Academia and the Transition to an Ecological Civilization (University of Alberta) - David Korten
Academia and the Transition to an Ecological Civilization (University of Alberta)
By David C. Korten
This presentation was delivered on January 30, 2017, at the 20th annual International Week, hosted by the Global Education Program at the University of Alberta in Edmonton. A printable PDF version is available HERE.
I’m thrilled to be a part of this International Week gathering seeking a path to a Better World. My topic tonight, “A Living Earth Economy for an Ecological Civilization,” is intended to provide a deep frame for this conversation and expose important implications for institutions of higher learning.
During the past century, we humans have become a truly global species with both the ability and the necessity to choose our common future as a conscious collective choice. Advances in biological and ecological sciences and the global communications network give us the means. Growth in our human numbers and the destructive power of our weapons of mass destruction of one another and nature creates the necessity.
Globally we face three interlinked crises that together frame the magnitude of the challenge at hand.
1. First and most fundamental we face a growing global environmental crisis. Elements of the crisis include climate change, loss of fertile soil, diminishing supplies of clean freshwater, disappearing forests, and collapsing fisheries. These failures create growing human displacement and hardship that drives social breakdown. Per the Global Footprint Network, we humans are consuming globally at a rate 1.6 times what Earth can sustain. Everything above 1.0 comes at the cost of diminishing Earth’s ability to sustain life—including human life.
2. We face a growing global social crisis of extreme and growing inequality. In 2010, the combined wealth of the world’s richest 388 billionaires equaled the combined wealth of the poorest half of humanity—3.5 billion people. Now, just 7 years later, it takes the combined wealth of only the 8 richest billionaires to equal the combined wealth of the world’s poorest 3.6 billion people. The combination of inequality and environmental displacement undermines human well-being, institutional legitimacy, and the social fabric of families and communities. The violence driving massive numbers of refugees from the Middle East is a direct consequence.
3. We face a governance crisis, as dramatically demonstrated by the current assault on the integrity of our democratic institutions in my country just to the South of the Canadian border.
These three crises are interlinked, self-imposed, potentially terminal for our species, and a direct consequence of the growing power of global corporations that value life only for its market price and empower those humans least likely to act in the common interest.
We the people, allow this travesty to play out because we live in a cultural trance induced by cultural narratives that lead us to accept beliefs and values at odds with reality and contrary to our well-being.
It seems we have forgotten that we humans are living beings. Earth is our mother—the source of our birth and nurture.
We will not get out of our current mess by tinkering at the margins of a failed system to make it slightly less destructive. We must build from the bottom up the institutions of a new system—a new civilization—that aligns with a deepened understanding of our human nature, our possibilities, and our relation to creation. If that sounds like a serious challenge, you hear correctly.
The task at hand is to navigate a civilizational shift from the imperial civilization of the past 5,000 years, to the ecological civilization on which our future depends. It will require drawing from all the sources of human understanding, including the ancient wisdom of indigenous peoples, the great religious prophets, and the findings of contemporary science.
That transformational transition will be built on the foundation of a 2nd Enlightenment already taking form. The Enlightenment of the 18th Century brought us elemental democracy and a recognition that there is order in Creation. It unleashed a period of extraordinary advance in technology and social organization. It also sowed the seeds of the great environmental and social unraveling now playing out.
Intellectually, the 21st Century Enlightenment will be grounded in a recognition that the intelligence and consciousness denied by the 18th Century Enlightenment—are in fact the true the ground of creation. Metaphysically, the 2nd Enlightenment will feature an emerging synthesis of our understanding of the material and spiritual dimensions of reality. Politically it will recognize that we have only begun the journey to a true democracy that mimics the cooperative patterns of self-organization that are a defining characteristic of healthy living systems.
There is no blueprint or easy set of prescriptions for the turning to an Ecological Civilization. I can, and will, however, offer some fundamental principles and guidelines—starting with two foundational design priorities: We must value life over money. And the relationship of community over the isolated individual.
I want to introduce you to the first of these principles—life over money—by sharing a piece of the story of my personal intellectual journey. From there I will take you on a deep dive into some fundamental ideas that address the significance of our human relationships with one another, the rest of nature, and the unfolding of creation.
A Personal Wake-up Call
I devoted some thirty years of my professional life to international development, including twenty-one years living and working in Africa, Latin America, and Asia. I was on a mission to end poverty by bringing to the world the secrets of what I understood to be U.S. economic success. In the naivete of my youth, I understood the United States to be a middle-class nation with freedom and opportunity for all.
To my horror, I realized over time, that the actual consequence of the policies we were advancing abroad, was quite different from the advertised intention.
Yes, I witnessed growth in GDP and expansion of the middle class, while a few people amassed huge fortunes.
I also, however, observed that as GDP grew, life for the majority became less secure and more desperate. Slums spread. Families and communities disintegrated. Once beautiful cultures, survived mainly as tourist attractions. Rivers died. Once vibrant coastal corals and verdant hillsides became barren wastelands.
Eventually, I realized that in the name of helping the poor, rich countries were loaning poor countries foreign currency to invest in growing their economies. Because foreign currency is only good for buying things from abroad, this created dependence on foreign goods and technology purchased with loans that could be repaid only by selling their national labor and assets to foreigners.
When payment came due, the International Monetary Fund and World Bank stepped in like mafia debt collectors with baseball bats ready to break legs. They told indebted countries they must restructure their economies, not to better meet the needs of their own people, but rather to repay the foreign debt. They were told: Reduce spending on health and education for your people. Sell your land and natural resources to foreign corporations. Set up duty free zones with cheap non-unionized labor with no rights or benefits to produce goods for export to foreign consumers.
Debt, dependence, and deprivation for the many. Outsized profits for the few.
You may recognize a familiar pattern. It was something of a preview of the dynamic that now plays out in varied forms here in Canada, the United States, in Europe, and much of the world.
Eventually, I also became aware of a related dynamic. Before the introduction of Western economic development, most people economists counted as living in absolute poverty—meaning they had no money—were members of a community self-help subsistence economy that lived with and from the land with little need for money. Often, they had rich cultural lives, were well-fed, had secure shelter, and had no concept of being poor.
In the name of development and the Green Revolution, subsistence farmers were introduced to chemical agriculture, which required them to buy inputs from corporations on credit secured by the land they farmed. One bad crop and they lost their land to a bigger farmer or a corporation.
Corporations and rich individuals ended up controlling the lands and waters on which the people had depended. The peoples’ only choice was then to sell their labor to some wealthy individual or corporation for whatever pittance was offered.
World Bank and IMF economists pointed to this income and bragged about development success. “These people now have a $1.00 or $1.25 a day. We have lifted them out of poverty.” Never mind that most of them had far better lives with a means of self-help subsistence and no income.
It turns out that much of what economists celebrate as GDP growth, is simply the monetization of what used to be relationships of family and community. The process continues as we turn from caring for our own homes and children to taking jobs to get the money to hire home and child care services—often with a corporation getting a cut of each transaction.
Gradually, we give up control of our own lives to the corporations that control both the means of production and the creation and allocation of money. Each time we do something for ourselves or engage in a mutual exchange with a neighbor—we take back control a bit of our lives.
In Search of the Sacred
Why do we tolerate a system that strips away the relationships that define our humanity and reduce us to servitude to money? It traces to a fundamental aspect of our human nature. We organize as societies around shared cultural stories.
