Women are often portrayed as suffering ‘victims’ inherently vulnerable to changing climatic conditions, or as the unrecognised ‘saviours’ of the planet upon whose shoulders lies the burden of responsibility in avoiding climate breakdown. 

A reductive portrayal of women as either being more dependent on the natural world (and so more vulnerable to its changing conditions) or as having a better understanding of environmental protection is deeply problematic. 

It is much easier to design policy that relates to simplified narratives of women as impacted victims, acutely affected by environmental destruction and as agents of positive environmental action than it is to frame policy that addresses the complex drivers of gendered vulnerabilities.

One-size-fits-all 

Reductive narratives homogenise women across the planet into a single group with static roles. This  overlooks the potential differences in vulnerability and environmental agency of women of different classes, castes, ethnicities, ecological zones and so on. 

This homogenisation and simplification often results in a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach in development policy and programming that rarely matches the needs of the intended beneficiaries. 

The potential vulnerability and agency of men is drastically overlooked. Take for example the soaring temperatures up to 50 degrees C and persistent droughts across much of India that are forcing (mostly) male farmers into wage labour and leading to a spike in male farmer suicides.

Narratives that depict only women as inherently vulnerable to climate change overlook such instances where male groups face specific and acute vulnerability to changing climatic conditions.

These criticisms can be traced back to the failed development policies of previous environment and development movements of the 1970-1990s. Such parallels demonstrate that feminists have consistently faced pressures to simplify, sloganise and create narratives in order to find space for their agenda within development discourse. 

Women in Development 

In the ‘Women in Development’ (WID) movements of the early 1970s, development organisations lobbied for women-centred policies in order to bring women into the development agenda. An important influence behind this was Ester Boserup’s work on the role of Women in Economic Development (1970).

Combined with the feminist fight for equal pay, working conditions and citizenship for women in the US, the WID movement gained momentum throughout the 1970s through the narrative that the gendered division of labour results in women’s disadvantages in society. 

This argument intertwined with environment and development discourse in the 1980s-90s and lay the groundwork for the Women, Environment and Development (WED) movement.

Scholars such as Vandana Shiva argued that the gendered division of labour (particularly in reproductive and subsistence-focused activities) meant women have a higher knowledge of and dependence on the natural world as a source of food, fuel and sustenance for themselves and their families.

Shiva developed this ideological relationship through demonstrating that the destruction of nature therefore equates to the destruction of women’s resources and the material oppression of women. 

Natural protectors

As a result, the image of the ‘vulnerable’ rural/indigenous woman having to travel ever further in her search for food, fuelwood and water for her family became popular within international development organisations in order to promote their women-centred programs and policies. 

This narrative was developed in the 1980s when women were portrayed as the natural protectors of the environment through demonstrating their intrinsic relationship with nature and special understanding of environmental protection.

Shiva drew on the resistance of indigenous women in particular in the Indian Chipko movement, which prevented widespread logging destruction by hugging trees, in order to demonstrate women’s unrecognised position as caretakers of the environment. 

By the end of the 1980s, the positive image of women as efficient natural resource managers and protectors overtook that of the victim image.

This narrative gained traction and resulted in the interpretation that women should be exclusively targeted through policy and projects as they represented an untapped resource for development.

Inertia

Critiques of the women-centred approach within development organisations soon followed. Adding environmental chores to women’s already long list of household and caring roles was seen to increase their workload with little reward nor provided them with the inputs (education, information, and land rights) that they required. 

This essentialist link between women and nature stems from a generalised perception of women’s roles as static and more closely linked to the environment and natural resource management that men’s. A conflation of all women into one homogenous group resulted in a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach in development policy and programming that rarely met the needs of different women groups. 

An almost exclusive focus on the role of women in society drastically overlooked the role of men in caring for the environment. 

These critiques resulted in inertia in the WID and WED movements in the early millennium. The narrative of women as having a special relationship with the environment began to ebb and no longer permeated environment and development policy discussions at the time.

Poverty and global climate change began to take precedence within development discourse and were seen to require an international response that focused predominantly on technologically-driven mitigation approaches within policy, and which, for a while at least, overlooked any possible connections with women or gendered inequalities.

