Free registration here for a Society of Authors panel discussion (Mon 18 Mar, 1900-2000) on how writers can inspire action on climate change, with permaculturist/educator Lusi Alderslowe, teacher/musician-storyteller Alan McClure, and ecologist/conservationist Julian Caldecott, chaired by Claire Watts of SoA and moderated by Heather Parry of SoA Scotland.
An hour of companionable music and dialogue with Julian Caldecott on Peace with Nature in California and beyond – where it comes from, what it means, and how we get there from here. The interview is hosted by Alanna Jane Goldsmith on Radio 2050, the inspiring and forward-looking channel of internet-based Radio Paradise. Relax, enjoy, and think Peace with Nature!
My 7 December 2023 interview on The Why? Curve podcast aimed to raise awareness of the need for smarter investment in climate change mitigation to prevent major Earth systems breaking down in the 2050s or 2060s. Worse, there are reasons to think that the loss of Arctic summer sea ice from around 2030 could accelerate this process dramatically. These risks are so obvious and dire that they call for urgent precautionary action.
Major Earth systems are becoming unstable under stress from global heating and other more direct pressures. These systems include the Arctic Ocean and its surrounding coasts and permafrosts, the Amazon and other rainforests, and major ocean currents and monsoons. They have been absorbing stresses for decades but are now approaching the limits of their tolerance. That limit is each system’s tipping point, when it becomes committed to chaotic transformation. Because Earth systems are connected they can pull each other over, so multiple systems could become committed to breaking down at about the same time. This would be a ‘biosphere-wide tipping point‘ (BTP), which is a key moment because we can influence outcomes until it is reached, but we will be powerless to do so afterwards.
The idea of a BTP challenges all our assumptions about the future. These were shaped during centuries of economic expansion into what was seen as an infinite global frontier. But our predicament now, at the end of that phase, leads us towards the idea of deadline-aware mitigation investment (DAMI) with a new purpose and a new approach.
I have proposed and demonstrated a transparent and consistent way to calculate the cost-effectiveness of different mitigation investments in postponing the BTP. This relies on:
Armed with data on true mitigation cost-effectiveness, public servants can reliably choose the best public investments. This would improve governments’ ability to deliver on their ‘net zero’ or Paris Agreement goals. Taxes and other regulatory signals can also be adjusted to ensure that the most cost-effective mitigation projects attract the highest rates of financial return for private investors, while also valuing healthy ecosystems, biodiversity, human rights and other important co-benefits.
The progressive thinning and shrinking of Arctic Ocean sea ice since 1979 was first flagged by Peter Wadhams, former Director of the Scott Polar Research Institute, in his 2016 book A Farewell to Ice. The volume of Arctic summer sea ice continued to decline and is now expected to approach zero at its September minimum by around 2030.
The context for the Arctic issue is the rising heat of the oceans. This has increased by hundreds of zettajoules (ZJ) since the mid-1980s (one ZJ ≈ double humanity’s current energy use). This is where most greenhouse heat has been going, with much of the rest going into melting ice.
Without summer sea ice to absorb excess heat, at least two mechanisms mean that the temperature of the Arctic Ocean and its seabed and coastal zone will begin to rise much faster than before. These are:
The likely rate at which Arctic Ocean temperature will rise under ice-free summer conditions is unknown, but could be high. Until we know what will actually happen, a precautionary attitude is called for since sudden Arctic heating could have the following consequences:
Every tonne of methane is about 86 times more potent as a GHG over 20 years (the most relevant timescale) than a tonne of carbon dioxide (CO2), so 1 Gt CH4 ≈ 86 GtCO2e, equivalent to about twice current global emissions of all GHGs put together. If there’s the slightest chance of this happening, urgent precautionary investment to mitigate harm would be justified. Since we cannot now prevent the loss of Arctic summer sea ice, this may have to involve open-air methane recapture. If we need to do this in the 2030s, we should start thinking about it now.
As a contribution to safeguarding the process of urgent, fair and effective decarbonisation, my podcast aimed to raise awareness and encourage urgent, practical thought:
Julian Caldecott 2023
This talk by Julian Caldecott was on Lost Species Day and St Andrew’s Day/Là Naomh Anndrais at the Edinburgh Climate Change Institute (ECCI), and was organised by the Edinburgh Environment and Development Network (EEDN).
