Gentle Decline 2/30: Feedback & Fears

Talking about broad approaches to climate change; can we really depend on governments to take care of us, or do we have to defy them to make things safe?

Hello. In the last issue, I talked about anarchy and how it has a lot in common with planning for climate chaos. This issue, before I start to talk about the feedback and discussion that resulted, I’ll note that I’m taking some of that planning in almost the opposite direction, and branching out professionally into climate consultancy. If your business or organisation hasn’t got a climate plan in place, I can help you set one up. And if you want me to talk to a board, climate action group, or really any number of people about climate change, I’ll happily do that too. Eminently reasonable rates.

[Gentle Decline is an occasional newsletter about climate crisis, and - more to the point - how to cope with it. All issues are free! You can support the newsletter via Patreon (where there’s sometimes further discussion about particular points), Ko-fi, or by buying some of the seriously classy merchandise, including the new Plant More Trees t-shirt.]

(AI-generated idea of an environmental protest involving public transport)

Positive Things

There’s a good bit of evidence coming in that something as simple as scattering rock dust on crop fields could reduce carbon dioxide in the air by some pretty notable amounts. Here’s an explanation with powdered basalt, and here’s a study which pins down the benefits fairly solidly. A floating solar farm in the Netherlands can track the sun through the day to maximise energy generation. The EU has finally approved a €1.3 billion forestry project for Ireland. And a team in UMass Amherst has come up with a way to generate electricity from humid air.

Feedback

There was a lot of feedback from the section on Anarchist Futures in the last issue, and it went in a lot of different directions. A good few were from other anarchists, open or otherwise, along the lines of “hell yeah”. A few more were from anarchists going “how on earth is this a new idea to you?”, which is a fair question. I am capable of connecting wildly disparate dots, but I need to think of doing so first, and the initial inspiration can take a while to hit. All the agreement is nice, of course, but the interesting stuff came from people who weren’t agreeing, or had concerns.

There were three major areas within that. The first was “how would groups without government prevent crime?”. The second was “what would prevent government from simply asserting power over you?”. And the third was “the existence of government provides me with benefits that I wouldn’t get in other circumstances, please don’t overthrow it”.

All of these are concerned, really, with the last step of the nine proposed: become ungovernable. That one is the least important, in my climate-survival view, even as it is the most fundamental in the broader anarchist sense. I’m going to try to answer these in the climate context, and verge into the broader anarchist context only when absolutely necessary.

How would groups without government prevent crime? I’m trying to avoid the approach of “the Oxford dictionary defines ‘group’ as…”, but to answer this, we do need to look at “crime”. It isn’t as cut and dried a definition as people would like, for a start. Crimes are actions which are illegal. The distinction of legal or illegal comes down to what’s written down in law, and has very little to do with what is moral, or right, or justified. Being a landlord, for instance, isn’t notably moral (and derives directly from feudal concepts of land ownership, hence “lord”), but it’s defended to the hilt by law. So in the circumstance that you’re in a place which doesn’t have laws, you’d have no criminals. And sure, that’s a stupid technicality where we’re playing around with language, but law is made of language. Take a trivial (and daft) crime like jaywalking. This wasn’t a crime anywhere before the 20th century, because roads weren’t dominated by fast-moving metal boxes before that. Jaywalking as a “crime” was invented by the car industry in the 1920s. Similarly, selling opium wasn’t controlled in England at all until 1868, and wasn’t really illegal until 1920. Before that, it was available to anyone who wanted it, pretty much. Cannabis was only controlled there from 1928, and control of it was only really stepped up in 1971. That control was only in place in Ireland from 1934. And it may become pretty ordinarily legal again in the next decade, because it’s less harmful than alcohol, nicotine, and possibly caffeine.

But what about real crimes, theft and murder? Well, government and corporations engage in those pretty regularly, and don’t come to any huge difficulties. Governments engage in murder (not an abstract, actual “that person has to die” and then they do) all the time. Banks take our money and call it “fees” and “interest” and so on. And these are not abstract concepts outside of their control; it is perfectly possible for banks to waive fees (they frequently do so on student accounts, for example) and they are in no way compelled to follow central bank interest rates - and even those are controlled by a person or small number of people making a decision. But our society has decided that those particular methods of taking money away from someone are legal, while at the other end, sitting on the street with a paper cup and asking for it is often not.