Untapped agency

The recognition that climate change will adversely affect the world’s poor and exacerbate existing inequalities provided space for the women’s movement to again strategically position themselves and revive their rhetoric in order to drive policy and programming.

In the early millennium rural women in the developing world were consistently portrayed as one dimensional objects that were inherently vulnerable to climate change and rarely entered into discussions as anything else – leading to the narrative that they required the assistance of the international development agencies of the North.

The homogenisation of women and their depiction as victims and/or saviours of the natural world is now once again prominent within policy arenas and international development organisations through the portrayal of women as having an increased vulnerability to climate change and a simultaneous untapped agency in the fight against it. 

Arora-Jonsson (2011) outlines three main arguments within the growing body of literature of women and climate change as to why women require special attention: 1. women are proposed to make up 70 percent of the world’s poor; 2. women have a higher mortality rate in climate-induced disasters (some papers claim women are 14 times more likely to die in such events than men); and 3. women are portrayed as being more environmentally conscious. 

This narrative therefore builds on the inertia associated with the WED movement since the 1990s through yet again welcoming notions of vulnerability, feminine agency and care for the environment.

Complex relations

Such stark statistics are used by many international organisations and NGOs in order to access resources and to support their women-centred projects. However, such figures are heavily disputed with no scientific studies ever cited to back them up.

This provides a simplistic and even misleading basis for the design, implementation and evaluation of policies and programs. 

Taking for granted assumptions of women’s vulnerability overlooks the complexity of gendered power relations and reduces gender to the biological differences between men and women – with women alone seen as being consistently disadvantaged.

Such notions again silence any contextual differences in vulnerability between women of different social groups and ecological settings – and again drastically overlook the potential vulnerability of certain male groups.

Vulnerability to climate change is not defined by gender alone as it crosses boundaries of race, class, ethnicity and numerous other demographics.

Development projects should avoid a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach in programme design with one homogenised solution, and instead focus on the drivers of vulnerability rather than targeting the inherent vulnerability of women as a homogenous group. Such a shift would therefore allow for a deeper and more nuanced consideration of women (and men) in different contexts. 

This Author

Ruth Smith is a first year PhD researcher in the Sustainability Research Institute at the University of Leeds. Ruth’s PhD focuses on gendered differences in the adoption of climate smart agricultural practices in sub-Saharan Africa.

Image: Climate Visuals. 

A broad and distinguished group of people from academia, the world of campaigning, farmers and people who rescue food otherwise headed for landfill gathered at City University recently to debate what a food strategy for England should look like.

Sign up to our daily or weekly newsletter. 

We learnt how Scotland has already been through several iterations of a written food strategy, and how public interest in the strategy has grown exponentially in recent years, with 214 responses to a consultation in 2014, and 1,400 to a similar call in 2019.

We heard an inspiring account from Brighton and Hove of how a city food strategy there is making real progress in delivering “healthy, sustainable, fair food for all”. And we learnt how the Brazilian city of Belo Horizonte started as a global pioneer with a food strategy in 1993, with results that continue to be admired.

Maximising profits

This all makes England – which has no such plan – apparently very late to this particular dinner.

This is one more case of where an absence of declaration of intent doesn’t mean an absence of decision-making.

We have had a food strategy for decades, just not one that has been written down.

That strategy is to let the supermarkets and multinational food manufacturers decide what we eat, what farmers grow and often how they grow it. It is a strategy with one goal: maximising profits. 

The results are terrible for the health of English people, for the state of our nature, and for the income and security of farmers. It is also terrible for 0ur food security, as the New Economics Foundation reported back in 2008 in its telling report Nine Meals from Anarchy. 

Price-squeezing

Ruth Davis, from the RSPB and Defra, summed it up well: “No one rocks up to supermarket intending to buy their child an unhealthy diet. But then they encounter the behaviour change techniques. If you buy biscuits at ‘two for the price of one’ they don’t last two weeks. This leads to poor families spending more.”

Our unwritten “food strategy” has contributed to a society that has an obesity crisis, an explosion of Type 2 diabetes, massive overconsumption of ultra-processed food, and pitiful underconsumption of fruit and vegetables.

It’s one where farmers receive only 6 percent of the value in the food chain, as the National Farmers’ Union Minette Batters reminded the City University Symposium, while many smaller, more environmentally friendly operations, like family dairy farms, are forced out of business in favour of mega-factory farms.