About the talk. Almost every community in Scotland has people actively restoring peace with nature or wanting to, and this puts Scotland in the vanguard of a global Zeitgeist shift to restore peace with nature. Ecocide laws and constitutional protections for nature are urgently needed to accelerate and consolidate this shift in values and attitudes. Scotland has the opportunity to be a global thought-leader in this process. The video of the talk is now available here. But we should meanwhile be aware that planetary boundaries have already been violated and Earth Systems are approaching their tipping points, so time is now short in which to build a viable future for humanity and life on Earth. The six broken Earth System Boundaries are highlighted in this diagram from the Stockholm Resilience Centre:
Dimensions of the new disaster-proneness
Humanity is systematically taking apart the living systems that used to make the world relatively safe and predictable. And we have also wrapped the Earth in a blanket of GHG pollution that is trapping the sun’s heat here, mostly in the oceans that shape weather on land. This is a deadly combination, since wrecked ecosystems cannot protect us from storms, droughts and floods, and the hotter ocean is driving more storms, droughts and floods our way. Meanwhile, diseases are spreading in new conditions to new locations, and our crops are being harmed by chaotic and harsh weather. Dry heat-waves kill tens of thousands increasingly often, and moist heat-waves threaten far worse casualties. Fires consume forests and peatlands that have been degraded and dried out, often sweeping into built-up areas and choking us with smoke. The rising ocean pushes salt into our fields and aquifers, and billions live in cities close to the storm-bearing sea, densely packed in poor housing where pandemics can do most harm.
Disaster Risk Reduction Day: origins
The close links between ecosystem damage and disaster vulnerability took a while to be fully recognised. Rather, humanity’s efforts on disaster risk reduction (DRR) started mainly in response to the earthquakes that killed thousands in the 1980s. These struck El Asnam (Algeria, 1980), Irpinia (Italy, 1980), Golbaf (Iran, 1981), Dhamar (Yemen, 1982), Erzurum (Turkey, 1983), Mexico City (México, 1985), San Salvador (El Salvador, 1986), Napo Province (Ecuador, 1987), and Spitak (Soviet Armenia, 1988). Their cumulative effect was to make governments want to improve early warning, preparedness and response capacity. So in 1987, the UN General Assembly resolved to make the 1990s a decade for DRR. Two years later, it also agreed a Framework of Action and designated the second Wednesday in October (later changed to 13 October) as the International Day for DRR.
Yokohama
The 1980s were geologically quiet in Japan, relative to its history of major disasters back at least to the 1293 Kamakura earthquake and tsunami. But Japan was sensitive to the issue and in May 1994 it hosted the World Conference on Natural Disaster Reduction in the port city of Yokohama. This had been badly hit by the 1923 Great Kantō Earthquake, with over 140,000 fatalities. The conference produced the Yokohama Strategy, which covered all the main topics in DRR: risk assessment, civil preparedness, development planning, capacity building, early warning, inclusive participation, building design, environmental protection, and political leadership. Then in January 1995 an earthquake hit the city of Kobe in Hyōgo Prefecture, killing nearly 6,500 people.
ISDR and Hyōgo
In 2000, the UN adopted the International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (ISDR) to follow the 1990-1999 DRR Decade. Both the decade and the ISDR were influenced by the wave of international agreements on sustainable development and the global environment that had been forged in the 1990s. These included Agenda 21, the Millennium Development Goals and treaties on combating biodiversity loss, climate change and desertification. People were starting to see how environmental change, human drivers of disasters, and poverty and exclusion were all involved in the same complex global system. Revamping the Yokohama Strategy to take account of all this was the agenda for the second World Conference on Disaster Reduction in January 2005. This was again hosted by Japan, at Kobe in Hyōgo. The result was the Hyogo Framework, which sought to fix gaps in the coverage of issues of governance, specific risks and early warning, education and knowledge sharing, underlying risk factors (such as ecosystem health and climate change), and disaster preparedness.