Which leads into why crime exists, and hopefully back toward climate-related stuff, because I’m not awfully interested in explaining why laws are mutable things. Most people (not corporations or governments) commit crimes because they need something. Usually it’s money. If you make sure that people are provided for, in terms of basic needs like food, shelter, education, and so on, crime drops. This has been demonstrated over and over. Just housing homeless people makes crime rate drop, insofar as “crime rate” is a trustable metric at all. And within small groups, communities, and so on, we can take care of other people. We have to take care of other people. This is the “be generous” of my 3 Rules.

I’m not saying, however, that the groups and communities we form to cope with climate chaos should exist outside the the law, or outside of the polities and nations that we live in. Those polities and nations will respond pretty forcefully to that. We can, however, provide for people, be self-policing to some degree, and only need the full force of the law when local and internal measures will clearly fail.

This is already working for every hobby association, festival, re-enactment group, scout group, and cycling club out there, in limited contexts. It’s not hard to extend it a little further.

So, what would stop government from asserting control over you? Nothing. Governments thrive on control, specifically that of violence. “A group that has a monopoly on violence” is the closest I’ve ever come to a definition of government (with thanks to Anna, who outlined that one for me). The main trick here will be to not engage with government, and to make it too awkward and costly for them to engage with you. Need a licence to plant more than an hectare of trees? Well, plant two 0.8 hectare plantations separated by a field. For good measure, let that field go wild. If the state is going to hold land ownership as a holy thing in which they can’t intervene (and look at their reluctance to take over vacant, abandoned and even derelict properties in towns and cities to illustrate that), then that can be turned to environmental benefit. Governments can’t (easily) stop you from giving people food, or a bed for the night, or even low levels of employment for cash. And it costs them more than they benefit to stop that even when it’s “illegal”. And so forth.

Finally, “the existence of government provides me with benefits that I wouldn’t get in other circumstances, please don’t overthrow it”. I mean, that’s nice. But that’s a position of considerable privilege, on a global basis, even though it’s what governments are supposed to do. Most people, globally, are prevented, by governments and corporations acting under the auspices of government, from doing what would be best for the planet and for themselves. But I’m mostly not talking about overthrowing governments here (which tends to require violence, and injury or death for a large number of the overthrowers); I’m aiming at the idea of working around them, and getting to a state where them asserting control over the things that matter is more costly to them than not.

For instance, in a very simple example: we need better public transport, since climate chaos will increase the running costs of cars and require more road maintenance. If, hypothetically, we engage in the mild civil disobedience of only using public transport, and of complaining to our representatives every time it fails (due to overcrowding, in this case, rather than understaffing or incompetence as it currently does) then the government will have little choice but to provide more of it.

Isn’t this working within the system? Not really. Working within the system would mean allocating votes to the representatives who promise to prioritise public transport - that is the only actual within-the-system that representative democracy allows for. Honestly, even as simple a thing as writing to the representatives to express how you’d like to be represented isn’t really in there - they don’t have to pay any attention to you (and they frequently don’t); the only thing that actually matters is their chance of being re-elected the next time that’s possible. Any form of protest, even one as mild as using buses and trains when you could use a car is outside the system, and inconvenient to the state.

That said, I think protest marches and the like less effective in terms of actually motivating governments to make changes. They serve to demonstrate some level of the will of the electorate, and that may, eventually, sway actions. The reactions in media give the elected people some idea of how the protestors are received more widely. Pride in Ireland, for example, is now as much a civil celebration as it is a protest, and no Irish government in this era would dare move against gay marriage or the rights of gay people to adopt, no matter what else was out there. But protests for tenants’ rights, actual ability of abortion, or any environmental concern are still widely ignored. More overt forms of civil disobedience are necessary, and these can fit in perfectly well with environmental and climate-related activities. Guerrilla tree-planting, taking over empty lots with community gardens, undoing the “work” of straightening watercourses, and so on are all things you can do in this line.

Closing

More responses are welcome, although I don’t intend to spend a whole lot more space dealing with abstract questions. If you want to read about anarchism, you can find a lot about it on the internet. Read sceptically, remember that a room with three anarchists has a minimum of four ideas of how things should be, and make up your own mind after you’ve read different viewpoints. My intention for the next issue is to concentrate on practical things you can do which are in the line of civil disobedience or circumventing government restriction. The gods only know what will actually emerge when I start typing.

[Support this newsletter (and Commonplace, its (more) food-related sibling) on Patreon or Ko-fi. Merchandise is also available. Major research contributions in this and all issues by Cee, and the rock-powder stuff and floating solar farm in Positive Things came from Yda.]