It’s one where the state of nature has become truly parlous, as supermarket price-squeezing pushes unsustainable practices.

We learnt that some of these impacts can be counteracted with clever, solid effort, in the case of the HENRY project in Leeds, and innovative, adventurous companies like Hodmedods, which sells beans and pulses grown in the UK as an affordable alternative to factory-farmed meat.

Policy failures

But these initiatives have to fight the government policy of “Supermarket First” every step of the way.

Insisting that there already is a food strategy, even if not written down, is not just a piece of sophistry. It makes a crucial point that the way things are now is not inevitable.

Choices have been made in the past – whether to take away any government responsibility for food security (storage warehouses were emptied and closed in the 1970s), or to end the former Labour Party policy of forcing out-of-town shopping centres to charge for parking, as do town centres where small independent shops cluster (something else to blame Tony Blair for).

An inadequate minimum wage, inadequately enforced, has left many of the one in eight workers employed in the food industry at risk of going hungry. As one speaker commented: it’s a profound policy failure that supermarket workers are having to go to food banks to feed themselves.

We ate a delicious vegan lunch at the symposium – top marks to the organisers for modelling the change to the fruit and vegetable-packed diet the nutritionists and climate-scientists tell us we need, although still with a lot of work to do on ending single-use plastics). Before that, participants were polled on what they thought was the primary barrier to  healthy food system.

I was pleased, but not surprised, that “power differentials in politics” received by far the highest number of votes (above “siloed government” and “different world views”).

Stepping stone 

People want to feed themselves and their children well, but letting the decisions about our food system be made by a handful of companies – supermarkets and manufacturers – is not allowing them that outcome. (And long working hours and distant, slow, horrible commutes are making it even more unlikely.)

A thoughtful, constructive food system – of the kind the symposium hoped to be a stepping stone towards – can only come when communities are empowered to make decisions for themselves. 

Our communities need access to the resources to implement these decisions, be it access to land, funding or forcing the supermarkets to bear the externalised costs of their model – whether that be pesticide-soaked waters and voluminous, inevitable food waste, or the disappearance of wildlife and childhood obesity and rampant diabetes.

Bearing that cost would almost certainly put the supermarkets out of business, and let small independent producers flourish. 

That’s a food strategy worth writing down.

This Author 

Natalie Bennett is a member of Sheffield Green Party and former Green Party leader.

Sign up to our daily or weekly newsletter. 

All material aspects of human society need to be symbiotically re-integrated with the rest of life.

That shift will be an intellectual, cultural and spiritual one, where anthropocentric or human-centred thinking will be replaced by ‘sumbiocentric’ thinking. 

The production and consumption of food is of utmost importance in the material transition from the Anthropocene to the Symbiocene. The revolution in symbiotic science that has taken place over the last 40 years teaches us that to eat as ‘sumbiovores’ we must produce sumbiosic food. 

Sumbiocentrism

To be sumbiocentric means that one is taking into account the centrality of the life-process of symbiosis in all of our deliberations, as opposed to being anthropocentric, or human-centered. Symbiosis, as a scientific term, is derived from the Greek, sumbios, or to ‘live together’. 

Protecting the sumbios requires us to give priority to the maintenance of symbiotic bonds within and between species and the aim of such thinking is to maximize those bonds and to allow further creative liaisons to take place. Symbiosis holds life forms together as a community or biome; it is life-glue.

Sumbiocentrism is also an ethical position which entails that maintaining symbiotic connections, diversity and unity, within complex systems, is the highest good. 

To live together with the richest diversity of life will be good for humans and will maximize the vitality and viability of interconnected life forms, including those living within us, known as our gut microbiome.

Industrialised food production has ignored symbiosis and has endangered the vitality of all life in the process. In order to become an ethical eater of food, we need to identify the key aspects of industrial agriculture that have violated symbiosis and the biodiversity dependent on it. 

Industrial agriculture

For those no longer living close to the land and primary sources of food, there has been increasing alienation from the reality of food production. It comes as a rude shock to many that the industrial system of food production, especially for meat, has inherent environmental and ethical problems.