Sendai
By March 2015 it was traditional that Japan would host the World Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction in a city with relevant experience. Sendai in Miyagi Prefecture was chosen, which was where nearly 20,000 people had died in the 2011 Great Sendai (or Tōhoku) Earthquake. The tsunami that followed also wrecked the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear complex, causing massive leakage of radioactive material. The conference adopted the Sendai Framework, which sought to strengthen the Hyōgo Framework in addressing underlying disaster risk factors, building disaster resilience at all levels, and mobilising investment. An important factor was that climate change was now seen as a key driver of disaster risk, so the new framework put its hope into the work of the UNFCCC and the 2015 Paris Agreement on Climate Change. It sought to complement them by addressing disasters whether small or large, frequent or infrequent, sudden or slow, natural or man-made, and also by working on related environmental, technological and biological hazards and risks.
DRR Day themes
Each DRR Day has a theme to focus the hive-mind on an aspect of reducing disaster risk. That of DRR Day 2022 was early warning and early action for all. This was inspired by the Sendai Framework’s goal to roll out multi-hazard early warning systems (EWS) for many more areas and people. And early warning is important. Not only does 24 hours’ notice reduce the average cost of disasters by 30%, but EWS installed since the first DRR Day in 1990 have saved tens of thousands of people. Worldwide disaster deaths fell annually from 50,000 or more in the 1970s and 1980s to below 20,000 in the 2000s and 2010s, and halved again in 2020 and 2021. But as climate chaos builds alongside human numbers, the poor continue to fall through the cracks in protective arrangements. So DRR Day 2023 has as its theme fighting inequality for a resilient future. Here the focus is on another Sendai Framework concern: that poverty, inequality and discrimination are causes and consequences of growing disaster risk. The aim is promote greater investment in resilience-building among the poor and excluded, to reduce their exposure and vulnerability to harm.
Meanwhile, at the grass-roots
The way things are going, the UN estimates that soon there will be a major disaster somewhere every couple of days. Poor communities are often hurt most, because they tend to live in crowded, badly-built housing, or on land that is fragile, steep, flood-prone and at greater risk. Most disaster-related deaths occur in developing countries, and do most damage to their relatively fragile economies. In practical terms, emergency aid can take days to arrive, so it’s vital for people to be prepared. In practice, the most effective life-saving efforts are usually made by the people themselves, during and immediately after disasters, and both the UN and EU have programmes to help people prepare for and respond to disasters.
Making communities stronger: APELL and DIPECHO
The UN’s version is APELL, originally developed in response to the 1984 industrial disaster in Bhopal. It was later adapted to natural disasters, to build the capacity of local emergency services to cope before, during and after disasters, and to raise community awareness of risks and what they can do about them. The EU’s version is DIPECHO, launched in 1996 to help vulnerable communities in developing countries strengthen themselves. Its main goal is to ensure that disaster reduction measures are fused with wider national policies, for example on education, building codes and health.
Making communities stronger: anywhere and everywhere
In my book Surviving Climate Chaos, I describe how two small urban communities, in England and Scotland, each turned themselves from a scattering of strangers into a group that was capable of discussing risks and opportunities, acting collectively to protect and advance its own interests, and sharing information about its own capabilities. All it would take for either network to become a local climate change adaptation and disaster preparedness group would be to do some APELL or DIPECHO training. Communities that have increased their connectivity in this way, and have a record of who lives where, who does what, who needs what, and who can contribute what, are likely to cope much better than others during and immediately after disasters. And these simple arrangements work equally well anywhere and everywhere.
A long march in lengthening shadows
Our increasing disaster-proneness is driven and made harder to manage by a human failure to regulate our relationship with nature. Many people and organisations are at work to restore peace with nature and build a more viable future for life on Earth. Starting with the DRR Decade, Yokohama, ISDR, Hyogo and Sendai all helped the world to grow together, to learn and improve the baseline of good practice, and to raise expectations on leaders and of peoples. But the dynamic of climate change means that disasters will keep on coming. Increasing numbers of people will need to be helped, and enabled to help themselves and each other. A global commitment to reducing disaster risk is the least that caring governments can do, while efforts to solve root causes continue. That commitment is still there, people know it, and we are steadily getting better at it. But we cannot afford to forget that we are in a race against the climate and nature emergency, one that we must not lose and in which every community on Earth is an important actor.