Political demagogues have long recognized that those who control the framing stories of society’s culture, control its people.
During the 20th century, corporate PR and advertising specialists became masters of the arts of cultural manipulation to create an individualistic culture of greed and profligate material consumption that serves well the short-term interests of the financial oligarchy. Once immersed in this culture, we lose sight of that on which our true health and happiness depends.
Of our many influential cultural stories, the most important are those that define what we hold to be sacred [entitled to reverence or respect]. When we get the sacred wrong, we can become entangled in a web of self-destructive, even suicidal, deceptions.
Separated from nature and one another, we of modern society have lost our sense of what is truly sacred. Losing sight of the truly sacred, we fill the breach with a familiar story constantly affirmed in the public mind by pundits and economists schooled in what Nobel Laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz has called a faith-based religion. I call it our Sacred Money and Markets story.
Time is money. Money is wealth. Those who make money are society’s wealth creators. Poverty is a sign of laziness and personal failure.
Consumption is the path to happiness. Individualistic greed and competition are human virtues that the invisible hand of the free market directs to ends that create opportunity and prosperity for all.
Those who would deprive society’s wealth creators of the fruits of their labor engage in envy—a mortal sin. Maximizing financial gain is a moral and legal duty of business—indeed of every individual. Earth is a rock in space useful as a source of free resources and a cheap and convenient waste dump.
Every element of this story is false or misleading. Yet over the past few decades this has become the story by which we define the purpose, meaning, and direction of society—and of our individual lives and relationships. In its thrall, we embrace money as a sacred object of veneration and the measure of our human worth and accomplishment, banks as our temples worship, consumption as our solace, economists as our moral authorities, and free [unregulated] markets as a superhuman controlling power that meets our needs and rewards the worthy.
The Sacred Money story frames the moral and intellectual foundation of the Sacred Money and Markets economics taught as an objective values free science to business and economics students in virtually all the world’s colleges and universities.
False on every point, it perverts our sense of values and leads to the concentration of decision-making power in the hands of a financial oligarchy. It is neither a true science nor a true religion. It is an immoral, anti-democratic political ideology at odds both with the moral teachings of the world’s great religions and the findings of contemporary science.
The immoral and intellectually false premises of the Sacred Money and Markets story sets us up to measure economic performance by financial metrics like GDP and stock price indices like the Dow Jones Average.
GDP is in substantial measure an indicator of the rate at which we are monetizing relationships previously based on mutual caring. This process destroys the natural bonds of family and community, while increasing our dependence on obtaining money controlled by global financial institutions to purchase goods and services offered for sale by global corporations that serve global finance.
With a similar bias in favor of financial interests, stock price indices are primarily an indicator of the rate at which the inflation of financial assets is increasing the power of those who own them relative to the power of those who do not.
Contrast the fabrications of the Sacred Money and Markets story with truths of the following reality based Sacred Life and Living Earth story. Imagine how different our world would be if this were the foundational story by which we structure and manage the economy.
Time is life. Life is the most precious of the many forms of wealth. Money is just a number useful as a medium of exchange in well-regulated markets. We humans are living beings born of and nurtured by a living Earth itself born of a living universe evolving toward ever-greater complexity, beauty, awareness, and possibility.
Life exists only in community. We humans survive and prosper only as contributing members a living Earth community. It is our human nature to care and to share. Making time for life—to experience and serve—is the path to happiness and well-being. Equality, community, and connection to nature are essential foundations of human health and happiness.
As our sacred Earth mother loves and cares for us, we must love and care for her. The institutions of business, government, and civil society exist for only one purpose—to serve as vehicles through which we cultivate and express our true nature and create our means of living in service to the Earth Community to which we all belong.
The Christian biblical verse Matthew 6:24 says it well: “No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.
If you visualize God as the spirit of life, it is a defining spiritual lesson for our time. Will we organize as a global society in the service of life? Or of money?
Three Defining Creation Stories
Now let me take you on a deeper dive into our story problem. Three contrasting creation stories have established currency in Western culture: the Distant Patriarch, the Grand Machine, and the Mystical Unity. Each conveys a very different understanding of relationships, agency, and meaning.
1. The Distant Patriarch story is most commonly associated with the institutions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
By the reckoning of this story, my most important relationship is to a distant God who is the source of all agency and meaning. All that is, is by his will. My defining task is to obey His commandments to win his favor and thereby a favored place by his side in the afterlife.
We know who are God’s most favored, as he has granted them the wealth and power to rule over us. It is not our place to challenge or change what he has willed. We should be grateful for the bounty of nature he has gifted us to use as we wish.
2. The Grand Machine story comes to us as the standard story of Newtonian physics and classical evolutionary biology.
By its reckoning, the universe is best understood as a giant clock works winding down to a heat death as the energy of the tension in its spring is exhausted.
Life is merely an accidental and meaningless outcome of material complexity. Only the material is real. Consciousness and free will, or agency, are illusions.
I am alone in a mechanistic cosmos devoid of agency and possessed of no meaning or purpose. Wow, this is depressing. I think I’ll go shopping to lift my spirits.
3. The Mystical Unity story, most commonly associated with Buddhism, comes to us from the world’s spiritual traditions.
In its classic expression, the only reality is spirit. What we experience as material reality is an illusion generated by the ego, which is the cause of suffering. I find peace by shedding my ego through meditation to become one with the timeless eternal One.
This readily leads to a turning away from the manifest world and the opportunities it provides to explore and actualize the potentials of our humanity through creativity and service.
Though each of these stories is dated and incomplete in itself, it makes a distinctive contribution to a larger and currently emergent creation story consistent with the fullness of human knowledge and rich with meaning.
The Distant Patriarch story recognizes intention in creation. The Grand Machine story acknowledges order in creation. The Mystical Unity story acknowledges spiritual consciousness and unity in creation.
Living Universe
Each contributes to an emerging Living Universe story that draws from all the sources of human knowledge and understanding—including our inner awareness, indigenous wisdom, the teachings of the mystics, the findings of science, and daily experience to tell the story of an epic journey that can inspire and guide our way to an Ecological Civilization.
The essence of the Living Universe story has long been known to indigenous cultures, suggesting it lives in the human heart. To bring it to the fore of public consciousness as our shared story, we need only affirm what most people already know—and what science now confirms.
According to science, the universe was born some 13.8 billion years ago, when a giant energy cloud burst forth in a blinding flash of quantum energy particles that formed into complex atoms that formed into complex molecules that joined with the passing of time to form stars and galaxies that gave birth to planets—one of which gave birth to carbon based life.
Evolutionary biologists tell us that some 3.6 billion years ago, the first living organisms appeared on Earth. As their numbers, diversity, and complexity increased, they organized themselves into a planetary-scale living system comprised of the trillions of trillions of individual choice-making living organisms that to this day work together through highly complex relationships of exchange to optimize the capture, organization, and sharing of energy, water, and nutrients to bring Sacred Earth to life. Acting with no discernible source of central direction, they continuously renew Earth’s soils, rivers, aquifers, fisheries, forests, and grasslands while maintaining global climatic balance and the composition of Earth’s atmosphere to meet the requirements of Earth’s widely varied life forms.
All the while, constantly experimenting, testing, and learning—as if with conscious intention and foresight—this living system—a living superorganism in its own right—evolved toward ever-greater complexity, beauty, awareness and creative potential.