Modern, intensive, industrial forms of agriculture (plant and animal) maximise a negative and alienating relationship to those things we eat because they ignore the symbiotic foundations of all life.

Gigantism in agriculture (get big or die) means that in order to meet the requirements of economies of scale, huge tracts of land must be cleared of virgin vegetation and soil turned into a medium for the growing of food. In doing this, untold trillions of interrelated organisms (small and big) are extinguished. 

The massive loss of native vegetation and its animal and insect biodiversity in tropical zones for palm oil and non-food crops such as tea, coffee and cacao is well documented. 

Extensive monocultures – grain, pulses, vegetables, fruit or meat – are only possible with huge inputs from the ‘cides’ or killers of life. 

Destroying symbiosis 

Herbicides, insecticides, parasitecides, fungicides are all used to maximise production and profit. These bio- and ecocides are inherently symbiosis-busting chemicals as they work against all forms of life.  

For example, some types of insecticide can kill nitrogen fixing bacteria that inhabit the root nodules of legumes such as soy. Symbiosis between the plant and the bacteria is then replaced by dysbiosis (life destroying) that leads to lower crop production and ultimately, crop failure. 

Fossil fuels are the basis of chemical fertilisers and the fuel needed to run giant machines required for clearing, farming and transport. As greenhouse gas concentrations rise, it is now well known that climate warming also breaks the symbiotic bonds between species, including those important in human food consumption.

By polluting the local environment with excess nutrients, introducing toxins and carcinogens into the food chain, using genetically modified organisms that present an irreversible risk to human and ecosystem health, removing biodiversity and being fossil fuel dependent, industrial agriculture is a successful short-term food production system but a longer-term symbiosis destroyer.

We are now being warned by bodies such as the UN that the Sixth Great Extinction event is well underway. The role of all forms of intensive agriculture in the destruction of symbiosis at all scales is now well documented and cannot be ignored any longer.

Food ethics 

The overcrowding of animals and the unnatural conditions within which they live are also features of industrial forms of agriculture. Keeping life confined in ways that violate natural instincts to move, fly, bathe in water, dust bathe and be part of a community of beings is common practice in intensive agriculture.

Killing animals after they are herded, transported long distances and placed in stress-maximising facilities (industrial abattoirs) is also a core practice in intensive agriculture.  

A ‘flexitarian’ diet in which people eat less meat might help reduce the rapidity of species extinction, climate change and animal suffering. However, even this shift will not put all food production and consumption on a path that meets the ethical requirements of the Symbiocene. 

Recent scientific research on plants has revealed that they too have sensory awareness and forms of what must be called intelligence. We now understand that plants have at least 20 different sensory capabilities, can learn, store information, use memory to react to stimuli and share resources via symbiotic fungal and root community networks.

The ‘wood-wide-web’ is an apt description of this extensive networked communication system that operates between plants of the same and different species plus fungi and bacteria species. 

Plant sentience

If plants possess a form of sentience, then they too become the subjects of our ethical concern. 

We cannot judge animal suffering to be more ‘serious’ than plant suffering because that form of speciesism would be ‘sentientism’ or the unjustified elevation of the status of animal sentience over plant sentience.

The abuse of sentient animal beings can be addressed by not killing or eating them or perhaps ameliorated by humane forms of management and death.

However, for a vegetarian, the prevention of the abuse of plant sentience is an impossibility.

Given that humans have little choice but to eat plants or animals, the ethical requirement of respecting sentience would mean that we would not be able to eat anything except life-disconnected, cell-cultured food.  

Sumbiosic eating

Eating is a necessity; it is also an emotional act, intimately connected to our feelings and moods. How can we eat ethically and in a nutritionally and emotionally satisfactory way in the Symbiocene?

In the transition to the Symbiocene, in addition to respect for the sentience of our fellow beings in considering food choices, there is the need to respect the importance of symbiosis in maintaining healthy soil, food, animals and people. 

The grazing of herbivores and their manure, compost and bioturbation at local and regional scales, all assist in building soil fertility via symbiosis between micro-organisms and invertebrates.

Predation of herbivores by carnivores to prevent over-browsing and soil erosion also has a vital role in maintaining ecosystem health. 

