Resistance as a strategy for sustainability
Comment by Cam Walker
To someone active in the environment movement in Australia, the debates about tactics and vision in environmentalism often occur within fairly narrow perimeters. Direct action or lobbying? What constitutes "non-violent" action? What emphasis should we place on public mobilisation? What about "new" campaign tools, like shareholder activism?
Given that most activists working on local campaigns are seriously under-resourced, it can sometimes be hard enough to share information around Australia, let alone around the world. At the same time, there is a growing awareness that we can no longer afford the luxury of just keeping our heads buried in our own backyard.
In recent times there has been substantial debate about the differences between "Northern" and "Southern" perspectives on environmental activism, including within Friends of the Earth International (FoEI).
FoEI holds an annual meeting, which is hosted by a different group each year. In November, Accion Ecologica (FoE Ecuador) hosted the meeting, called "Resistance as a strategy for sustainability".
The goal of the gathering was to "strengthen processes of resistance based on cultural, environmental and social arguments". Its focus was the central issue in the North-South debate: whether sustainability will come from industrial fine-tuning and reform or fundamental social transformation.
One conference seminar sought to define the different types of campaigning — the issue-specific and targeted campaigns that epitomise the activity of campaigners in the North and the broader cultural resistance of the South. What links them is opposition to "globalisation" and the recognition that nowhere is spared from the endless demand for the resources needed to sustain First World lifestyles.
The North (Western Europe, the USA, Canada, Japan, Australia and New Zealand) contains around 28% of humans, yet uses almost 80% of resources which are consumed. Clearly, we need a massive reduction in consumption in the affluent North. This is the first thing we must remember as activists from the North: the collective impact of our lifestyles on the South.
Capitalism
But non-government organisations (NGOs) in the North and the South confront different situations. In the North, we lobby and campaign against the transnational corporations (TNCs), but our livelihood and communities are generally not directly threatened by them in the short term. In the South, communities, agriculture, food security, basic freedom and the right to community controlled development are regularly under direct threat by TNCs.
Most institutionalised environmental activism in the North adapts to getting the best outcomes under the ruling party of the day. Groups go to great lengths to paint themselves as "non-political" and "middle of the road". While most people know that on a planet with limited resources, a social system based on endless economic growth is simply madness, the environment movement almost never articulates this fact. At best we talk about more efficient use of resources and cleaner production.
We are endlessly caught in a holding pattern of fighting "effect", but rarely getting to "cause". There are even off-shoots of the movement in which former activists are now acting as consultants to big business. Any attempts to resist corporate rule are quietly dismissed as being "out of left field". In this scenario, a benevolent green capitalism seems possible.
Again, this is a Northern perspective. Representatives from the Brazilian Landless Peasants Movement argued: "We know the capitalist model cannot be painted with nice colours, it must be destroyed. It is a monster that cannot be transformed because, by living, it has to step on communities. Destroying it is the only way we will achieve a humane society which also has respect for nature."
This is perhaps the second key difference between North and South: the question of whether current economic practices can be made more sustainable at all.
Globalisation, as was noted by Ricardo Navarro of FoE El Salvador, is simply the logical consequence of the capitalist model; its excesses and negative impacts shouldn't surprise us. It is an extension of what has happened in the past; the history of capital has always been to seek out new markets. It seeks to privatise the benefits but socialise the costs. However, what is different now is that the global economy is running out of new regions in which to exploit resources.
While it has been 15 years since the Bhopal disaster in India, and Union Carbide has never properly compensated the victims of this terrible disaster, there are signs that TNCs are being forced to fulfil the role they like to say they do: that of "good corporate citizen". Fifteen years ago, companies like Texaco operated largely out of control in the Amazon. Local communities began to resist, which had an influence. Then local campaigns linked with international NGOs in the consumer countries.
This is when changes really started, and it is the third lesson — coordinated, internationalised action can deliver results not possible through national-level activity.
Ecological debt
While many thousands of people in the North have been concentrating on the Jubilee 2000 campaign, which is calling for the cancellation of "debt" owed by the poorest countries, a parallel voice is being raised in the South about the "ecological debt".
The current economic system is based on the transfer of resources from the South (timber, fibre, food, energy, minerals and water) to the consumer-based societies in the North, usually in a way which doesn't adequately represent the cost of providing the resources. At the same time, the North's consumption patterns are creating climate change, which is already being felt in the South.
So the industrialised world owes a double debt to the South, for resource use and the impacts of climate change. The ecological debt far outweighs the external debt owed to entities such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.
Recognising this fact shifts the emphasis of campaigns such as Jubilee 2000 from a sentiment of goodwill to an acknowledgment of the North's debt to the South. The fourth point for Northern activists is that until we clear our ecological debt, it will be impossible to achieve sustainability.
North and South
There are some who believe that the terms "North" and "South" are no longer of use in either political analysis or day-to-day campaigning. They point to enclaves of middle-class consumers throughout the South and pockets of absolute poverty in the North. Many also point to the fact that the gap between rich and poor within countries continues to widen.
Yvonne Yanez, of Accion Ecologica, pointed out that we still need to use the North/South analysis because, "The North still has the economic and political voice and the armed power to enforce its will on the rest of the world".
While we live in a post-colonial world, we operate by economic rules which were established during centuries of domination of the South by the North and which continue to favour the interests of those who control both the North and the South, while increasingly undermining living and working conditions and environmental protection around the world. This is the fifth lesson: the middle-class environment movement will remain only partly relevant until it names this political reality.
Disruption
We need to not only know what we are against, we need to articulate what we are for. Gabriel Rivas Ducca from FoE Costa Rica reiterated that we need a "radical disruption of globalisation" with a new framework for visualising sustainable societies. This will include protection for existing local economies and active opposition to the globalising tendencies of transnational corporations.
It is here that groups in the North come into the picture: they need to coordinate focused campaigns against the TNCs' activities in the South. While there is a strong tradition of this, there is a need to dramatically increase the level of this type of campaigning. Activist groups in Australia should consider a "solidarity tax": the allocation of a set amount of time per month to international solidarity activism.
While many of us in the North are seeking models of what a sustainable society might look like, there are thousands of examples of pre-existing societies which have managed to be sustainable for many centuries. Yet many of these are under direct assault by economic and political sources that seek to use their lands for resource production for export to the industrialised world. Hence, opposition to these trends becomes an automatic defence of sustainability.
We have no option but to globalise our resistance to environmental destruction. There has been a slow shift in many mainstream environment groups over the last decade to embrace social issues, but, in the light of current trends of globalisation, there is a strong need to speed up this evolution.
[Cam Walker is a member of Friends of the Earth Australia.]