The idea that this miracle is solely the outcome of a combination of purposeless mechanics and chance—to this day the public premise of science—defies logic, common sense, and the foundational principles of Newtonian mechanics.
In the earliest stage of this grand evolutionary journey, Earth’s living organisms worked together with Earth’s geological processes to filter excess carbon and a vast variety of toxins from Earth’s air, waters, and soils and sequester them deep underground. In so doing, this grand alliance of seemingly primitive species, created the environmental conditions suited to the emergence of a highly-advanced species with an extraordinary capacity for conscious self-reflective choice. We call ourselves, “human.”
So how have we humans chosen to use the precious gift of our unique capacity for self-reflective choice? We dedicate our best minds and most advanced technologies to the extraction and release of these sequestered carbons and toxins back into Earth’s atmosphere, waters, and soils in a foolhardy effort to dominate, suppress, and control the natural processes of a living Earth that make our lives possible.
Our current life destructive, climate disruptive, and hugely profitable expansion of tar sands oil extraction, deep-sea oil drilling, hydraulic fracture natural gas extraction, and mountaintop-coal removal is only a particularly visible current example of this ungrateful insanity.
An economic system based on the premise that money is more valuable than life regards this extraction as essential to jobs, profits, and prosperity. We treat the related economic, social, environmental, and governance devastation as simply regrettable collateral damage. Can we truly presume to be an intelligent species?
If we step back and take in the bigger picture—and apply our native intelligence—we see an economy structured and managed as if it were our human purpose to occupy Earth as alien invaders intent on disrupting Earth’s climate, poisoning its air and water, destroying the natural fertility of its soils, and eliminating all of nature’s species other than those we choose to serve on our dinner table.
To save Earth and ourselves from ourselves, we must mobilize every resource at our command—including every intellectual resource—to transition from an imperial civilization of Earth invaders to an Ecological Civilization of Earth protectors. It requires a fundamental rethinking of our foundational stories by the institutions of academia and religion around a Living Universe narrative that recognizes our human nature, responsibility, and possibilities as living beings born of and nurtured by a living Earth.
Design for a Living Earth Economy
Institutionally, the economic system defines how we humans relate to one another and the rest of nature to obtain our means of living. By the structure of the current economy, we live in involuntary, undemocratic servitude to whomever controls that system, much like the serfs of medieval times who farmed the lands of nobles.
The actions required to transition from a money serving Suicide Economy of involuntary servitude to a global system of self-governing, life-serving living economies go far, far beyond increasing worker pay and implementing additional rules to curb corporate excess. These include a deep institutional restructuring to shift power from money seeking global financial markets and corporations to self-governing, life-seeking communities of place.
Given life’s need for constant creative micro adaptation to local conditions, it is impossible to achieve Earth balance between people and nature through the central direction of local action. As with Earth’s biosphere, our human economies must self-organize locally everywhere, recognizing that if the people of each bioregion are living in sustainable balanced relationship with their local ecosystems then we, as a species, will be in balance globally with our Earth mother.
Earth’s biosphere segments itself into self-reliant, self-regenerative bioregional communities, each engaged in the constant locally self-reliant capture, sharing, reuse, and regeneration of the nutrients, energy and water required to maintain the health and vitality of all its resident organisms. Each community member contributes; each benefits.
Our future depends on learning to assimilate into and function as responsible members of these generative and largely self-reliant living communities. Indigenous communities learned to do it. Presumably we, their descendants, can learn to do it as well—though we must now learn to do it in ways that balance the consumption of 7.6 billion—and growing—humans with the generative capacity of our living Earth mother.
In our modern human economy, we may trade a portion of our material surplus with our neighbors, but always in fair and balanced exchange. And we will need to freely share that which is infinitely reproducible—information, culture, and beneficial knowledge and technology.
The transition needs the guidance of a new societal narrative that recognizes and celebrates our nature as living beings born of and nurtured by a living Earth born of and nurtured by a living universe. That narrative must remind us that money is simply a number with no meaning or existence outside the human mind. And GDP is a financial indicator that tells us far less about how well the economy is serving people than about how fast the very rich are consolidating their control of the resources and money on which the rest of us depend.
The restructuring requires that the rights and power of each corporation be subordinate to the jurisdiction and authority of the government that chartered it. And its operations must be limited to its chartering government’s jurisdiction.
Transnational corporations, by their nature, violate this essential organizing principle. They are an illegitimate institutional form and should take their place alongside monarchy and other institutions of authoritarian oligarchy in the dustbin of history.
We must turn our attention from GDP as our measure of economic performance to indicators of the health and well-being of people and the rest of nature.
We must reclaim finance as a service sector. It produced nothing. It’s only function is to ration access to money. Its institutions should be cooperatively owned and managed as public utilities. Financial speculation is properly prohibited. Gambling should be limited to well-regulated casinos.
Economic democracy in which each person has a real ownership share in the assets on which their livelihood depends is an essential foundation of political democracy. If we value democracy, we should give it a try.
Currently the laws of most countries give corporations more rights than people and nature no rights at all. Yet without nature, there are no people, and without people there are no corporations. We have it exactly backwards. Nature must come first. We the people create corporations, let them be our servants.
We are presently engaged in a struggle between corporate power and people power. The latter is less visible, but is growing as people withdraw their life energy from the corporate suicide economy and redirect it to creating the building blocks of a living Earth economy from the bottom up. They are advancing sustainable community agriculture, Renewable energy and energy efficiency, Local zero-waste circular manufacturing, Independent retail, Green building, Local Financial services, Local and/or fair trade clothing, Holistic education, Independent media and communications, Local business development and professional services, public transportation, holistic health and wellness, creative participatory arts and culture. The greater their success, the greater our opportunities to engage and meet our needs through the emerging living Earth economy.
Higher Education for the 21st Century
So now we turn to the implications for the institutions of the Academy.
At best, our universities now prepare their graduates for jobs in institutions of a dying imperial civilization. Not only must future graduates be prepared to serve wholly new institutional forms that support ecological balance, shared prosperity, and living democracy, they must be prepared to create them anew with few models to guide them. And it isn’t just about young people. The entire society must be retooled and re-skilled—immediately.
Few universities are prepared to address this challenge. They currently organize by narrowly defined academic disciplines grounded in the mechanistic Grand Machine worldview of the first Enlightenment.
Their graduates are ill prepared to think and act as living beings in a living Earth world that organizes around complex, interconnected, and constantly adapting and evolving systems in which disciplinary boundaries are meaningless. This creates a sharp disconnect between academia and our social and ecological reality.
Academia’s fragmentation of knowledge actively suppresses the ability of its graduates to understand complex human social systems and their connection to the living systems on which our well-being depends. A deep and immediate rethinking and restructuring is essential.Working out the specifics of essential institutional reforms will require deep reflection, rigorous debate, and radical restructuring. Here are some initial suggestions.
Strip away the intellectual walls that isolate academic disciplines from one another and the physical walls that isolate formal learning from the living world.
Organize faculty and students into interdisciplinary learning teams that reach out to, engage, support, and learn from nearby community-based problem solving.
Shift the focus from specialized pre-employment degree programs to preparation for and facilitation of lifelong learning.
Replace the metaphor of the machine with the metaphor of the living organism as the defining intellectual frame.
