Two major crises have made it clear that the age of disconnection is over

Thu, Apr 02, 2020 page9

Two major crises have made it clear that the age of disconnection is over

Australia’s bushfires and the COVID-19 pandemic have shown it is crucial that human disconnection from and dominance over nature must be challenged
- By Tim Hollo / The Guardian
Everything is connected. It is hard to imagine right now that, just weeks ago, the truism of ecological politics was treated as hippy nonsense by mainstream politics.
Announcing the statutory review of the commonwealth’s Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) Act in October last year, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s government pitched it as an opportunity to weaken the laws of former Australian prime minister John Howard’s era even further and make it easier still for environmentally destructive projects to be approved.
Regardless of clear statements from scientists and strong advocacy by campaign groups, it looked like it would get away with it because, back then, everyone was still living in the age of disconnection, when the environment and the economy could be seen as separate things, in competition with each other.

Illustration: Mountain People

Then the Australian summer arrived, delivering one after the other two massive wake-up calls. In the age of consequences, with the climate crisis and a deadly pandemic bearing down on the globe, it is impossible to pretend that everyone is separate from one another and from the natural world.
A pandemic, more than almost any other phenomenon, shows that all lives are inextricably intertwined, now and forever.

It brings into sharp focus the impossibility of trying to keep economics, health, environment, education and social justice as separate questions with separate answers. It heightens awareness of everyone’s vital need, as social beings, to stay connected to each other as much as possible while keeping a physical distance.
It shows how the “efficient,” on-demand world that capitalism has constructed is so incredibly fragile that a series of shocks can bring it to the point of collapse.
With the rules of neoliberal economics being broken by governments the world over, it demonstrates that massive policy interventions, shifting the entire structure of the global economy, are possible.
With all focus now on COVID-19, it takes an effort to recall this summer’s bushfires in Australia. They were, of course, far larger and fiercer than ever before, over a season that started when winter had barely ended.
Where previously bushfires had affected a small number of people, this season the smoke blanketed Canberra, Sydney and Melbourne, and the repeated evacuation of summer holiday spots, meant that most Australians were affected.
This heralded a shift in thinking that went deeper than personal impact. Perhaps due to the remarkably low loss of human life compared with the scale of the disaster, there was a tremendous focus on the more than 1 billion mammals, birds and reptiles killed.
The world mourned the thousands of koalas and numerous species being pushed toward extinction.
The true legacy of this summer could be a vital turning point in recognizing that “the environment” is not something “over there.”
The environment is the air we breathe and the water we drink; it is the soil in which we grow our food; it is the animals we identify with and the landscapes imprinted on our souls; the environment is us, all of us, together, integrally connected with everyone and everything else on this beautiful blue marble floating in space.
Damage the environment and we damage ourselves, and not just some of us — all of us together. Continue to think in our compartmentalized, linear fashion, and we will keep missing what is coming, be it weeks of smoke, runs on toilet paper or deadly pandemics.
What started to become clear thanks to the fires was rammed home by COVID-19. We are only as healthy as the least healthy among us.
Everything we do relies on extraordinary networks of activity by people we have never met, crisscrossing the globe.
Responding to a health crisis that was likely triggered in part by environmental destruction also has world-changing effects on the economy, on education, on social justice and on geopolitics.
The age of disconnection is over.
However, where does that leave the review of the EPBC Act?
There is an opportunity now to not just push for a new generation of environment laws, but to re-evaluate the whole deal, to cultivate a new political settlement based on ecological principles of living well together in harmony with the natural world, understanding humanity’s place as part of it, as the First Peoples did for millenniums, with an economy designed to serve people and planet.
As part of this, vital improvements to the act need to be advocated for immediately. It is extraordinary that the Howard legacy of deliberately excluding a project’s climate effects from the triggers to require assessment still has not been remedied.
That must be fixed now, as must the fact that there is no mechanism for assessing the cumulative ecological effects of various proposals.
After this summer’s destruction of huge areas of remaining healthy ecosystems, a presumption of protection — in legislation and the practice of assessment — needs to be instituted, instead of a culture of managed destruction.
