Re-locating and re-connecting: Keys for the re-imagining of an ambitious new legal agreement

INTRODUCTION

As nation states gather in Paris for the twenty-first Conference of Parties (COP21) climate negotiations, the deep and historical divisions between developed and developing countries remain all too evident. This article proposes a more comprehensive ecological approach for consideration as a possible solution to unlocking the current climate deadlock and attaining a future climate regime that is both ambitious and legally binding.

Currently over half of the world’s population lives in cities and urban settings. Most of the future population growth will be located in African and Asian cities and these are characterized by informal or slum settlements. It is in this second urbanization wave where most of the world’s resources for infrastructures (transport, water, sanitation, food, energy, housing, and waste management) will be needed and where current ecosystems are under severe strain. These informal slum settlements are also home to the most vulnerable and marginalized communities.

One of the consequences of high urbanization levels worldwide is the dislocation and disconnection from the earth experienced by city dwellers. Consider your answers to the following questions: name three indigenous trees in your community; where does your water come from; what is the source of your energy supply; where does your waste go; when is the next full moon; name three computer or smart phone companies? Re-locating and re-connecting are discussed below as necessary ecological steps in the journey towards the re-imagining of any future climate agreement between nation states that is both ambitious and legally binding.

RE-LOCATING

Many have affirmed what Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955) wrote in the 1930s, namely that ‘the era of the nation state is over and it is time to build the earth’. Our identity no longer resides in the nation state but is located rather as human earthlings within the unfolding expanding evolutionary 13.7-billion-year journey of the universe as expounded by the new paradigm sciences. A new ethic of care and compassion to build our common home (cosmos) is essential.

The shift in scale is away from centralized top-down decision-making structures towards the bioregional community. Through the principle of subsidiarity, i.e. decisions made at lowest level, governance is then self-organized and this then feeds into sub-national, national, regional and finally international levels. Structural transformation for integrated community owned infrastructures assist in food, water and energy sovereignty for a just transition of livelihood provisioning. In this way real needs are identified and addressed by communities. This is important as high levels of unemployment, especially among youths, characterize informal settlements in the global south. This focus on the bioregional community limits the extractives industry and mega scale infrastructures that are prone to elite corrupt practices and that reproduce patterns of overconsumption. The bioregional community aids the shift towards post-extractives societies and provides post-carbon alternatives.

One practical way of re-locating of self within the broader earth community and decision-making is to answer the questions posed in the introduction and to begin to build local community. Re-locating is not about building a climate or social movement to put pressure on the political and economic elite to bring about structural or system change, but rather about linking and re-linking within the ‘bioregional community of place’ in a comprehensive ecological way. Both direct actions and working for structural transformations are needed and necessary, but given the urgency of the civilizational crisis a more comprehensive ecology must also include re-connection.

RE-CONNECTING

Today people are uprooted and disconnected from the earth through the urbanization process. Humans are disconnected from the Earth-soul and the sense of belonging. The soul is the expression of sensitivity and spirituality. It is this rescuing of the soul of humanity that is needed to love Mother Earth and ecosystems and all humanity, especially the marginalized and vulnerable humans and earth systems.

Re-connecting goes beyond eco-social or material eco-feminism understandings. The re-connection is to both the exterior differentiation aspects and also inwards into the interior aspects of the human psyche and cosmos – conscious and unconscious, individual and collective, thinking and feeling.

The Latin American Indigenous concept of buen vivir, i.e. to live well in contrast to living better, or the African concept of ubuntu ‘I am because we are’, have provided a different value system to that of overconsumption and highly individualistic western value system. These concepts still need to find dynamic equivalents in other cultural contexts. Although Westerners stand in solidarity with these more traditional notions and concepts they cannot meaningfully connect to them as the Western worldview is still residing within a dis-enchanted or soulless cosmos.

Western minds have also been mis-enchanted with techno-science and are still in need of re-connection or re-enchantment within an ensouled and animated cosmos. This mis-enchantment with technology and markets has been very evident in the climate agreements with the focus on false solutions such as carbon capture and storage, biofuels, geo-engineering and new market mechanism for carbon trading. Technocracy and the addiction to technology must be replaced with an earth democracy.

Synchronicities and meaningful coincidences, consciousness, spirituality, psychic, and intuition are all-important and can play a role in the re-enchantment of the cosmos for the Western mind.

RE-IMAGINING

Re-locating and re-connecting are keys to the re-imagining of a new future climate regime. As mentioned above, the shift is away from the mono nation state towards increased diversity and complexity of local bioregional communities. In addition, the shift is away from the dominant mono neo-liberal market system or return to the developmental state to bring about development through a new commodity consensus. Instead the informal economy and bioregion is made visible.

The shift is also away from the ‘mono solar hero’ to embracing ‘heroic earth communities’. For Westerners this is very much an ego death experience. The mono solar hero or heroine must go down so that the many stars of the night may be made visible. Many bioregional communities situated at the margins of the capitalist system are creating new habits such as collective living and cooking, using biodynamic and agro-ecological farming methods, building mass public transport systems, urban energy refits, talents and skills sharing, increasing small water harvesting techniques, building community-owned small-scale renewable energy infrastructures, wetland rehabilitation and new waste management practices, experimenting with skyloos that are less water intensive, biomimicry architectural designs and hemp housing that are less carbon intensive, using alternate currencies, and many innovative solidarity actions. These new habits will, in time, become the new resilient norm.

Scientific materialism has placed a strong emphasis on measuring for management and control and has replaced notions of hope. This is seen in the emphasis placed on the carbon markets as a solution to the climate crisis and the disregard for local communities perspectives and calls to uphold the rights of Mother Earth. The human-earth relationship must still shift from an I-It relationship (as evident in carbon market approaches), or I-You relationship (evidenced in rights of Mother Earth approach) to an I-Thou sacred marriage relationship that reverences and celebrates life.

It is this recovery of the human soul that reconnects with ecosystems and with the whole earth and not just the mono carbon climate part that is important. The ability to extend compassion to the sufferings of nature and humanity is required. The re-enchantment or re-imagining of the human soul needs to be rescued, and herein lies our hope for the re-imagining of any new ambitious legal climate agreement.

The UNFCCC can thus be re-imagined as the United Natures Framework Convention on our Common Cosmos-Home – where ‘Natures’ is understood from an integral ecological perspective to simultaneously include environmental ecology (increase in diversity and complexity), deep ecology (interiority, consciousness, spirituality, self-organisation) and social ecology (social justice, increased communion of all beings).

In closing, this quote is chosen from the Earth Charter (2000):

“Let ours be a time remembered for the awakening of a new reverence for life, the firm resolve to achieve sustainability, the quickening of the struggle for justice and peace, and the joyful celebration of life.”

* Michele Maynard is an activist and independent researcher, living in her hometown, Cape Town, South Africa. Feedback on this article is most welcome. You can follow her on @micheleAfrica

* THE VIEWS OF THE ABOVE ARTICLE ARE THOSE OF THE AUTHOR AND DO NOT NECESSARILY REFLECT THE VIEWS OF THE PAMBAZUKA NEWS EDITORIAL TEAM

* BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

* Please do not take Pambazuka for granted! Become a Friend of Pambazuka and make a donation NOW to help keep Pambazuka FREE and INDEPENDENT!

* Please send comments to editor[at]pambazuka[dot]org or comment online at Pambazuka News.