Staff departments of biology and ecology with biologists and ecologists who view life through a living-systems lens.
Feature history courses that examine through a holistic system lens how large-scale social transformation occurs in human societies and draw out relevant lessons for contemporary change agents.
Replace conventional economics departments with departments of ecological economics. Invite conventional economists to retire, retrain as ecological economists, or to offer courses on the logical and moral fallacies of neoclassical economics and why and how it brought humanity to the brink of self-destruction.
Replace engineering, architecture, and urban planning curricula centered on creating an automobile oriented infrastructure that suppresses nature and walls us off from life with curricula that support creating a life oriented built infrastructure that connects us with one another and nature as living members of living communities.
Introduce law school courses exploring the nature, structure, and doctrines of an Earth-law/rights-of-nature legal system.
Moment of Readiness
Breakthroughs in public consciousness take hold only at rare moments of readiness. I sense such a moment is at hand.
There is no solution to the unfolding environmental, social, and governance system collapse within an institutional system based on demonstrably false values and flawed assumptions. This presents a strong challenge and opportunity for colleges and universities.
We humans are engaged in a monumental work of reinventing ourselves, our culture, and our institutions. I believe it is the most exciting intellectual challenge and creative opportunity in the whole of the human experience.
The need is urgent. The time is now. We are the one’s we’ve been waiting for. Thank you.
Dr. David Korten is the author of Agenda for a New Economy: From Phantom Wealth to Real Wealth, The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community, The Post-Corporate World: Life after Capitalism, and the international best seller When Corporations Rule the World. He is board chair of YES! Magazine, a founding board member emeritus of the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies, president of the Living Economies Forum, an associate fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies, and a member of the Club of Rome. He earned MBA and PhD degrees from the Stanford University Graduate School of Business and served on the faculty of the Harvard Business School. He blogs for YES! Magazine. This presentation draws extensively from his book Change the Story, Change the Future: A Living Economy for a Living Earth. Keep up with his current thinking and schedule. Subscribe to his newsletter. It is infrequent and we will never share your e-mail.
China and the Ecological Civilization - David Korten
China and the Ecological Civilization
(An earlier version of this paper was prepared for and presented to the 2016 Donghu Forum on Global Governance: Symposium on Green Development and Global Governance, Hauzhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China.)
Abstract: We humans are now a truly global species. Our common future depends on our successful transition to an Ecological Civilization that works in balanced and harmonious relationship with Earth’s living systems to provide every person with a means of living consistent with their need for health and happiness. To achieve this future, we must navigate a successful species transition from transnational corporations to national governments as our primary institutions of governance, from competition to cooperation as our dominant mode of relating, and from growing GDP to meeting the spiritual and material needs of all the world’s people within the limits of what living Earth can sustain as the economy’s defining purpose. The governing institutions of an Ecological Civilization will support national and bio-regional self-reliance, the free sharing of information and technology, and balanced trade in goods for which one nation has a natural surplus and another is unable to produce for itself. PDF version
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For some 5,000 years, the dominant human societies have organized around institutions of empire that rest on a competitive foundation of human domination and exploitation of one another and nature. Its contributions to architecture and the arts and to extraordinary advances in medicine, knowledge, technology, and communications came at a great price. Whether we celebrate this past for its accomplishments or condemn it for its injustices, however, we now face the reality that the time of imperial civilization’s viability has passed.
In the early 1970s, human exploitation of the living systems of our Earth mother for the first time exceeded what she can sustain. The values and institutional structures that drove the exploitation of the civilizational era of empire are no longer viable.
Our time has come to move on. The civilization of our future is an Ecological Civilization that rests on a foundation of cooperation, partnership, and sharing for the common good of all members of Earth’s community of life to which we belong. The imperative to navigate a nearly instantaneous transition from an Imperial Civilization to an Ecological Civilization presents, by order of magnitude, the most daunting challenge our species has ever faced. The outcome depends on whether we embrace this challenge as opportunity or continue to cling to outdated ideas and institutions that no longer serve.
Social and Environmental System Failure
A global economy based on failed and badly outdated economic theories and institutions is driving human society toward social and environmental collapse. The failure of this system is summed up in two devastating indicators of environmental and social imbalance.
Environmental Imbalance: We humans currently consume at a rate 1.6 times what our living Earth mother can sustain. The more we grow this already unsustainable human burden on living Earth’s community life, the faster we degrade Earth’s ability to sustain life—including human. Climate disruption is one of the most visible consequences. Other consequences include toxic contamination of the air we breathe and the water we drink, the erosion of soil fertility, and destruction of the pollinators on which the plants that feed us depend.
Social Imbalance: Globally, 62 people own as much economic wealth as the poorest half of humanity—3.7 billion people who struggle to survive on US $2.50 or less per day. This extreme social imbalance is tearing apart the social fabric of society and undermining the credibility of both national and global governing institutions. In the United State that imbalance has destroyed the credibility of the establishment wings of both our major political parties. As income and wealth inequality continue to grow in nearly all countries, this loss of credibility spreads as well.
These extreme, growing, and potentially fatal system imbalances are a direct consequence of our human embrace of economic theories and institutions that prioritize growing Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and financial asset bubbles over securing the health and well-being of living people and living Earth.
Globally, real economic output reached the limit in the early 1970s of what Earth can sustain. Continued GDP growth since then has been depleting Earth’s natural living capital—the foundational capital on which life itself depends—and growing the phantom financial capital of the few at the top to increase their control of what remains of Earth’s real wealth.
Natural living capital is real wealth. Financial capital is nothing more than numbers of no intrinsic value stored on computer hard drives. I call it phantom wealth.
Natural living capital—not financial capital—defines the true limit of sustainable economic output. We passed that limit nearly half a century ago. Beyond that point, continued GDP growth has come at the expense of real living capital and served mainly to concentrate control of what remains of Earth’s real wealth in the hands of a tiny, ever richer, ever smaller, global oligarchy. These imbalances are further exacerbated by continued growth in the human population.
Gross domestic Product (GDP) is a financial indicator that measures the expansion of the financial economy. This expansion tracks closely with the growth and concentration of corporate power. GDP has little, if any, validity as an indicator of human well-being. If our goal is to secure and improve the health and well-being of people and living Earth, GDP is best thought of not as a measure of benefit, but rather as a measure of the economic cost of producing whatever real benefit is achieved.
Measuring actual benefit requires a dashboard of indicators of living system health. Are children healthy and happy? Are families strong? Do people feel their lives are meaningful? Are the air and water pure? Are soils stable and fertile? Are forests and fisheries thriving?
A living Earth economy for an Ecological Civilization properly seeks to grow real well-being as measured by living indicators while reducing the economic costs—shrinking GDP.
I call our current global economy a Suicide Economy, because it is systematically destroying the foundations of its own and human existence. Known also as capitalism, it is dedicated to what Pope Francis calls the idolatry, or worship, of money.
The suicide economy didn’t happen by accident or force of nature. It is the result of a decades long campaign by the corporate interests that now dictate the economic priorities and policies of most of the world’s governments.
Imperial Corporate Power Grab
My insights into the nature and origin of the suicide economy—and how we can put it behind us—are informed by the experiences of my 50-year professional career. For the first 30 years, I worked in international development in the nations of Africa, Latin America, and Asia that were recovering from the oppression of the classical imperial colonization that extended from the 15th century to the mid-20th century. I was on a personal mission to end global poverty by sharing with the newly decolonized nations the lessons of the economic success of the United States.