Humans have also played an ecosystem role as carnivores managing grazing pressure within grasslands. Some traditional African cultures (e.g., the Massai) did this as they had a meat-predominant diet based on the flesh, milk and blood from cattle herding. 

Their predation on cattle ensured that an ancient symbiosis (pre-climate warming) between soil, cattle, humans and all other rangeland biodiversity was maintained in balance.

Regenerative grazing

Contemporary versions of this natural system of grazing can be found in what is called ‘regenerative’ grazing.

Here, farmers attempt biomimicry of the natural symbiosis between plants and animals in rangelands. Their rewilding of degraded land is controversial, but at the very least they are providing new opportunities for symbiosis on a large scale. 

As all human cultures have known, to some extent, ecosystem and human health are intimately interconnected. Create the right symbiotic relationships in particular places, life will be good. 

If all people in all places create these kinds of relationships, then the totality of life on Earth will be very good. 

It is this crucial aspect of living systems that both meat and plant-based food production systems have excluded in the shift to the industrialisation of food production.

Symbiocene food

Symbiocene food will be food produced by a new generation of farmers that enhances mutual interdependence between the non-living foundations of life (biogeochemical systems) and, in particular, all species as living beings sharing a common life. 

The consumption of food from regional agriculture that fully respects symbiosis will entail a tougher standard for food than ‘organic’, as organic systems can currently be monocultures and have no necessary connection to the symbiosic foundations of biodiversity in bio-regional contexts.

Sumbioculture celebrates the interconnectedness of life (living together) and the unique characteristics of place and culture as expressed in food or wine (terroir). Being a food ‘locavore’ also helps overcome food kilometres and greenhouse gas emissions. 

Sumbioculture, in the form of permaculture, agroecology, some organic and biodynamic farming, is consistent with the health of symbiotically unified ecosystems and our need for food. 

If you eat sumbiosic food you are a sumbiovore and being a sumbiovore requires a value system that must be considered in addition to choosing to be a carnivore, omnivore, vegetarian or vegan in the Symbiocene.

This Author

Dr Glenn Albrecht is a freelance environmental philosopher and farmosopher. He has pioneered the domain of psychoterratic or psyche – earth relationships with his concept of solastalgia. He is the author of Earth Emotions: New Words for a New World and writes at Psychoterratica.

Public concern about climate change has hit new highs as the issue has risen up the agenda in recent months, a Government survey suggests.

The findings were released as a letter from more than 100 “worried parents” – including actor Jude Law, former footballer Gary Lineker and musicians Jamie Cullum and Paloma Faith – was published demanding climate action.

Polling for the Business and Energy Department (Beis) found four-fifths of people are now fairly or very concerned about climate change, the highest level since the regular survey began in 2012.

Emergency

The new highs were driven by an increase in the number of people who are very concerned about the problem – with more than a third  saying they feel that way.

Almost half said climate change was caused entirely or mainly by humans, the highest level recorded in the survey. Just seven percent thought it was an entirely natural phenomenon and only two percent said they did not think it existed.

Young people were more likely to see climate change as being mainly or entirely caused by humans, with 61 percent of 16 to 24-years-olds.

The changes in the survey, which took place from March 13 to 24, come amid increasingly hard-hitting warnings about the impacts of rising global temperatures from scientists, as well as school walkouts.

Since the survey was conducted, there have also been high-profile protests by Extinction Rebellion over the climate and environmental “emergency” which saw more than 1,000 people arrested amid huge disruption.

Technology

The poll found that seven in 10 people think climate change is already having an impact in the UK, with half  saying they had noticed rising temperatures or hotter summers in recent years.

Almost two-thirds expect higher temperatures and hotter summers over the next 15 to 20 years, while more than half expect to see rising sea levels and more flooding and extreme events such as storms.

Support for renewable energy was up to 84%, with backing for solar, offshore and onshore wind, wave and tidal sources all reaching new highs.

Two-fifths of people now oppose fracking, the highest level since the question was first asked in 2013, while just 12 percent support the process of producing natural gas.

Industry body RenewableUK said despite record levels of support for onshore wind, the technology is being excluded by ministers from competing in auctions for contracts to generate clean power, and called on them to change their policy.

Judge

RenewableUK’s deputy chief executive Emma Pinchbeck said: “In a climate emergency, we need to use every tool in the box.”

