‘Extinction rates are rising by a factor of up to 1,000 above natural rates. Every hour, three species disappear. Every day, up to 150 species are lost. Every year, between 18,000 and 55,000 species become extinct. The cause: human activities.’
- Ahmed Djoghlaf,
head of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity.
The problem, again:
The interconnected ecosystems that make up the biosphere are all dependent on
the capture, conversion and distribution of the sun’s energy through the
planetary cycling of carbon. The biosphere has proved to be fairly resilient.
Within the constraining parameters of life on earth, however, changes in
climate can have enormous consequences. Interventions, human or non-human, that
impact ecosystems and the carbon cycle can result in irreversible losses of
biodiversity and trigger abrupt and uncontrollable climate changes. The
contemporary form of human society – the global social process we know as
capitalist modernity – has initiated both a new mass extinction event and
global warming. As a result, tens of thousands of life forms will be
‘disappeared’ and millions of people will lose, directly or indirectly, their
lives, health or homes through famine, drought, illness and war. These
processes are already unfolding. The urgent question is: how far will they go?
Put differently, the
problem is the dominant social process and the difficulty in changing it. The
social process, organized to maximize capital accumulation and channeled
through a rivalrous interstate system, compels all individuals to compete for
places in a national economy and compels all states to promote and defend one
national economy against all others. Growth, measured in Gross Domestic
Product, is a given. By this logic, capital and biosphere are caught in a relation
of antagonism, setting up endless and dreary struggles between the claims of
jobs and environment, profits and endangered species, consumption and
biodiversity. Through this optic, climate change and mass extinction are simply
matters of national security and risk assessment. It is taken for granted that
science and technology will enable human adaptation to ecological degradation
and the weather. The national security-surveillance state is oriented toward
enforcing the current social logic, not changing it. The state’s concern is:
who can dominate in the new climate scenario? Or in other words: what must be
changed, in order to keep in place the current regime of accumulation and logic
of domination? Seen from below, however, the problem is how to change that very
logic.
Global governance,
to use the current buzz word, is the interstate process tasked with
administering the parameters for growth and accumulation, mediating conflicts
and managing emerging threats and volatilities. Nominally democratic,
governance draws on international law, negotiated and interpreted by states
bilaterally, as well as through the UN and a vast array of supplementary
multilateral forums and agencies, with inputs by NGOs and, sometimes, the
popular pressure of social movements.
States abide by the
fabled rule of law, except when they don’t. The weak accept what they must, as
Thucydides put it, and the strong do what they can get away with. The rule of laws is the rule plus the exceptions, which makes for unraveling legitimacy. If it would
be too reductive to say that capital simply and directly does what it wants,
then it would also be too naïve not to see that capital dominates the process
and that corporate and national powers generally achieve their aims either by
the mediations of party and law or, that failing, by flexible mixes of
corruption, coercion and war. As we know all too well, this systemic essence of
domination actively corrupts and undermines democratic forms and impulses.
Shaped since 1945 by the allied imperatives of capital, bureaucracy and weapons
systems, so-called governance is by and large technocracy. As limits loom and
contradictions intensify – as they have in the still-unfolding financial
meltdown and as they are doing far more powerfully in the biospheric meltdown –
the tendency is to favor security options and a de facto permanent state of
emergency.
This is the context
within which we need to reflect on the technocratic ‘science-policy interface’
where, presumably, the ‘from above’ responses to climate change and mass
extinction are being generated. More than twenty years ago, the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was established under the auspices of the United
Nations, in order to provide governments with scientific assessments and advice
on the causes and risks of climate change. The publications of this body have been
the most authoritative articulations we have of the scientific consensus
regarding global warming. Because the conclusions of the IPCC are disturbing to
a model of global development dependent on the immensely profitable extraction
and consumption of fossil fuels, a new industry of warming denial has emerged
to smear scientists and sow public confusion. The climate scientists, painted
by the Right as political radicals, are mostly good technocrats who have merely
gathered and relayed the findings of their peers. Many scientists are being
politicized, however, by the cynicism of the public attacks launched against
them. This disjunction on the ‘interface’ may yet become a political factor. In
the meantime, the repressed has returned as postcolonial reality: at
high-profile summits in Copenhagen (2009), Cancun (2010) and Durban (2011),
policy has bogged down in disputes between governments representing ‘developed’
and ‘developing’ economies. Rebellions stirring in the Global South are being
contained, but at the cost of no effective agreements being reached or measures
taken. In Washington and other Northern metropoles, dominant politicians have
simply brushed off the counsel of science as inexpedient.