Eventually, I realized that the celebrated liberation from colonialism was temporary, partial, and illusionary. The international foreign aid establishment was in fact imposing a new colonialism under the rule of transnational corporations.
There is nothing new about corporations as instruments of empire and colonial rule. China experienced it in the 18th and 19th centuries with the Opium Wars when the British East India Company sought to profit by addicting China to opium.
The mid-20th century Third World experience with the West’s international development assistance presents an interesting parallel. In the 1950s and 60s, most people still lived in villages and met most all their needs by growing and harvesting their food and other essentials directly from the land. An explicit objective of international development assistance programs funded by the World Bank and many national foreign assistance programs was to get people off the land and into paid employment where their labor would contribute to GDP.
In many instances, corporations took over the lands from which the people were driven. And the displaced farmers became dependent on money they could get only by working for corporations. In an interesting parallel to the Opium Wars, people became dependent on (addicted to) money.
National economies in turn became dependent on or addicted to imports, contractors, and technologies from foreign countries paid for with foreign debt repayable in foreign currency that borrowing nations could get only by selling their labor and assets to foreign corporations. This was subtler than opium as a means of control—and therefore more effective.
When it became evident that the borrowing countries could repay only with dire consequences for their own people, the World Bank and IMF stepped in as international debt collectors with a corporatist policy agenda. They forced indebted countries to:
Slash public expenditures for health and education to fund tax breaks and subsidies to foreign investors,
Eliminate restrictions on foreign ownership, imports, banks and financial institutions, cross-border financial flows, and the extraction and export of natural resources;
Put public assets and services—including natural resources and communications, power, and water services—up for sale to foreign corporations; and
Roll back protections for unions, workers, consumers, public health and safety, and the environment.
The foreign aid recipient countries thus lost control of their economies to transnational corporations that raped the land and paid workers a pittance for their labor.
Going Global
In the 1990s, the corporatists that had engineered this recolonization process extended their takeover agenda to high income countries through international agreements like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and international organizations like the World Trade Organization (WTO). Step by step the corporatists reduced the ability of national governments to protect and advance the well-being of their own people and made the profits of transnational corporations their implicit economic priority. These efforts were supported in the United States by the establishment wings of both the Democratic and Republican parties.
As the takeover of the United States by transnational corporations progressed, corporate profits soared, while working people became mired in unpayable mortgage, credit card, and student debt they have no means to repay. It became harder to find a meaningful and secure job at a living wage. Young people gave up expecting their lives would be better than their parents. Environmentally, we experienced increasingly violent weather events, contamination of water sources, and other environmental failures.
We the People of the United States never voted to yield our national sovereignty to transnational corporations. The world’s wealthiest financiers and corporations used their wealth to buy our politicians, consolidate their control of our media, and assure the public that trade agreements, corporate mergers, and the privatization of public services will increase efficiency and bring peace and prosperity to all.
The public backlash against the proposed Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the TransAtlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) played an important role in the election of Donald Trump to the US presidency. Both proposed agreements are now presumed dead. Blocking these agreements could be a first step toward rewriting the rules of international commerce to support global cooperation among nations in strengthening national self-reliance and ownership consistent with the needs and values of an Ecological Civilization.
From Mutual Destruction to Mutual Benefit
The extreme dysfunction of the economic system the world must now move beyond is starkly demonstrated by how the China-US relationship unfolded as China embraced capitalism and the Western neoliberal economic model. The Chinese government took food from Chinese farmers in the countryside to feed low-paid factory workers in the cities. US capitalists jumped on the opportunity to have their goods produced by low paid Chinese labor, and moved production from the United States to China to produce goods for export back to the United States and other wealthy countries. This grew corporate profits as it eliminated once secure, well-paid US jobs and drove growing inequality in both China—by raising the top—and in the United States—by lowering the bottom and wiping out much of the US middle class.
As China imported US jobs, it also imported the pollution that went with them. US air quality improved as the air in China’s cities became life-threatening. To meet the resource demands of the products it exported, China colonized the resources of other countries—following in the footsteps of imperialist colonizers through the ages—including the United States—spreading increased global environmental burdens, inequality, and social instability throughout the world.
In the United States, we paid China for our imports with debt that we repaid in part by selling off our assets to wealthy Chinese. This in turn contributes to the skyrocketing price of housing in major US cities and fuels a global financial asset bubble that could collapse at any moment and bring down the entire global economy. The primary beneficiaries in both China and the United States have been the financial elites who reap the corporate profits generated at each step along the way.
Our two countries have a mutual interest in redefining this relationship. In the United States, we need to put our people to work meeting our needs with our own resources. China needs to do the same for its people so that its workers reap the rewards of their own labor. It makes no sense for Chinese people to work for a pittance generating life-threatening pollution and resource extraction to promote wasteful Western consumerism by producing goods for export that Chinese workers cannot themselves buy. If China and the United States could unwind this mutually destructive relationship and replace it with a relationship that works for people and the rest of nature in both countries, the resulting model could be a gift and inspiration for all the world.
For the Love of Money
We humans must choose between the love of life and the love of money. A choice for life would lead us to organize our national economies to maximize the health and well-being of people and natural living systems. We have instead chosen the love of money and organized national economies to maximize the profits of transnational corporations. The inevitable consequence is the destruction of life, the concentration of wealth, and widespread human suffering.
Much of what GDP counts as economic growth is simply the monetization of relationships and the related growth in corporate control of the means of living on which working people depend. On one side, these corporations control access to the essentials of living: from food and water to shelter, communications, education, and health care. Corporations then grant access to these essentials only to those who pay with money they can only get from corporations that control access to paid employment, loans, and investments. All except the very rich are reduced to lives of involuntary servitude.
This system works especially well for those corporations that control the creation and allocation of money, which is nothing but a number that banking systems can create in unlimited quantities with nothing more than computer key strokes. This control gives the institutions of the financial system potentially total control of the society. If democracy is to have meaning, financial institutions must be wholly transparent, localized, and accountable to governments that are in turn accountable to their citizens.
As wages are depressed relative to rising living costs, pressures mount for all able-bodied adult members of a family to increase their hours of paid employment to make ends meet. This means that more of everyone’s time is devoted to paid relationships that grow GDP and less to family and community relationships that grow bonds of mutual caring. Instead of growing and cooking for our family, we buy food from corporate supermarkets chains and meals from corporate restaurant chains. Instead of caring for our own children and aging grandparents, we hire out their care to corporations.
GDP and corporate profits grow. Money becomes our ticket to means of living. Our love of life becomes a love of money and our life energy is consumed by a systemic demand to direct our life energy to making money for people we will never meet and who value us only as cheap labor and gullible consumers. Life itself loses meaning except for those precious and all too rare fleeting moments when we still experience authentic relationships.
Most of the corporations that now dominate daily life have shed any sense of national identity or obligation. They operate by rules of their own making and accept no responsibility for consequences for people and the rest of nature.
In the United States, as in many other countries, corporations buy politicians, avoid taxes, and take over the institutions of media and education to suppress independent voices. They pose an ever-growing threat to democracy, life and the future of humanity.
As a global species, we humans now have ample evidence that an economic system that prioritizes growing profits of transnational corporations does not work for people and Earth.
