successes of the Citizens Climate Lobby, an organization of ordinary citizens who are building “political will for a livable world”. It will then sketch the economics of the “carbon fee and dividend” policy, including the projected downward redistribute of purchasing power in the United States (more).
Climate Justice: A Call for Leadership
Margot Hurlbert, University of Regina
This talks provides both a common definition of climate justice through literature review and use of a survey and argues that strong leadership from all is required to move climate justice forward. Defining justice is important as it can provide guidance to climate negotiators (more).
Liberation Communications: How Participatory Framing Fomented the People-Powered Movement for Just Transition
Celia Alario, University of California, Santa Barbara
This presenter imagines a world of 2050 that promotes rights-based approach to climate solutions. The talk outlines the path to get here, including how we can build power in communities most directly impacted by climate chaos, retool our activism and finally learned to put relationship before task, recognizing that quality relationships supported true empowerment and authentic self-expression, which allowed for greater participation, and ultimately fomented our deepening democracy (more).
Making Cosmopolitical Commons in the Ruins of Europe
Miriam Tola, Northeastern University
This talk imagines what Europe will look like 2050 by envisioning the proliferation of struggles for the commons as more just mode for dwelling on earth. Working back from the future to the present, the presentation finds traces of the cosmopolitical commons in an episode of struggle occurring in Rome, Italy, where an urban lake has recently become a central actor in a prolonged mobilization for the commons (more).
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Hi everyone.
It would be useful to my efforts to attract other folks to join the CCL efforts to hear from you what you found more and/or less compelling in this brief presentation. So:
What questions or reservations do have about the carbon fee and dividend and/or the CCL?
What might I add or clarify to move you personally to send in the post cards? 🙂
Emily, I’m a supporter of CCL, and think their plan is excellent. However, I’ve been concerned that many CCLers offer their plan as a full-scale solution to the climate emergency, rather than an incremental step in the right direction.
As I suggest in my “future history” in Panel 5, Cli-Fi, my fear is that if (and when) a carbon price is adopted, the fossil fuel companies (many of whom already support it!) will use their lobbying power to limit its impact, while what we really need is a full scale restructuring of our political and economic system to avert disaster later this century.
I’ve discussed my concerns in more detail in this blog post:
https://patternsofmeaning.com/2015/09/10/a-price-on-carbon-it-will-work-because-it-doesnt-change-everything/
I do think the bipartisan approach of CCL is especially valuable in our current polarized political environment, so please don’t interpret my comments as a criticism of what it’s doing––just my perspective that, on its own, a price on carbon won’t lead the kind of restructuring we need for civilization’s survival in this century.
Greetings Conference Peeps!
Great to have you here. I’m curious where you stand on the question of process vs. outcome? A central thesis of my talk is that where we are in 2050 will rest heavily on our ability to recognize and prioritize the importance of ‘how’ we interact with one another as a movement, not just ‘what’ we achieve as we organize toward a just transition. Do you agree? How important are relationships and process to you? Have you ever had experiences that made you more or less likely to participate in activism based on how people behaved with one another? How central in your work is “relationship before task” or “transformational relating (over just transactional)”? Is this vital? Or is it all just woo woo? Your call! Do tell all!
Celia, I’m a supporter of CCL, and think their plan is excellent. However, I’ve been concerned that many CCLers offer their plan as a full-scale solution to the climate emergency, rather than an incremental step in the right direction.
As I suggest in my “future history” in Panel 5, Cli-Fi, my fear is that if (and when) a carbon price is adopted, the fossil fuel companies (many of whom already support it!) will use their lobbying power to limit its impact, while what we really need is a full scale restructuring of our political and economic system to avert disaster later this century.
I’ve discussed my concerns in more detail in this blog post:
https://patternsofmeaning.com/2015/09/10/a-price-on-carbon-it-will-work-because-it-doesnt-change-everything/
I do think the bipartisan approach of CCL is especially valuable in our current polarized political environment, so please don’t interpret my comments as a criticism of what it’s doing––just my perspective that, on its own, a price on carbon won’t lead the kind of restructuring we need for civilization’s survival in this century.