© Julian Caldecott 2023
Urban October: origins
The early 1970s are when true modernity began. The post-war economic boom had created new conditions, civilian Earth surveillance and communication satellites were up and running, climate change and mass extinction were coming into view, and humanity was migrating to cities. Many key environment and development indicators and institutions tell their stories from then. In 1975 the new UN Environment Programme was tasked with midwifing an urban-specialised body which later became UN-Habitat. A decade afterwards, UN-Habitat was given World Habitat Day (WHD) at the start of October to mark its concerns. And a decade after that it was given World Cities Day (WCD) at the end of October to mark its progress. The month of urban focus in between became known as Urban October.
Urban October: purpose
The aim of Urban October is to encourage everyone to think about the viability and liveability of our towns and cities, and how they do or do not, or can, or should meet the needs of all their inhabitants, sustainably, inclusively, and without imposing harm on people elsewhere. Urban October also reminds us that we are all stakeholders in adapting our cities and towns to meet the needs of everyone, both now and in the future. And this calls for informed participation in decisions about cities’ needs, ecological footprints, vulnerabilities, and systems of governance.
We are becoming an urban species
More than half of all people now live in cities and towns – our new habitats – and this proportion may reach two-thirds by 2050 as small cities grow in developing countries. We gather in cities to benefit from their density of people, jobs and opportunities to interact with others. A result is that cities are potent and influential aggregations of infrastructure and industry, as well as human and financial capital. But with concentrated populations that depend on imported ecosystem products like food and clean water, and on past assumptions of environmental security, they are also increasingly vulnerable in a changing world.
Cities are on the front line of global heating
Many cities are already facing the effects of climate change, including heat-waves, water stress, flooding, storm damage, and new diseases, all on top of the health effects of urban lifestyles, poverty and poor nutrition. And the vast majority of urban areas are coastal, putting them at particular risk from rising sea levels and storms powered by the ever-greater heat content of the oceans. Ironically, cities also produce 70% or more of the world’s GHG emissions, especially from the transport, buildings, energy, and waste management sectors. But the future of the living world depends on quickly reducing the concentration of GHGs in the air. This calls for rapid net emission cuts by major emitters (like cities), accountability to vulnerable electorates (like city dwellers), and leadership supported by access to key sources of knowledge (like urban academia), capital (like urban businesses), and the levers of power (like urban elites).
Urban October: historical themes
Each World Habitat Day, and since 2015 Urban October as a whole, has a distinct focus on a certain aspect of urbanisation and its consequences and implications. The theme of the first WHD, in 1986 and hosted by Nairobi where UN-Habitat is based, was the right to shelter. UN-Habitat returned to this again in 1987 and 1990. Other themes have included planning our urban future (1997, 2001 and 2009), urban safety and liveability (1998 and 2010), women in urban governance (2000), water and sanitation (2003), and climate change (2011). Since 1989, alongside WHD, WCD and Urban October, UN-Habitat has maintained a Scroll of Honour for people, places and initiatives that have made outstanding contributions in areas such as housing, homelessness, post-conflict reconstruction, and improving the quality of urban life.
Urban October: recent themes
The 2022 theme was growing inequality and vulnerability driven by Covid, climate and conflict. The pandemic and multiple conflicts (in Ukraine, Ethiopia, Yemen, Haiti, Myanmar, and elsewhere) had reversed years of progress against poverty, with tens of millions blocked from advancement or thrown back into unemployment and destitution. And the 2023 theme is investment for resilient urban economies. Here the aim is to promote full recovery from the economic shocks of Covid and conflict by boosting economic activity and sharing experience on tackling inflation. Attention will likely soon return to climate change, following the many weather-related disasters recorded globally in 2022 and so far in 2023.
Cities comparing notes
The immeasurable adaptability of our species is increasingly shown through solutions to the special challenges of urban life and the special needs of cities themselves. Because all cities are built by only one species (us), they differ only superficially (in the great scheme of things) and have many major features in common. This allows city administrations to learn from each other, and their ability to do so is greatly enhanced by networks such as United Cities and Local Governments, C40 Cities, and the Global Covenant of Mayors.