Managing the Household
The Neoliberal/Free market economics that currently guides global economic policy is an intellectually and morally flawed ideology posing as a science. Grounded in the logic of finance, it: 1) equates money with wealth, 2) values life only for its market price, and 3) assumes we each best serve society when we maximize personal financial return without regard for others. These three fundamental conceptual errors defy logic and moral sensibility. In practice, they lead humanity to celebrate the destruction of life to grow GDP as an act of wealth creation and the globalization of unaccountable corporate power as the advance of freedom and democracy.
Over the past nearly fifty years, the world has put the neoliberal ideology to the test. It failed and its credibility is fast fading.
We need a new economy—a living Earth economy—guided by a new economics grounded in a recognition of our essential nature as living beings born of and nurtured by a living Earth. These are basic truths affirmed by indigenous knowledge, Eastern philosophy, the mystical traditions of all major religions, the leading edge of modern science, and common sense.
We humans know how to make money; we must now learn how to live.
An authentic economics for an Ecological Civilization will be grounded in the scientific study of living systems and life’s ability to create and maintain the conditions essential to its own existence. This economics will revive the quest of the much revered and generally misrepresented classical economists, including Adam Smith and David Ricardo.
The word ‘economics’ derives from the Greek ‘Oikonomia,’ which means ‘household management.’ In an earlier time, households were the primary units of production. We must now enlarge our vision to recognize Earth is our mother and her household as a meta-household to which we humans belong. We must learn to manage our relationship to her household with love and caring.
Neoliberal economists made placeless profit seeking transnational corporations the primary unit of economic organization. People, households, community, and Earth all disappeared.
In an Earth household frame, territorially defined nation states are the primary units of organization and national governments have an essential role giving voice to the interests of people and nature, setting priorities and market rules consistent with those interests.
A Living Earth (Green) Economy
We must rethink and recreate the global economy based on a recognition that we humans are living beings born of and nurtured by a living Earth. Life exists only in community. Real wealth is living wealth and money is just a number. Earth is a living organism—a community of life—our Earth mother’s living household.
The living Earth economy to which we must now transition must fulfill three essential conditions:
Maintain a healthy balance and harmony between humans and the generative systems by which living Earth continuously renews herself. Over billions of years, Earth has learned how to continuously renew her fresh air and water, fertile soils, forests, grasslands, and fisheries—constantly adjusting to maintain the chemical composition of her atmosphere and oceans and the stability of her climate and surface temperatures to meet the needs of ever more complex organisms. We must learn to meet our human needs in ways that simultaneously allow Earth to restore the full and sustained function of these essential systems.
Secure for all people the essentials of human health and happiness. No human created the generative systems of Earth’s biosphere and no human has the right to monopolize them. They must be equitably shared to the benefit of all. A healthy living Earth economy must assure every person access to a means of living a full and meaningful life consistent with their distinctive needs and abilities.
Support a planetary system of self-organizing local bioregional community economies that meet conditions 1 and 2. Life organizes locally. This is the key to the ability of living communities to quickly adapt to diverse and changing local conditions. Life’s extraordinary capacity for cooperative self-organization is exemplified by the human body—a community of living cells that self-organize as if every individual cell recognizes and accepts its responsibility to maintain its own health and vitality and to make its own distinctive contribution to maintaining the health and vitality of the whole.
The implications are daunting. We must reduce the global human consumption footprint from 1.6 times what Earth can sustain to 1.0 or less. That requires a reduction in total consumption and a reversal of GDP growth—exactly the opposite of what the existing money-centered, corporate-driven global suicide economy strives to do. We must also reallocate current consumption to secure for each of Earth’s 7.5 billion people the essential needs of a healthy and joyful life—exactly the opposite of the legal mandate of the current suicide economy’s current dominant institutions.
To create and maintain essential system balance, our human decision making must mimic the localized decision processes of nonhuman living systems. These involve extremely complex interactive processes that the leading edge of science is barely beginning to understand. We do know, however, that localized decision making is a key to the ability of living communities to quickly adapt to diverse and continuously changing local conditions. This lessons of life’s success must guide our human path to an Ecological Civilization.
New Rules
The rules of an Ecological Civilization are necessarily grounded in a recognition that without nature, there are no people, and without people, there are no corporations. This foundational truth has yet to receive more than passing recognition in the laws of any nation. Western law generally gives corporations more rights than people, and gives nature virtually no rights at all.
The laws of local, national, and global government must be rewritten to bring them into line with our fundamental human reality. Our laws tend to be organized around rights and responsibilities. Laws relating to humans and nature can be expressed according.
In an Ecological Civilization, nature will have rights. People—as self-aware, choice making beings— will have both rights and responsibilities. Corporations, which are purely creations of governments that themselves exist only to serve a public purpose, will have responsibilities for serving the common good. Each corporation must be accountable to the government that created it for serving a public purpose clearly stated in its charter.
The societal goals of an Ecological Civilization can be fulfilled only by a system in which corporations are accountable to democratically accountable governments. These goals are wholly incompatible with a system of global governance by transnational corporations accountable only to global financial markets for maximizing financial returns to the financial assets of absentee owners.
The system of global corporate governance must be dismantled as each nation moves to revise its own laws to secure the health and integrity of the natural systems within its territorial borders and assure the equitable allocation of the generative product of those systems to secure the health and happiness of all its citizens.
The Transition
The transition from a global suicide economy grounded in a failed neoliberal ideology to a living Earth economy grounded in ecological reality requires an ambitious cultural and institutional system transformation to:
Shift the defining purpose of the economy from growing consumption and financial assets to securing the health and happiness of all people for generations to come;
Shift institutional power from global corporations to the people of self-governing, self-reliant nations that self-organize to meet their needs within the limits of their own self-renewing resource base;
Shift production-consumption systems from global, linear, one time use-and-dispose resource flows to local circular resource flows that continuously renew and reuse materials, soils, water, nutrients, and energy; and
Shift the ownership of productive assets from global corporations and financiers to people who live in the communities in which the assets are located and who feel a responsibility for the wellbeing of future generations.
This transition depends on people of all nations mobilizing to demand that their national governments declare their independence from corporate rule. Once liberated, national governments can work together to dismantle the remaining institutions of global empire and replace them with institutions that support a global system of cooperating, self-governing, self-reliant bioregional communities.
National Self-governance, Self-reliance, and Global Cooperation
Let the wise words of John Maynard Keynes be our common guide:
Ideas, knowledge, art, hospitality, travel—these are things which should in their nature be international. But let goods be homespun whenever it is reasonably and conveniently possible, and above all let finance be primarily national.
We need international exchange to advance mutual understanding, cooperation, and learning that speeds the transition to a global Ecological Civilization. And we need to freely share ideas, knowledge, art, and culture to enrich the lives of all. But the free international movement of physical resources, goods, and money is a different matter.
The people of sovereign nations best secure their well-being by maximizing their national self-reliance in meeting their own essential needs in perpetuity through the responsible management of their own resources. This potentially eliminates foreign debt, the use of military force to expropriate the resources of other nations, and dependence on stateless corporations to manage material and financial dependence and resource flows between nations.
National self-reliance increases overall system resilience. It reduces needless long distance transport of physical resources and manufactured goods and the related carbon burden on Earth’s atmosphere. And it increases the incentives for each nation to manage its own resources sustainably. The result would likely be a blow to corporate profits. It would be a boon to people and nature.