The letter from parents has been co-ordinated by the group Mothers Rise Up, and is being published ahead of International Mothers’ Day on Sunday May 12, when parent groups across the UK and Europe will be demanding climate action.

In the letter, 125 actors, writers, musicians, politicians, faith leaders and campaigners urge governments to declare a climate emergency and dramatically speed up emissions reductions “for the sake of our children and the planet”.

They write: “We are terrified at what the growing climate crisis means for our children and millions of children across the globe – many of whom are already suffering because of the extreme droughts, floods and storms that are increasingly the norm in our rapidly overheating world.”

TV presenter Lineker said: “The climate crisis is an issue for all parents – no matter what we do, or where we live. Together we need show politicians that this is something we care about, and an issue we will judge them on.”

This Author

Emily Beament is the environment correspondent for the Press Association.

A new research lab to explore radical ways of fixing the Earth’s climate is being launched by the University of Cambridge.

The Centre For Climate Repair is being established in response to concerns that current efforts to tackle climate change by reducing emissions will not be enough to halt or reverse damage to the environment.

Refreezing the Earth’s polar regions and removing carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere are among the bold ideas up for research.

Greening

Known as geoengineering, such theorised techniques could become a reality if scientists manage to figure out a way of implementing them.

The project is being co-ordinated by Sir David King, a former chief scientific adviser to the government, who said time “is no longer on our side”.

“What we continue to do, what we do that is new, and what we plan to do over the next 10 to 12 years will determine the future of humanity for the next 10,000,” he said.

One of the ideas being considered by scientists is spraying salt water high into the atmosphere to “whiten” clouds in the Arctic region in order to reflect heat back into space.

Another proposal is “re-greening” and “greening” areas of the planet with vegetation, on sea and on land, to remove carbon dioxide from the air.

Solutions

In October the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned that changes on an unprecedented scale would be needed by society to keep global temperatures from rising more than 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.

The panel said countries need to cut carbon emissions by 45 percent by 2030 and to net zero by 2050, with steep cuts in other greenhouse gases such as methane.

The IPCC said methods to take excess carbon out of the atmosphere, known as carbon capture, will also be needed.

A poll by YouGov at the time found that a majority of Britons would be happy to reduce their consumption of resources to slow or halt the negative effects of climate change.

One in three preferred an approach that relies on technological solutions to counter climate change.

This Author

Ryan Wilkinson is a reporter for the Press Association. 

Abrupt climate change some 8,000 years ago led to a dramatic decline in early South American populations, suggests new UCL research.

The study, published in Scientific Reports, is the first to demonstrate how widespread a decline was and the scale at which population decline took place.

Dr Philip Riris of the UCL Institute of Archaeology and lead author of the study, said: “We wanted to connect the dots between disparate records that span the Northern Andes, through the Amazon, to the southern tip of Patagonia and all areas in between.

Abrupt change

“Unpredictable levels of rainfall, particularly in the tropics, appear to have had a negative impact on pre-Columbian populations until 6,000 years ago, after which recovery is evident.

“This recovery appears to correlate with cultural practices surrounding tropical plant management and early crop cultivation, possibly acting as buffers when wild resources were less predictable.”

The study focused on the transition to the Middle Holocene – itself spanning 8,200 and 4,200 years ago –  a period of particularly profound change when hunter-gatherer populations were already experimenting with different domestic plants, and forming new cultural habits to suit both landscape and climate change.

While the research shows that there was a significant disruption to population, the study highlights that indigenous people of South America were thriving before and after the middle Holocene.

Co-author, Dr Manuel Arroyo-Kalin (UCL Institute of Archaeology), said: “In the years leading up to population decline, we can see that population sizes were unharmed.

“This would suggest that early Holocene populations, probably with a social memory of abrupt climate change during the Pleistocene-Holocene transition, developed successful strategies to deal with climate change.”

Cultural resilience

Dr Arroyo-Kalin continued: “Abandonment of certain regions and the need to adapt quickly to new circumstances may have promoted the exploration of alternative strategies and new forms of subsistence, including the early adoption of low scale cultivation of domestic plants.

“Viewed in the context of at least 14,000 years of human presence in South America, the events of the Middle Holocene are a key part of indigenous South Americans’ cultural resilience to abrupt and unexpected change.”