Sustainable landscapes with cities in them
Every city needs healthy farm, catchment and wetland ecosystems nearby, for food and water supply, waste management, environmental security, education and recreation. So city administrations should care for upstream and downstream ecosystems, and the people who live in them, as key allies in meeting the needs of their cities. This often requires the careful and ecologically-informed negotiation of landscape-scale agreements between cities and their surrounding ecoregions. And cities are important habitats for many wild species. Rivers often run through them, offering beauty and biodiversity to city-dwellers, while parks and gardens can be constellations of connected ecosystems that sustain an immense diversity of wildlife. Urban ecology is a key part of our heritage and future, where peace with nature can be restored and maintained for the benefit of everyone and everything.
Self-sufficient cities?
As I explain in my book Surviving Climate Chaos, there is no such thing as an entirely self-sufficient city. But a city can be viable as an open system that draws on resources without harming the systems from which they come. This usually means paying a price for imported goods and services that is satisfactory to producers, and also sufficient to pay for the systems concerned to be managed sustainably. Balancing this equation requires skill and knowledge, but can also be made easier if a city minimises its demands for imports, for example:
Future cities?
In a 2085 scenario, my book on water describes a world in which “City administrations had learned to strike long-term deals with catchment dwellers to pay a fair price for catchment services, in return for their help in protecting upstream ecosystems. Cities had learned to collaborate with one another to liberate rivers from industrial canals and dams, so that they and their shadows, and migrating fish, could run free again. They had also learned to collaborate with land owners to encourage organic farming and low-impact use of ecosystems in the catchments. Their citizens, affected by the ideas of ‘water democracy’, quickly became adept at conserving municipal waters, and began insisting that public water companies (the private ones having been repossessed) fix all leaks in their supply systems. [And] they also began to demand that their urban environments become much more porous, with parks and gardens everywhere, all roads made of water-permeable materials, and a water trap on every roof.” Urban October is an opportunity to join those who are seeking outcomes like this.
© Julian Caldecott 2023
A combat economist
Yanis Varoufakis teaches economics at the University of Athens. He was finance minister of Greece during the country’s 2015 sovereign debt crisis, an experience reported in his book Adults in the Room: My Battle with Europe’s Deep Establishment. He later co-founded the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 (DiEM25), which campaigns for transparency, social justice, environmental sustainability and constitutional advance (but is yet to embrace Peace with Nature as a constitutional principle). Talking to a capacity crowd at Greenside Church in Edinburgh, an event organised by Toppings Booksellers , he outlined the thinking in his new book, Techno-feudalism: What Killed Capitalism. These are my notes on what he said there.
Death of an egalitarian community
The Internet developed in the 1970s and 1980s as an egalitarian community dedicated to the free exchange of knowledge among everyone, everywhere. It began to be privatised in the 1990s when opportunities to do so in a big way became obvious, especially when it became possible to share photos and videos. The privatisation of the Internet commons is reminiscent of the land enclosures and clearances of the 16th-19th centuries, when rural peoples were displaced en masse from farms to cities and factories. This harsh process replaced the relics of feudalism, which was based on land rent and tied labour (‘serfdom’), and facilitated the advance of capitalism, which is based on profits, markets and investment in the means of production.
The Cloud
Privatisation of the Internet continued in the 2000s and exploded in the 2010s when private capitalist endeavour created the Cloud. This is a boundaryless digital soup of messages, images, identities, texts, thoughts, fears, aspirations and connections that made real the old idea of the Noosphere. Taking biology as a metaphor, like any nutritious medium this one quickly spawned herbivores, parasites, predators, and the viruses that live on them. A competitive and creative frenzy followed, the carnage unregulated, with only the strong and lucky few surviving to shape the future (not unlike the Cambrian Explosion in evolutionary history).
A mutant Cloud virus
A ‘virus’ soon arose in the form of a new way of seeing the whole Cloud and all its users and content as an exploitable resource. This required parts of the Cloud to be captured and turned into private fiefdoms, within which people would be used to create value for the local baron. These fiefdoms were called things like ‘Facebook’ and ‘Amazon’, and the barons had names like Zuckerberg and Bezos. In each case, users could be studied and their likes and dislikes recorded and exploited to ensure that their needs were met more and more effectively. Positive feedback between what users liked and what they were offered led to an ever-greater machine capacity to predict and shape their behaviour. And so ‘artificial intelligence‘ (AI) was born.