In April 2012, governments from 90 countries established the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). Intended to provide authoritative scientific assessments about biodiversity loss and ecosystem degradation, this body is meant to be analogous to the IPCC. Its first plenary is planned for January 2013, in Bonn.
The IPBES will inform, but remain independent from, the UN process initiated by the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). The eleventh Convention of Parties (COP 11) to the CBD has just finished meeting in Hyderabad, India. (The quote at the top is from CBD head Ahmed Djoghlaf’s opening statement.) While everyone agrees that a mass extinction event is a deplorable thing, the usual North-South fissures reopened when the discussion turned to financing conservation efforts. As with warming, so with extinction: the Northern beneficiaries of accomplished ‘development’ will not take responsibility for the history of conquest, plunder and containment that underwrites their power and privileges – and who is going to force them to? Nature is great, so long as someone else has to pay for it.
A decade ago, Edward
O. Wilson estimated that spending $30 billion per year on a robust coordinated
conservation effort could cut the extinction rate by half. (See my review of
Wilson’s The Future of Life
below, in the biosphere thread.) He argued that this ‘one-thousandth of world
domestic product’ is ‘the best bargain humanity has ever been offered.’ In the
run-up to COP 11, researchers writing in the journal Science revised Wilson’s figures: establishing and
maintaining the reserves needed to save the world’s threatened species will now
cost more like $80 billion per year. Meanwhile, with each passing hour the
world becomes three more species poorer, and degrading ecologies edge that much
closer to tipping points of collapse.
The shared
technocratic assumption here is that growth (or more bluntly, capital) and the
biosphere can be reconciled, and that an acceptable balance can be struck,
under the unchanged sign of accumulation, between ‘lifting the world out of
poverty’ and conserving nature. Critical theory, of course, rejects this as a
false reconciliation and calls for a new social logic beyond that of domination
and perennial misery. Short of that leap, however, we should push the vectors
of conservation as far as they can go.
Among the responses
to the crisis and the political impasses surrounding it, is the still-emerging
field of ‘ecological accounting’. The idea here is to put values on all the
ecological costs and benefits that are conventionally left off the books, from
the untallied costs of pollution and species loss to the freely-used benefits
of ‘ecosystem services’(the ES in the IPBES), such as clean air and natural pollinators. The sum of
these estimates brings into view – and potentially into business plans, accumulation strategies and security budgets – the
true carbon footprints of specific industrial processes, products and policies.
Such a re-conceptualization amounts to a radical redefinition of growth and,
possibly, a new economic paradigm. Limited to ‘carbon trading schemes’ and
similar shell games, such an approach will remain easily corruptible. But if it
takes hold more robustly and becomes generalized, then it may go differently.
It seems very doubtful that current patterns of production and consumption can
be justified under such criteria, rigorously applied. Whether ‘ecological
accounting’ is radical enough to open an ‘immanent’ path out of the logic of
capitalist accumulation remains to be seen, but is very much worth thinking
about.
The following
editorial from this week’s Economic & Political Weekly (Mumbai) reflects lucidly on COP 11 - with the requisite
skepticism for the ideology of growth. In the South, too, governance is rife with antagonism.
GR
Read the review of
Wilson’s The Future of Life.
Editorial: Words
not Deeds. The government's commitment to conserving biodiversity remains
hollow.
Economic &
Political Weekly, vol.
XLVII, no. 44, 3 November 2012
The recently
concluded 11th Conference of the Parties (COP11) to the Convention on
Biological Diversity (CBD) in Hyderabad reminded us that not everyone is
convinced that economic growth and biodiversity conservation are compatible.