Global Governance
We humans are now a truly interdependent global species. We must learn to manage that interdependence in ways that maintain essential system resilience while meeting the needs of all in harmonious balance and partnership with the whole of Earth’s community of life. Life organizes locally. To properly align the global economy with Earth’s living systems, the living Earth economy must similarly organize as a system of cooperating local economies.
Global humanity currently has two competing systems of global governance: The UN system and the Bretton Woods system. The UN system was created to facilitate cooperation and the peaceful resolution of conflict among nations for the good of the whole of humanity. Its institutions are essential instruments of global governance. Unfortunately, they are generally weak and ineffectual.
The Bretton Woods institutions—the World Trade Organization, International Monetary Fund, and World Bank—have relentlessly championed economic growth as the primary measure of economic performance and advanced an agenda of rule by transnational corporations. They have led the creation of a world in which national governments compete in a race to the bottom for the favor of global corporations.
These two competing governance systems correspond to the essential choice I outlined earlier to organize the global economy either to maximize the well-being of living people and communities or to maximize the profits of transnational corporations.
A system of global governance devoted to the well-being of living people and communities will facilitate the sharing of information, knowledge, technology, and culture among countries. And it will minimize the dependence of individual countries on international trade and investment—especially trade and investment controlled by transnational corporations.
I see three top priorities for a system of global governance for an Ecological Civilization.
Dismantle the Bretton Woods institutions and revitalize, strengthen, and extend the UN system to support the sharing of information, knowledge, technology, and culture within and between national communities while minimizing dependence on international trade and investment.
Break up global, transnational and multinational corporations and restructure the pieces as national corporations accountable to the government and people of the national community that issued their respective charters. To secure the common interest, corporations must be subordinate and accountable to the governments that created them and each government must be accountable to the sovereign people whose interests it was created to secure.
Dismantle the global military establishment, rollback the production and international sale of arms, and advance the peaceful resolution of conflict between nations. The production and use of military weapons creates enormous social and environmental burdens while serving no beneficial purpose not better addressed in other ways.
Unwinding the excesses and structures of the suicide economy while navigating a transition to an Ecological Civilization—and doing it within the time that remains to us between now and environmental system collapse—presents the greatest challenge the human species has ever faced. It will require bold and intelligent leadership from all levels of society.
________________________________
David Korten is an American author, lecturer, engaged citizen, and a student of psychology and living systems. He is president of the Living Economies Forum, co-founder and board chair of YES! Magazine, an associate fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies, a member of the Club of Rome, and an advisory board member of the Institute for Postmodern Development of China.
David has earned MBA and Ph.D. degrees from the Stanford Business School. In his earlier career, he served as a captain in the US Air Force, a Harvard Business School professor, a Ford Foundation project specialist, and Asia regional adviser on development management to the US Agency for International Development.
His books include two international best sellers: When Corporations Rule the World (now out in an updated, 20th anniversary edition) and The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community. He is also the author of Change the Story, Change the Future: A Living Economy for a Living Earth; Agenda for a New Economy: From Phantom Wealth to Real Wealth;and The Post-Corporate World: Life After Capitalism.
Thirty years working and living in Africa, Asia, and Latin America as an international development professional opened his eyes to the devastation of what he now calls the global suicide economy. His current work centers on defining a system frame for and path to a new economy in which life is the defining value and power resides with living people organized as living communities.
An earlier version of this paper was prepared for and presented to the 2016 Donghu Forum on Global Governance: Symposium on Green Development and Global Governance, Hauzhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China.
December 20th, 2016|Categories: Ecological Civilization, International, Living Earth
Extinction Rebellion - Wikipedia
Extinction Rebellion
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Extinction Rebellion
Named after Anthropocene extinction
Motto Rebel for life
Formation 31 October 2018; 9 months ago
Type Civil society campaign
Purpose Climate change mitigation
Nature conservation
Environmental protection
Region International
Methods Nonviolent direct action
Fields Conservation movement
Environmental movement
Affiliations Rising Up![1]
The Climate Mobilization[2]
Website rebellion.earth
Extinction Rebellion (abbreviated as XR) is a socio-political movement with the stated aim of using civil disobedience and nonviolent resistance to protest against climate breakdown, biodiversity loss, and the risk of social and ecological collapse.[1][3]
Extinction Rebellion was established in the United Kingdom in May 2018 with about one hundred academics signing a call to action in support in October 2018,[4] and launched at the end of October by Roger Hallam, Gail Bradbrook, Simon Bramwell, and other activists from the campaign group Rising Up!.[5] In November 2018, 5 bridges across the Thames River in London were blockaded.[6] In April 2019 Extinction Rebellion occupied 5 prominent sites in central London: Piccadilly Circus, Oxford Circus, Marble Arch, Waterloo Bridge and the area around Parliament Square.
Citing inspiration from grassroots movements such as Occupy, Gandhi's Satyagraha, the suffragettes, Gene Sharp,[7] Martin Luther King and others in the civil rights movement, Extinction Rebellion wants to rally support worldwide around a common sense of urgency to tackle climate breakdown.[8][6] A number of activists in the movement accept arrest and imprisonment,[9] similar to the mass arrest tactics of the Committee of 100 in 1961.
The movement uses a circled hourglass, known as the Extinction Symbol, to serve as a warning that time is rapidly running out for many species.[10][11]
Contents
1Manifesto
1.1Demands
1.2Stated principles
2Beginnings
3UK actions
3.12018
3.1.1'Declaration of Rebellion'
3.1.2'Rebellion Day'
3.1.3'Rebellion Day 2'
3.22019
3.2.1January council actions
3.2.2February – London Fashion Week
3.2.3March
3.2.4House of Commons naked demonstration
3.2.5Mid-April occupations
3.2.6"Summer uprising"
3.3Legal consequences
4Actions elsewhere
5Support
6Criticism
7Bibliography
8See also
9Notes
10References
11External links
Manifesto[edit]
Extinction Rebellion placard. Its logotype with the "extinction symbol".
Demands[edit]
Extinction Rebellion's website states the following aims:[12][13]
Government must tell the truth by declaring a climate and ecological emergency, working with other institutions to communicate the urgency for change.
Government must act now to halt biodiversity loss and reduce greenhouse gas emissions to net-zero by 2025.
Government must create, and be led by the decisions of, a citizens' assembly on climate and ecological justice.
Stated principles[edit]
XR states the following on its website and explains the following in its declaration:[14][3]
"We have a shared vision of change—creating a world that is fit for generations to come.
We set our mission on what is necessary—mobilising 3.5% of the population to achieve system change by using ideas such as "momentum-driven organising" to achieve this.
We need a regenerative culture—creating a culture that is healthy, resilient, and adaptable.
We openly challenge ourselves and this toxic system, leaving our comfort zones to take action for change.
We value reflecting and learning, following a cycle of action, reflection, learning, and planning for more action (learning from other movements and contexts as well as our own experiences).
We welcome everyone and every part of everyone—working actively to create safer and more accessible spaces.
We actively mitigate for power—breaking down hierarchies of power for more equitable participation.
We avoid blaming and shaming—we live in a toxic system, but no one individual is to blame.
We are a non-violent network using non-violent strategy and tactics as the most effective way to bring about change.