The return of the rentiers
Power under feudalism and early capitalism came mainly from capturing rents (often extremely high ones, and often at sword-point) from physical space in which people lived and worked. This was replaced under capitalism proper by a vast panoply of markets and market transactions, companies and waged employees, profits on the sale of goods and services, and returns from investment in ways to increase and diversify production. The Cloud is replacing all this. Its barons do not make ‘profits’ but only rents from users. Those users themselves create the content and rewards that satisfy themselves enough to keep on paying rent. Facilitated by AI, what each user gets from paying rent becomes ever-more satisfying (or at least addictively mesmerising) to them. This includes the opportunity to buy things, not from a ‘market’ but from algorithm-personalised offers in a captive space. Thus Cloud-users have become Cloud-serfs.
The end of capitalism?
With no profits or markets to speak of, the Cloud-baron/Cloud-serf system is much more like feudalism than capitalism, but it is divorced from the real world and depends entirely on technology. Hence: techno-feudalism. Still very new, its relationship with the real economy is fluid: the ‘virus’ is still spreading, and its genes are settling into the root code of its host. But it is already clear that if a typical Cloud enterprise pays hardly anything for labour (about 1% of revenues in the case of Facebook, compared with about 85% for a traditional business), then it will tend to suck money out of the real economy. As this wealth is frozen away in private vaults and tax havens, society is deprived of the circulating wealth that is essential for everyone else to live their lives.
The end of society?
As more of all economic activity is captured by the Cloud, more of the Cloud is captured by Cloud-barons, and more people become Cloud-serfs in thrall to manipulative algorithms, the results will be dire for human society. Yanis made clear that as a socialist he is appalled by techno-feudalism, and even more so because the death of capitalism has been followed by something even worse, rather than by socialism. He therefore sees his role not as predicting the future but only as describing what has happened – rather like Adam Smith describing capitalism in The Wealth of Nations (except that Smith liked what he saw). But there is also a duty to try to mitigate harm, he says, “to have an historically virtuous role”, even without hope of success.
Existential angst
Yanis described what he sees as existential angst among young people everywhere. This is because they no longer see a meaningful role for themselves, sensing that the only jobs on offer are pointless make-work activities to keep them quiet so they can be used by Cloud feudalists. He drew attention to potential remedies in the last chapter in his book, but meanwhile stressed the importance of being aware of being a Cloud-serf. Painfully dragging these things into consciousness is the only way to engage a creative search for solutions. He made it clear that the Cloud and AI are wonders of human creativity and are capable of immensely positive contributions. His warnings are focused only on the concentration of ownership in the hands of a few Cloud-barons, and the resulting lack of merit and constructive purpose (or worse) in all their intentions and deeds.
But what about ecological reality?
Yanis did not mention the relationship between techno-feudalism and ecological reality, so I looked in my copy of his book. Here the message seems to be that the baronial distribution of Cloud ownership is unlikely to help and may well hinder environmental negotiations among the pre-techno-feudal states of the United Nations. I guess the problem is that both ecological reality and social reality are equally irrelevant to the new Cloud-barons. And this attitude will continue until society and ecology collapse and the Cloud itself is extinguished, possibly in this mid-century. Meanwhile, the more people are in thrall to virtual reality, the less attention they are likely to pay to ecological reality. Worse, the more existential angst that people feel, the greater the attraction of virtual reality. This is daft but, like comfort-eating, understandable.
Restoring meaning to life
Prompted by Yanis’ words (and Tyson Yunkaporta’s transformative book Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World), my view is that we are a custodial species with responsibility for the stewardship of all life on Earth. Living obsessively in the Cloud while the biosphere over-heats and dies is mad and wrong. And we are a very social species, so treating society like a bad dream is self-destructive (and wrong). We are happier and healthier when we feel engaged and useful, so the remedy for existential angst is hard work, with other people and companion animals, on protecting and restoring the ecological health of the world. Community-based ecosystem restoration and building peace with nature are real jobs that no one can take away from us. But getting back to meaningful work involves realising that Cloud feudalism is merely, at heart, a gigantic scam.