In this new study, archaeologists examined data from nearly 1,400 sites consisting of more than 5,000 radiocarbon dates to understand how population changed over time, and cross-referenced this information with climate data. 

Dr Riris explained: “We studied ancient records of rainfall such as marine sediments for evidence of exceptional climate events.  Within windows of 100 years, we compared the Middle Holocene to the prevalent patterns before and after 8,200 years ago.

Historical context

“Normal patterns of rainfall suggest on average an unusually dry or wet year every 16-20 years, while under highly variable conditions this increases to every 5 years or so. This puts in perspective the challenge that indigenous communities would have faced.”

The authors believe that the research offers crucial historical context on how ancient indigenous South American populations dealt with climate change.

Dr Arroyo-Kalin concluded: “Our study brings a demographic dimension to bear on understandings of the effects of past climate change, and the challenges that were faced by indigenous South Americans in different places.

“This understanding gauges the resilience of past small-scale productive systems and can potentially help shape future strategies for communities in the present.”

This Article 

This article is based on a press release from UCL. The research cited was funded by a UCL CREDOC grant, the Sainsbury Research Unit at University of East Anglia and a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at UCL.

Image: Peruvian rainforest. Anna and Michal, Flickr. 

The UK government declared a climate emergency a week after Extinction Rebellion (XR) chose to pack down and clean up its last London site.

XR herald this as a step toward the UK Government fulfilling its first demand – ‘Tell the Truth’.

While it can’t be denied that XR’s bold and creative fortnight of action opened the way for the government’s declaration, it stands on the shoulders of those who have lobbied, marched and locked-on before them. 

Legitimate criticisms

The group has received some legitimate criticisms for its confused public positioning on the police.

But buried deep in its FAQs page is a more sensible and inclusive stance, which recognises “the structural racism in our policing and legal system”, and that “people of colour (PoC) have been more at risk for generations in defence of the environment and their lands […] It is time to for white people to take this risk too so that PoCs, who are threatened by structural racism, don’t have to.”

This kind of language needs to resonate throughout the movement. 

Fair criticisms aside, XR have been the target of people who believe that the imagination and politics of the movement is not sufficient to tackle the root cause of the climate crisis: the pursuit of endless profits on a finite planet.

These critiques fail to recognise two things: first, the current of anti-capitalist practice and principle that runs through the movement; second, that adopting a strong anti-capitalist stance would be movement suicide.

Targeting the culprits

XR has begun to hit out at the culprits of the climate crisis, targeting oil majors, big banks and investors and the home of capitalism, Canary Wharf.

Promisingly, the Bank of England, which has the ability to print hundreds of billions of pounds for the just transition, was one of XR’s targets during its day of action in the city.

Sign up to our daily or weekly newsletter. 

As XR grows and develops, with offshoots and new affinity groups forming every day, it should be encouraged to continue to draw the media’s attention to our failing economic system. 

Instead of pulling XR apart from the outside, those with strong anti-capitalist motivations should be forming affinity groups within the movement and be organising disruptive actions that target corporations and financial actors.

There is appetite and energy inside XR for this kind of work. If you build it, they will come.

Recreating London

XR reclaimed and reimagined how our public spaces could be used during the International Rebellion.

Spaces that had been reclaimed were subsequently decommercialised, eradicating pricing systems and excluding no one based on their ability to pay up.

This beyond-money system was expressed in every single one of the thousands of free, healthy meals that were served every day by the volunteer-led guerrilla kitchens at each site. 

This value-system, newly instated across the five London sites, echoed a late stage communist society, which, according to Marx, will consist of self-organised communities, free from private property.

The ideological implications of the occupied sites were most significantly felt at Oxford Street, a symbol of consumer capitalism. 

Bypass the lobbyist

The use of the Citizen’s Assembly is a crucial plank in XR’s strategy. The Assembly is composed of a representative sample of the UK’s demographic and is skilled up in climate issues and the deliberative decision-making processes.

It is designed to overcome the UK’s failing democratic institutions, which are beset with partisan conflict and in-party splits, as well as being dogged by industry and corporate lobbyists. 

As an independent body of citizens, the Assembly is shielded from any attempts by lobbyists to shape discussion and policy.

