In late 2019, an organism on the edge of life appears to have made the journey from the body of a bat into the bloodstream of a human, and shut down the global economy. Whatever else we may have learned from the pandemic caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, it has taught us that, before anything else, we are biological beings. Our lives and deaths are bound to the beings around us.
This lesson isn’t new. As capitalism has drilled into the boundaries of the life systems of our planet, we have had numerous reminders in recent years that we are not just individuals. All creatures on earth depend on each other.
As the novel coronavirus was starting to spread through Wuhan, Australia was under siege from bush fires. Thirsty marsupials found a new source of water: wombats used their burrowing skills to dig wells, which saved whole ecosystems of creatures.
In previous years, flood-struck communities in the UK had reintroduced beavers, so that their dams would hold back increasingly heavy rains, preventing drenching downstream and creating rich wetland habitats for hundreds of species. And scientists started discovering how, under each forest floor, there is a complex of fungi, transmitting nutrients between trees: mycorrhizal networks, sometimes known as the “wood wide web”.
One extinction affects all
Life on earth isn’t just an assortment of organisms. It is a rich system built on billions of connections, most of which we are only just beginning to understand. In this context, every extinction isn’t just the loss of a beautiful species. It is the annihilation of every connection between that form of life and thousands of others with which it shared an ecosystem, connections that have evolved together over millions of years. And every species loss makes all of us more vulnerable.
To understand how life on Earth is dying, and how to revive it, we need to go beyond cataloguing individual creatures, cute and furry or scary and scaly as they might be. We need to understand systems and relationships, co-dependencies and collaborations.
The same is true of our own species. Too often, the environmental crisis is broken down into questions about personal moral culpability (“Is it better to eat local beef or Amazonian soya?”; “What’s the greenest washing detergent?”) or technological possibility (“Is there enough lithium in the world for us all to have electric cars?”; “Is renewable energy too intermittent to supply the whole grid?”).
Of course, these things all matter, and thousands of brilliant engineers and scientists have dedicated their careers to finding answers to them. But the question of the future of life goes deeper. Ultimately, it is this: can we organise ourselves into a society that can flourish without plunder?
And that isn’t just a conundrum for a small band of technological whiz kids and engineering geniuses. It’s a matter for all of us. It’s a question about how we organise our civilisation. It’s an issue, ultimately, about power.
Are we the kind of society that chooses to invest the wealth produced by our work into building the green infrastructure of the future? Or are we the kind that works hard to create billionaires with private jets? After the pandemic, will we allow a tiny minority to accrue vast wealth with their machines of death? Or will we build a society that loves life? The answer depends largely on whose voices are heard. It depends on how democratic we are.
Unequal countries are dirty
Measuring the distribution of power across a society can be hard. But there is one simple proxy: money.
In 2011, a team of German academics pulled together the data on income inequality versus carbon emissions across 138 countries from 1960 to 2008. They found some clear correlations. In the developed world, it turns out, the more unequal a country is, the more it contributes to climate change. In fact, the correlation between inequality and climate impact is so strong that, as the paper put it;: “for high-income countries with high income inequality, pro-poor growth and reduced per capita emissions levels go hand in hand”.
When explaining their remarkable finding, they cited another paper: “In more unequal societies, those who benefit from pollution are more powerful than those who bear the cost.” With more traditional kinds of pollution, this is obviously true.
Landfill sites and dirty factories tend to be located in poorer communities, air pollution is usually worse in poorer neighbourhoods and poisoned water tends to blight only the poorest areas. This is an old story. It’s also the reason why, in many British cities, expensive postcodes are in the west while poorer areas lie in the east – the prevailing south westerly wind carried the filth from Victorian factories over the numerous East Ends and into the lungs of those who had migrated to the cities to operate their machinery.
But the causes and consequences of climate change are more global, and longer term. While those who are less well off in the global north are certainly at greater risk from the effects of dramatic weather events than their wealthier neighbours, those in the global south will suffer the most.
This difference is reflected in polling on the issue: a 2015 YouGov survey of a sample of countries in Europe, Asia/Pacific and North America found the nations least worried about climate breakdown were the USA and the UK, while the countries with the highest levels of concern were Malaysia, Indonesia and China.
Similarly, a poll published in January 2020 asked people in ten European countries whether the environment should take priority over the economy. The poorest country in the sample, Romania, featured the highest number of people who considered the environment to be more important.
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Adam Ramsay | Radio Free (2021-04-04T08:00:05+00:00) The UK’s democratic deficit is escalating the climate crisis. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2021/04/04/the-uks-democratic-deficit-is-escalating-the-climate-crisis/
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