Recapturing the Cloud
There are the ruins of a cathedral on the Black Isle in Scotland where legend tells of a weird cloud of mist that was frightening the people, who sought help from the clerics. This was before the Reformation, so the clerics were well-fed and out of practice. Even so, they managed to trap the cloud, drag it away, and bury it. How they did this is not recorded, but the precedent could be useful as we have our own Cloud to deal with, and Yanis has reminded us to be scared of it. So at least let us tax the Cloud-barons very hard, while limiting their tax deductions to socially-useful investments like climate change mitigation and adaptation, ecosystem restoration, and biodiversity conservation. Both feudal and techno-feudal systems are oppressive and deadly to ordinary people, so we must protect ourselves. And the sooner the better.
© Julian Caldecott 2023
What are we celebrating?
On this day we express solidarity with indigenous peoples living in about 90 countries around the world. With an estimated 7,000 languages and 5,000 distinct cultures among them, these peoples typically identify themselves as descendants of the original inhabitants of each country. They are usually also culturally distinct from the majority of people there whose ancestors arrived relatively recently. But many indigenous peoples have experienced a history of unfair exclusion, neglect and abuse, largely as a legacy of how explorers, settlers and colonisers, mainly of European origin, entered and took their lands in recent centuries. Yet many have survived and continue to nurture their distinct traditions and ways of understanding the world.
Why are we celebrating?
Each indigenous people holds a store of traditional social and ecological knowledge, ranging from techniques of survival to insights that could help resolve the deepest dilemmas of modern life. Among their thousands of distinct cultures are many unique perspectives on nature and humanity’s place in it. The more indigenous thinking engages with the mainstream, the greater the spectrum of solutions available to help resolve local, national and global problems. Indigenous peoples’ day 2023 is focused on the current generation of indigenous youth as a particularly energetic source of such solutions.
Deep background 1: people create cultures.
How humanity came to be divided into ‘indigenous’ and ‘non-indigenous’ people is a complex story. It starts with the fact that, as a species, our main claim to fame is that we can’t help being creative. We’re always making bits of culture, including languages, arts, tools, stories, beliefs, and new ways of describing, thinking, or doing things. We create small ones by ourselves, and larger ones with others, often by joining up what we and others are doing. All these fragments interact, making each other more or less likely to persist, produce others, or be forgotten. They include all the rules that keep bundles of culture going long enough for us to grow up with them and consider them normal. This is where our feeling of belonging to a distinct people comes from. For humanity as a whole, the result is a turbulent cultural ocean, with islands of stability representing peoples, each thinking of themselves as the people.
Deep background 2: people used to be very settled.
Before the European onslaught starting about 600 years ago, most of the world was occupied by thousands of different peoples. Each one had adapted to its own ecological circumstances, had its own culture, and had some kind of settled arrangement with its neighbours. Not always peaceful, but always organic and with each people knowing themselves to be unique and rooted in their own place, while accepting that other peoples saw themselves in the same ways. There were no orders from above because there was no above. Each people was the centre of its own world, living in the land by its own laws. Sometimes they shared with their neighbours a way to explain all this, like the Dreamtime of Aboriginal Australia, but sometimes they did not.
Deep background 3: people can make trouble.
Even settled people sometimes have to move, or some of them decide they want to, for various reasons ranging from environmental events to prophetic dreams. If the time is right then leaders emerge and people will follow. Having moved, they arrive elsewhere with little reliable knowledge of how to live there, and resident people (if any) may resist the invasion. Either way, the newcomers disrupt local systems: easy wild prey animals are massacred, new species of crops and livestock are introduced, and native vegetation is cleared. But after a generation or two, what were the new arrivals settle down and start thinking of themselves as indigenous again, with their own local laws, traditions and ways of life. This was the pattern as we became human over hundreds of millenia, and it was the same pattern while we occupied most of the world over the tens of millennia since then.
The European onslaught.
By the 15th century, what had once been the indigenous peoples of Europe had already been hammered by invasions, plagues, empires, genocides, and the intrusion of new ideas over several millennia. Throughly mixed up, and newly-energised by the reconquest of Iberia from Islam, they created ideas and technologies that allowed them to see the whole world as a discoverable and exploitable frontier. The Age of Discovery began, gently at first with Portuguese trade, but then more aggressively with Spanish advances in the New World. This set a pattern that impelled other European peoples to go everywhere to steal anything that they liked the look of from the locals. It became rational to distinguish between ‘European’ people, including all those raised in their ways, and ‘indigenous’ people who were so often their prey or coerced labourers, or (later) the second-class citizens of their empires and states.