All this is likely to be attacked as “green tape,” and we must be ready to defend it instead of changing the subject — and defend it on ecological grounds.
Regulation is a vital part of the connective tissue that holds the body politic together. Removing it sees everything fall apart.
COVID-19 is, among other things, showing the world the consequences of deregulating markets in health services, food supply and more.
Having that conversation in this way means we would not just be advocating for marginal improvements, but would be working to change politics. We would be building into the political common sense the idea that corporations absolutely should be regulated to enforce environmental and social responsibilities, and that shareholder profit can no longer be considered their sole focus.
That would help move politics toward altering the DNA of corporations so that they operate as part of the body politic rather than as cancer cells.
The flip side of this systemic shift would be to institute legal rights for the natural world. If BHP has legal rights, why does the Great Barrier Reef not?
Rights for nature is an increasingly mature legal field, instituted from New Zealand and Bolivia to India and parts of the US. They can and should at least be inserted as a normative principle in the goals of the act.
A new ecological political settlement would also need federalism to be rethought. The current system sees national and state governments cooperating to shut out community participation and scientific advice to facilitate destructive development.
An effective regime based on a presumption of protection would see federal, state, territory and local governments enabling communities to collectively develop creative ideas at their local level, within the context of expert scientific advice, and coordinating those ideas at a regional and continental level.
If environmental regulation is shifted from a process that is primarily responsive to developers’ demands into a proactive, constructive, community-led system, it could morph from a stance of defensive protection into one of active restoration, repair and regeneration.
It could lead to the greening of cities and towns as everyone embraces the idea that habitats are not just “over there,” but among them. It would create industrial jobs in coalmine rehabilitation. It could support regenerative agriculture and cooperative sharing of scarce water.
It could even open space for community-led conversations about relocation as the overheating world retreats from rising seas and inland desertification is inevitable.
Supporting and enabling communities to make decisions is also vital for rebuilding confidence in democracy, which has collapsed in the past few years.
Australians responded to COVID-19 by panic buying. The abject failure of their government to provide leadership through the fires could have worsened this.
This is an opportunity to rethink governance, reclaim agency for communities, build practices of trust and social cohesion, embedded in respect for expert advice.
It is important to recognize that with Morrison’s government Australians are not going to see these kinds of changes. At best, the push to weaken the act even further might be held off, but that should not stop people advocating for what they need. Quite the opposite.
Politics, like the natural world it operates within, is a system. It works in complex ways because all it is is the collective actions of humans, influenced by each other and by external impetuses such as the weather, or viruses.
US environmental scientist Donella Meadows, the modern mother of systems thinking, wrote that the most effective leverage point to change a system is “the mindset or paradigm out of which the system ... arises.”
It is critical, then, that the paradigm that sees environmental protection as of marginal importance at best, and as a barrier at worst, be confronted. It is vital that the mindsets of human disconnection from and dominance over nature be challenged.
Over the past three months, a huge number of people made that conceptual leap. In the past few weeks, the crisis has become such that even mainstream politics finds it impossible to ignore.
At the same time, over this period numerous people decided to just get on with it, without waiting for the government.
In bushfire response and the tremendous mutual aid response to COVID-19, millions of are setting up local projects, or joining existing ones, that make life better, generate social cohesion, reduce humanity’s footprint and cultivate an ethic of care — for themselves, for each other, for the natural world they are part of.
If enough people start doing this in their communities, and if enough submissions to the act inquiry call for reforms that are embedded in ecological thinking, a whole lot of small chocks will be put under the lever. Each of those chocks is tiny, but together they could tip the balance.
All of a sudden, especially at a moment like this, change will come.
Tim Hollo is executive director of the Green Institute and visiting fellow at the Australian National University’s School of Regulation and Global Governance.
Comments will be moderated. Keep comments relevant to the article. Remarks containing abusive and obscene language, personal attacks of any kind or promotion will be removed and the user banned. Final decision will be at the discretion of the Taipei Times.
Most Popular