I’m sorry, I put my comment in the wrong place! It was meant for Emily (above).
Celia, I just watched your presentation, and feel uplifted!
I believe that in many ways you have affirmed the work and approach of the CCL (the subject of my presentation). To be effective political lobbyists we MUST build relationships with people that we disagree with, and listen deeply for common ground/values that we can build on. So PROCESS is our focus.
We are currently looking to establish a local CCL chapter in my small(ish) town, and this PROCESS is very different from when I organized a local march (as part of the worldwide Sept 2014 events). With the march, it was mostly about getting the bodies out. I will definitely still participate in marches and similar actions, but they feel superficial compared to the deeper work of the CCL’s direct political engagement. However, I’m thinking that the relationship building WITHIN the CCL is something of a chicken-and-egg, or maybe it is simply that the relationships get built and the work gets done simultaneously.
I’ll directly answer two of your questions: PROCESS is critically important to me, b/c I have no confidence that we’ll do enough (globally) to avert dire outcomes.
I am TASK focused, but as I see it, to get the TASKS done, I/we have to build genuine relationships.
Thanks Emily! I realize in the end I really didn’t go into enough detail about the ins and outs of participatory research, participatory framing, etc, which I realized might have illuminated my points a bit more! But it is really great to hear your thoughts and to hear of CCL. It has amazed, confused, and saddened me over the years to see how transactional at best, cruel at worst people were in the interest of getting things done. I totally agree with you with your answer to my two questions! So here is a follow up. Any thoughts on how to help foster these beliefs further?
From where I sit all I can say is that I deliberately affirm civil, respectful discourse (even in public presentations on the CCL) both because we need it to be effective, and b/c it feels better. You haven’t named cynicism, but I appreciate the CCL circles b/c those are places where cynicism has only a small presence.
Now that I think about it, you are focusing more on how to be in relationship with folks who we are working WITH, while the CCL make the critical extension of relationship-building to folks who currently disagree with the goals of our political work.
Actually I am deciding how to handle my (only?) experience with feeling manipulated/used at this very moment.
Back around the time of Jublilee 2000 an off-campus activist (whom I didn’t know) made a very short-notice offer to bring Dennis Brutus to campus, and asked for financial support. We pulled together some money from here and there, advertised the event, and we were happy to do so. Then, by golly, at the very last minute Brutus wasn’t available after all, and someone else came in his place. The activist still wanted the money. I always felt like that was the plan from the get-go. Now, 16 years later, that same activist has re-appeared asking me to work with him on fossil fuel divestment. That isn’t where my current climate energies are going, and I don’t want to give him any campus contacts. Also, he hasn’t indicated that he remembers us “working together” before.
Can’t decide whether to ignore his request, or let him know why I won’t help, or maybe I should give him some names. This is the kind of thing I spend way too much time mulling over. 🙁
Hello Miriam, I would love to read some of your work on this topic. Can you recommend a publication or work in progress that I could access? Thank you, Michelle (presentation in the Future Polities/Economies session).
Hi Michelle,
Sorry for this late reply. I’m in Italy and, as you may have heard, the earth has been shaking here.
I’m currently working on a book project tentatively titled Ecologies of the Commons: Race, Sex, and the Politics of Nature. Portions of a chapter focusing on the work of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri were recently published in the journal Theory & Event, here is the link: https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/32578. Feel free to email me at miriam.tola@gmail.com if you have issues accessing the piece and I’ll send it to you.
Thank you!
Another follow-up question for Miriam, Stavrides, De Angelis, Linebaugh and others talking about commoning, emphasizing the process of making in common together – that the commons does not exist prior to the active labor of commoners. I would think we could include non-humans in the community of active commoners but do you think even this framing reinforces the active human agent/passive nature resource dichotomies?