Although all governments, including ours, make the right noises at such
conferences, reiterating their commitment to the environment and biological
diversity, their policies suggest otherwise. The CBD has been around for two
decades. It came into force on 29 December 1993, 90 days after the 30th country
had ratified it. Yet over this period, it is evident that the sense of urgency
that resulted in this important convention being formulated has not translated
into the kind of actions that could have slowed down the rapid decline in
biodiversity worldwide and in particular in biodiversity-rich nations like
India. In the last two decades, one-third of all species of plant and animal
life have become extinct in the world. Many more are on the endangered list as the juggernaut of
environmentally unsustainable developmental policies proceeds to destroy
precious ecosystem resources.
In poorer countries,
and even those like India that are on a rapid growth path, the people most
dependent on a natural resource base are also the poorest and most likely to be
in the path of projects that destroy biodiversity. Mining is only one of the
dozens of examples. In the last decade in India, close to one lakh hectares of
forestland have been excavated for mines and more such land is being surveyed
for mining. There is not a hint in official policy that the need to conserve
ecosystems is as important as extracting minerals. The importance of the former
has been recognised only when people dependent on these natural resources have
fought to save them. A similar example is the fate of India’s coastline that is
progressively being destroyed by scores of power stations, ports, jetties,
tourist facilities, etc, that have been sanctioned. The consequent destruction
of breeding grounds of the vast varieties of aquatic resources, taking place at
an alarming pace according to recent surveys, is putting the livelihoods of
fishing communities across the country at risk while at the same time
destroying aquatic biodiversity.
Traditionally,
farmers have been the conservators of scores of seed varieties. Their age-old
methods of conservation are today under threat as agro companies aggressively
push seed varieties, many of them genetically modified (GM), that promise
bigger profits and more resilient crops. But as the virtual epidemic of
suicides amongst farmers in many parts of India has shown, the promise of
profits has been illusory and has led not just to debilitating indebtedness but
also to the loss of precious diversity in seeds. In this context, the
recommendation of the Technical Expert Committee, constituted by the Supreme
Court in response to a petition asking for a ban on GM crops, is significant.
It has recommended a 10-year blanket ban on field trials of GM crops, particularly
in areas where India is the centre of origin of the seed variety. Predictably,
industry has criticised this recommendation, considering it short-sighted. In
fact, it might prove to be just the kind of far-sighted step that is needed to
halt the worrying destruction of indigenous seed varieties.
In his speech at
COP11, which India chairs for the following two years until the next COP is
held in South Korea, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh made all the right gestures
including kicking off the fund for biodiversity conservation with a pledge of
$50 million, a very small part of the estimated $8 billion needed to fund
research and projects in the countries that are economically poor but rich in
terms of biodiversity. Yet the government’s recent policies expose the
hollowness of much of what he said. For instance, in the last decades many
significant environmental laws have been enacted, including the Biological
Diversity Act 2002. The law envisaged local communities maintaining
biodiversity registers so that they could intervene if development plans
endangered these resources. The formulation of the Act itself, following
extensive consultation, offered an important model of consultative law-making.
Yet, even a law like this has not been implemented with any seriousness and
many states have failed to involve local communities. In fact, the very people
who are most vested in preserving biodiversity are today being forcibly
displaced in the name of economic development.
The real proof of
commitment to the concept of conserving biological diversity will come if the
economic growth model that a country adopts incorporates conservation
strategies as an integral part of its developmental plans. This necessarily
means trade-offs. But because environmental concerns involve issues that will
affect future generations and cannot be measured in terms of short-term gains,
policymakers have to embrace the vision of a future that incorporates such
diversity. Unfortunately, the belief that somehow economic growth can offset all
other losses, including those of ecosystem services, remains deeply embedded in
the corridors of policymaking. As a result, the only time conservation of
biodiversity is given a shoe-in is when those affected by its loss, the natural
resource dependent communities, organise and make themselves heard.
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