The function of the group moving into the future will be to design solutions and keep the government on track, as they are pressed by groups like Labour for a Green New Dealto deliver an industrial strategy that is moulded on the tenants of an internationalist Green New Deal. 

Movement building

By not providing an explicit critique of capitalism, XR has opened the doors to a bipartisan coalition of citizens who feel disenfranchised by a political process that facilitates the exploitation of people and planet.

While this deviates from the approach of explicitly politicised climate groups, XR’s strategy has so far mobilised thousands of people to take part in civil disobedience over consecutive days. 

As many climate organisers on the left will know, mobilising people to actions and demos is notoriously difficult, with those turning up being drawn from the same small circle of people.

To demand that XR adopts an explicit and overarching anti-capitalist narrative, which has previously failed to move enough people to action, is to demand that the movement gives up part of what has made it successful. 

And the successes of the movement are monumental, with climate breakdown hurtling up the news agenda, politicians being forced to the table, tens of thousands of people signing up as new recruits, and radical social and political spaces being established across major London sites for well over week.

Though not explicitly anti-capitalist, XR is challenging the old economic and democratic paradigms that dragged us into this crisis, and, crucially, it is opening up the space for discussions on how we’re going to get ourselves out of it. 

This Author 

Samuel Hayward is the project officer of climate change campaigns at ShareAction. 

Sign up to our daily or weekly newsletter. 

A week, it seems, is a long time in climate politics. On the streets, in parliament and on the airwaves, the clarion call of ‘climate emergency’ is beginning to penetrate.

Even the grumpiness of John Humphrys – recently defending his ‘right’ to fly to his place in the sun on the Today programme – could not drown out Ed Miliband’s (and the cross-party Climate Justice Commission from IPPR) call for the country to put itself on a war footing to fight climate change.

However, a decade is a short time in policy development and as the IPCC has pointed out, ten years is all we have to turn the world’s financial, economic and technological resources to the task of avoiding irreversible climate change. 

Collective action

People are scared. The impacts are present and real, whether written in the growing roll call of names of violent storms or in the voids carved by retreating glaciers and shrinking ice sheets.

We need policies that can convert our individual will into collective action in terms of society, economy and finance. 

The world’s economy has been stagnant since the financial crisis (itself just over a decade ago) with the predictable consequences that pessimism about the future brings. As economists know, economies are fuelled by sentiment, and the rise in nationalistic politics is fuelled by a negative view of the future.

Fearful of such effects, the world’s central banks mobilised trillions of dollars of capital to maintain the sense of wellbeing that comes from buoyant stock markets (aka. quantitative easing). 

John Humphrys’ riposte that somehow responding to climate change might spoil his fun is not so different from those who talk about the response to climate change in terms of potential losses and costs.

Transformative effect

When the world is on the up we are willing to take risks, make investments and hope for a share of a growing pie.

When the world is on a down, we fear losing what we have and cut our costs with the inevitable consequence that we are all worse off (what Keynes called the paradox of thrift – hoarding a quantity of money undermines its value as money). 

But responding to climate change is not the end of fun. Or holidays. It is about the need to create a financial and economic system that stays within the planet’s boundaries delivering progress that benefits the greater good without costing the next generation’s future. 

Optimism fuels invention. Optimism fuels change. Optimism finds ways to solve problems.  Climate change is a cause that needs optimism.

You don’t need to take my word for it. Those same people at the world’s central banks who bailed out the financial system also see a low-carbon transition as generating net positive long-term returns in growth and economic activity. 

Optimism and pessimism

There will always be winners and losers. That is just economics. But we can make sure that this transition has a positive transformative effect on our society, focusing on the things that matter, and moving away from only seeing wealth in terms of the value we extract from the world.

As I’ve said before, we make the markets and economies we deserve and right now they are not fit for purpose. 

It isn’t ideology to want a better future for your planet, although ideology can blind you to the solutions that could realise it.

The politics of climate change are not a question of right or left but about optimism and pessimism, the desire for or denial of the need for change. So maybe Ed Miliband really will save our bacon.

This Author

Bruce Davis is managing director of Abundance Investment, which advertises with The Ecologist.

Image: Ed Milliband, Flickr.