Michelle, thanks for your question! Linebaugh’s work has been crucial for shifting focus from the commons as resources to commoning as an ongoing activity. Building on this idea of commoning, Silvia Federici and George Caffentzis warn against the too easy adoption of commons as community of equals devoid of conflicts and contradictions (here is the link to a recording of their talk at 16 Beaver in New York City: http://16beavergroup.org/silvia_george_david). The shift from commons to commoning is certainly helpful yet, for Linebaugh “commoning is a labor process” (2008:45). It is a praxis with “manifold particularities” (19) and intimately related to local ecologies but still a human praxis. While I find useful the reframing of the commons as activity, I worry that the focus on human praxis, on human labor as primary force making the world, leaves out of the pictures a multiplicity of beings whose powers are involved in commoning. Hope we’ll continue this conversation.
Thanks to my fellow panel members for such interesting presentations! What a strong panel of women! I’m struck by the common themes in our presentations around change, action, and leadership! Canada has just announced a federal carbon strategy that you may be interested in Emily! One country in northern Europe has a carbon price of $150.00 and New Zealand has recognized a forest as a ‘person’. What great ideas! How do we tackle the inequitable distribution of emitters and those impacted?
Hi Miriam, I like your concept of cosmopolitical commons, and the stress on the integrated commoning force of ‘nature’ and people. I guess one could go further and invoke the notions of biocultural landscapes that indigenous peoples talk of, where there is no separation of nature and humans, and in this sense the commons are an integrated whole. Breaking down the binaries that plague ‘western’ thought is a crucial part of the transformations we need in knowledge and epistemologies. Eduardo Kohn’s recent book ‘How Forests Think’ brings this out powerfully (I’ve only yet read the Introduction, but that gives a good flavour), and increasingly in the world of ‘alternatives’ practitioners and thinkers the reality of nature’s agency is recognised. Btw you may also be interested in a case study of revival and commoning of a lake in Bangalore in India, see http://www.vikalpsangam.org/static/media/uploads/Resources/kaikondrahalli_lake_casestudy_harini.pdf. Also I’ve responded to your qs to Michelle and Michael in our panel no. 9.
Hi Ashish,
Thanks for this and for the link to Indian project.
Briefly, I’m not so sure about thinking the commons as “integrated wholes.” Making the commons is very much a matter of conflict and creating possibilities of alliance between uncommons. The relationship between the commons and indigenous claims to land is relevant here. Indigenous scholar Glen Coulthard talks about the danger of fetishization of the commons in radical circles. So for example, guerilla gardening projects in the United States are making commons in spaces that were taken away from indigenous people, yet often these layers of dispossession are not accounted for. In other words, there is a tension, a radical uncommon, between some claims to the commons and indigenous claims to sovereignty that needs to be carefully considered.
Thanks, Miriam, but by ‘integrated’ I meant the nature-culture integration, or non-dualism. I agree that there are various tensions and conflicts in the commons processes and visioning, including within each community itself (gender, caste, class, ethnicity, etc). But this is an issue with any kind of alternative paradigm, not only the commons … solidarity economy, radical democracy, swaraj, ecosocialist approaches, etc. And it is not even just between non-indigenous and indigenous peoples as in the example you mention above, but even amongst/between indigenous people … for instance the Maori claims to territory in N. Zealand do not mention that their own colonisation of the island was based on displacing pre-Maori peoples (of course they are no longer there at all so no continuing conflicts). In central India there are some dominant ‘adivasi’ (indigenous) peoples who have historically suppressed numerically or in other ways weaker adivasi groups; a phenomenon that has implications for the ongoing process of reclaiming collective forest rights that were taken away from them in colonial times. The tensions within any of these approaches need to be brought out, but I am not sure that these negate the approaches/concepts themselves. One tool we are developing (I’d be happy to send it to you) is an Alternatives Transformation framework, which helps people to look at multiple dimensions of their attempts at change, so that for instance in the process of claiming collective tenure, and through this conserving/sustainably using the forest, they are also aware that there are social justice and distribution issues that need to be considered and tackled.