Genocide, ethnocide, ecocide.
There are few ethical ways to obtain land for free that is already claimed. European colonists in many parts of the Americas had it relatively easy since so many indigenous people quickly died of introduced diseases. But elsewhere, such people could be (and were) declared inhuman, shot, poisoned, enslaved, or else broken militarily and the survivors moved out of the way. Thus lands were freed for new settlements, plantations and mines, creating social calamities across the world. Since the newcomers often had absolutely no idea of how to live sustainably where they now were, ecological calamities were also inevitable. Both kinds of disaster proliferated as the new ways forced themselves into every aspect of life. All this added up to the wholesale destruction of peoples (‘genocide’), ways of life (‘ethnocide’), and ecosystems (‘ecocide’).
New values, new purposes.
Indigenous peoples who managed to survive the European onslaught are now worth more than their weight in gold. Without them and their different ways of thinking, we would have only a limited global culture to guide us, one that is so full of bad habits that it can’t imagine or organise its way out of wrecking the world. As it is, though, we can still respectfully draw on immensely diverse cultural resources owned by indigenous peoples. And the sooner we learn from them how to think like indigenous people again, the better. With their help, we might be able to restore peace with nature – peace with the Great Mother, or Pachamama as many South American indigenous peoples call her. The International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples reminds us of that once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and time is ticking by.
© Julian Caldecott 2023
Click here to viewan enchanting meditation on marine life in the Raja Ampat marine reserve of eastern Indonesia. At the heart of the Coral Triangle, the seas here are the most biodiverse of any on Earth. Video by Jeannette Heidrich with music by the William Eaton Ensemble.
Nature, Great Mother: “nothing compares to you.”
In her haunting song of grief and loneliness, the late Sinéad O’Connor summoned with precision and beauty the feelings of wrenching loss. Our hearts are likewise tormented by the ruin of life on Earth: mass extinction of our fellow beings, and destruction of their marvellous home ecosystems. For we now risk a devastating age of loneliness, a fate that we must prevent at all costs. On this day we celebrate our efforts to do so.
A day for the global grass-roots
Of mysterious origin but well-marked in India, World Nature Conservation Day has not yet been adopted into the UN calendar. Rather it is owned by the global grass-roots: those who cherish and wish to protect nature, without reference to officialdom. Their concern and leadership daily become more important, as the fruits of official neglect and unsupervised private opportunism fall into our laps as deadly heat-waves, wildfires, storms, and floods.
Business as usual, when the world is dying, is no help
Business as usual is ravaging our lives and futures. Millions are giving up hope in the face of what the UN Secretary-General now calls the era of global boiling. But we aren’t yet sure how this will turn out, and can still hope and strive for better outcomes than those we fear. Despair is relieved by knowing that we are on nature’s side, and that nature can help restore our world if she is allowed to. Knowing this, we can act with determination and confidence on her behalf.
Individuals and small groups have surprising power
Some things we can do by ourselves: pledging our loyalty to nature, restoring local ecosystems, talking with others, spreading the word, and keeping the faith. Other things we can only do together, with many hands making light work, and many minds amplifying each other’s influence. Every little helps, often in unexpected ways.
Big irresistible movements can change whole systems
But then there are the big system changes, the constitutional and institutional transformations, which every nature conservationist should be ready to promote. These are what will protect us all against those who would continue to torture and kill nature. We know what these changes need to be, including peace with nature constitutions, anti-ecocide laws, and judges and lawmakers trained in ecology. And we are starting to sense that they are within reach.
We’re all indigenous, and should start thinking like it
Big changes to save us and nature can only come from people feeling awe for nature and respect for the laws of ecology. This is part of what thinking like indigenous people means. But such changes are opposed by the lies of those protecting their own interests against society and nature. Those lies can be neutralised through knowledge, thought, and discussion about what is really going on, and how to undo it. Every lie destroyed in this way is a victory.
Everyone and everywhere is important
So conserving nature is not just something that happens far away, in tropical rainforests and coral reefs. These ecosystems are vital globally, but everywhere is equally important as a habitat for ourselves and other creatures. The system in which we live is where our own health, safety and joy come from. By saving local nature we become part of the great solution to the great danger of our time. It is this that we acknowledge and celebrate on this day each year.
© Julian Caldecott
