“Healing our skies, healing our hearts”
July 5, 2016
Confronting 1000 year floods in Appalachia, devastating drought in California…we mourn that so much time has already been lost. Here are images posted on Facebook by WV residents, on the page, “West Virginia Millennial Flood 2016″. (Contributors to this photo album include Nostra-Thomas Koning (owner), Alice Hardman Blankenship, Jeanie Droddy and 27 others)
Feasible solutions to climate change must connect scientific and technical knowledge with on-the-ground transformation in human society. We see four urgent hurdles before us:
- Global justice movements face political barriers in bringing the rights and perspectives of climate victims and refugees to national and international decision-making forums.
- Interdisciplinary collaboration between humanities, social and natural sciences is sporadic.
- Existing nation-state apparatuses lack adequate structures for citizen participation in long-term planning for a post-carbon economy and society.
- Current models of national well-being foreground gross domestic production and consumer consumption and externalize negative ecological and social impacts.
Over the past decade, we have studied these four challenges from the grassroots up. In projects of university / community collaboration and as scholars of justice movements, they have been looking at concrete challenges faced by communities marginalized by neoliberal globalization and environmental injustice. For instance, from the grassroots perspective of the Appalachian coalfields, the breakdown of the regulatory state is visible. Working with citizen groups in this area, the deformation of democratic participation is clear. These must be overcome if we are to create feasible, integrated and just solutions to crises in our global commons – atmospheric, water, etc. If we are unable to make the case for a just transition to a sustainable economy in the Appalachian coalfields, how are we going to persuade peoples and governments in the Global South to move in that direction?
These urgent problems of ecological sustainability and social justice, are rooted in prevalent structures of political economy linked with core paradigms of modern political thinking. However, our work with grassroots justice movements – in Appalachia, India, and elsewhere – has convinced us that new political paradigms are emerging in the kind of practical problem-solving which grassroots groups are achieving against great odds. In Recovering the Commons: Democracy, Place, and Global Justice, we chart this emergent and hopeful paradigm and probe its historical connections with democratic forms of republicanism and populism. Theoretical bases for this emerging paradigm are found in thinkers such as Hannah Arendt, Wendell Berry, John Dewey, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.
We understand human agency as “body~place~commons” – that is agency, that arises from embodied life, in particular places, in the flowing cycles of interdependencies of “the commons”. We argue that this embodied, emplaced and encommoned notion of human life – is a shared and emergent paradigm in diverse environmental and social justice movements around the world. Drawing insights from grassroots environmental and social justice movements, we explore the theoretical bases for scaling up grassrooted, equitable planning for a post-carbon energy transition. We illuminate new models for community-based, economic development linked with civic professionalism, participatory planning and research.
In Recovering the Commons, we argue that “body~place~commons” is an often tacit idea within grassroots citizen action, and could be the basis for wide networks of solidarity and collaboration between movements and between citizens, civic professionals, and publicly engaged government. For instance, movements for the “new urbanism”, “livable and walkable communities”, “green design” or against “nature deficit disorder” in children – all share the goal to re-place, re-embody land use, architecture and design so that it fits the rhythms of human experience, community-building, and daily life. In a recent interview in Huffington Post, we argued:
Corporate capitalism has radically disrupted the connection between the commons and our personal life rhythms. It has vastly extended the geographic reach and complexity of the human / nature cycles that engulf us. So, for instance, most American suburbs, are “unwalkable” – the regular daily pathways of our lives do not allow us to shop and take care of other material needs using our own animal power. In a sustainable society, the basic cycles of our personal quests for sustenance – food, shelter, air, water, etc. – would harmonize more or less with the big ecological cycles, as nature creates forms that die and recycle into nutrients for new creaturely forms. Suburban sprawl is the kind of cultural / political / economic / architectural landscape you get when the cycles of the commons get discombobulated. It radically discourages forms of mobility and interaction that make people conscious of the ecological cycles they are in. It limits our choices on a daily basis – forcing us into a radical dependence on sources of energy, food, material items that are locked into huge, unjust, exploitative, global chains of production and investment. Not only do these capitalist chains of profit and waste extract far too much, but they also spew out massive amounts of toxins which nature is unable to digest or transmute into nutrients – making life hellish for people trapped in communities which are too politically weak to protect their local commons. (Jeff Biggers, “Recovering the Commons: Inteview with Scholars on the Climate Justice Frontlines“ Huffington Post, September 17, 2010 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeff-biggers/recovering-the-commons-in_b_720679.html)
Neither dominant concepts of “subjectivity” in social and political theory nor prevailing notions of academic professionalism are adequate to the challenges ahead. Recovering the Commons offers scholars important arguments for reorganizing their interests in global citizenship and a more sustainable climate. The powerful role of the USA as a state in the international arena requires serious rethinking of democratic change and a politics of limits in the American context. We argue for a democratic, rather than post-communal, professionalism re-situating academics from their places and regions. Against over-reliance on technocratic solutions, climate justice is the key to a sustainable world that is both thinkable and realizable only with greater participation of the citizenry in a commons-based ecological worldview. This is only possible with public scholarship that links the humanities, social and natural sciences with democratic citizen action and thought.