We are based on autonomy and decentralisation—we collectively create the structures we need to challenge power. Anyone who follows these core principles and values can take action in the name of RisingUp!"[15]
Beginnings[edit]
Extinction Rebellion was established in the United Kingdom in May 2018 with about one hundred academics signing a call to action in support in October 2018,[4] and launched at the end of October by Roger Hallam, Gail Bradbrook, Simon Bramwell, and other activists from the campaign group Rising Up![5]
Citing inspiration from grassroots movements such as Occupy, Gandhi's Satyagraha, the suffragettes, Gene Sharp,[7] Martin Luther King and others in the civil rights movement, Extinction Rebellion wants to rally support worldwide around a common sense of urgency to tackle climate breakdown.[8] A number of activists in the movement accept arrest and imprisonment,[9] similar to the mass arrest tactics of the Committee of 100 in 1961.
On 9 December 2018, a second open letter of support signed by another hundred academics was published.[16]
UK actions[edit]
In addition to major events, a great many forthcoming smaller and local events are listed on the Extinction Rebellion Web site.[17]
2018[edit]
“ Organisers say they hope the campaign of 'respectful disruption' will change the debate around climate breakdown and signal to those in power that the present course of action will lead to disaster. ”
— Damien Gayle, The Guardian[6][18]
On 17 October 2018, activists from Extinction Rebellion held a sit-in at the UK headquarters of Greenpeace, the direct action environmental organisation, "to encourage their members to participate in mass civil disobedience as the only remaining alternative to avert the worst of the catastrophe" and join in future activities of Extinction Rebellion.[1][19]
'Declaration of Rebellion'[edit]
An assembly took place at Parliament Square, London on 31 October 2018, and drew more than a thousand people to hear the "Declaration of Rebellion"[20] against the UK government and speeches by Donnachadh McCarthy, 15-year-old Greta Thunberg, the Swedish schoolgirl "on strike" from school over her own government's climate inaction,[21] Julia Bradbury, and Green MEP Molly Scott Cato in the square.[20] After a motion was proposed and agreed, the assembly moved to occupy the road, where Green MP Caroline Lucas, environmentalist George Monbiot, and other speakers and singers, including Seize the Day, continued from the reclaimed street directly in front of the Houses of Parliament.[20][a] Following this, 15 campaigners were arrested for deliberately continuing the sit-in in the roadway.[20]
In the first two weeks of the movement in November 2018, more than 60 people were arrested for taking part in acts of civil disobedience organised by Extinction Rebellion.[6]On 12 November 2018, activists blockaded the UK's Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy and some glued their hands to the department's doors.[22] Activists unveiled a "Climate Change... We're Fucked" banner over Westminster Bridge[23] and glued themselves to the gates of Downing Street, near the Prime Minister's official residence, on 14 November.[24][25] In the evening of 15 November a large group closed the access road to Trafalgar Square outside the Brazilian Embassy in an joint action with Brazilian Women against Fascism UK.[26]
'Rebellion Day'[edit]
"Rebellion Day" on Blackfriars Bridge, 17 November 2018
On 17 November 2018, in what was called "Rebellion Day", about 6,000 people took part in a coordinated action to block the five main bridges over the River Thames in London (Southwark, Blackfriars, Waterloo, Westminster, and Lambeth) for several hours, causing major traffic disruption; 70 arrests were made.[6][27][28][29][30] The Guardian described it as "one of the biggest acts of peaceful civil disobedience in the UK in decades".[6][18] YBA artist Gavin Turk was one of the activists arrested for obstructing the public highway.[31][32] Internationally there was an action by the XR group in Stockholm,[33] as well as rallies in Dublin, Cork, Galway, Belfast. Copenhagen, Berlin, Madrid and New York City.[34]
Extinction Rebellion protesters in Tower Hill, 23 November 2018
From 21 November 2018, beginning a campaign known as 'swarming' roadblocks (repeated roadblocks of approximately 7 minutes each), small groups of Extinction Rebellion activists carried out protests by occupying road junctions at Lambeth and Vauxhall Bridges, Elephant and Castle, Tower Bridge and Earl's Court, causing serious disruption to rush-hour traffic and continuing throughout the day.[18][35][36][37][38][39]Similar actions continued for the next two days in London,[40] with one group moving to Oxford Street on the afternoon of the discount shopping day Black Friday.[41]
On 23 November, in a first action outside London, an Extinction Rebellion group in Yorkstopped traffic on Coppergate, Clifford Street, Pavement and Ouse Bridge, as well as holding a demo outside West Offices of the City of York Council.[42][43] An Oxford XR group blocked traffic on Botley Road on the same day.[44]
'Rebellion Day 2'[edit]
On "Rebellion Day 2", a week after the first, Extinction Rebellion blocked the roads around Parliament Square, before a mock funeral march to Downing Street and then onto Buckingham Palace.[45] XR co-founder Gail Bradbrook read out a letter to the Queen, and one activist glued herself to the gates of the Palace, before the procession returned to Parliament Square.[46] On 24 November there were actions outside London by XR groups in Manchester,[47] Sheffield,[48] Machynlleth[49] and Edinburgh.[50]
On 15 December 2018, a professor of psychology was arrested for a "climate change graffiti attack" on the Bristol Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) building,[51][52][53] and a "die-in" was held at a local shopping center.[54]
On 21 December 2018, actions were staged at BBC locations across the UK by Extinction Rebellion calling for a change in editorial policy, perceiving a "failure to report" on the "climate emergency." BBC headquarters in London was placed on lockdown.[55][56][57]
2019[edit]
January council actions[edit]
On 25 January 2019, about 40 members of Extinction Rebellion staged a peaceful one-hour occupation of the Scottish Parliament's debating chamber in Holyrood, Edinburgh.[58]Council chambers were also occupied by XR groups in Norwich on 11 February,[59] and Gloucestershire, on 13 February, which included a mock trial of the council's "criminal negligence".[60] A week later neighbouring Somerset County Council declared a climate emergency, citing school strikers and XR as having some input into the decision.[61] In late February, following an XR petition, Reading Borough Council also declared a climate emergency,[62] aiming to cut carbon emissions by 2030, a week after discussions with the XR Reading (XRR) group[63] and a day after the warmest winter day on record in the UK.[64]
February – London Fashion Week[edit]
An Extinction Rebellion march during the London Fashion Week in London, 22 February 2019
During London Fashion Week in February, Extinction Rebellion organised actions to disrupt events, calling on the British Fashion Councilorganisers to declare a 'climate emergency' and for the industry to take a leading role in tackling climate change.[65] 'Swarming' roadblocks were held outside several venues; a couple of rebels wore living grass coats.[66] Later in the week, designer and XR co-founder Clare Farrell, was barred from a fashion show by a label in which she had been involved with production.[67]
March[edit]
Gerald Vernon-Jackson, leader of the Portsmouth City Council, joining in an Extinction Rebellion protest in Portsmouth, 19 March 2019
On 9 March 2019, around 400 protesters staged a "Blood of Our Children" demonstration outside No. 10 Downing Street, in which they poured buckets of fake blood on the road to represent the threatened lives of children.[68] As Portsmouth City Council passed a climate emergency motion, the 49th in the UK, protestors confronted leader Gerald Vernon-Jackson outside Portsmouth Guildhall.[69]
House of Commons naked demonstration[edit]
On 1 April 2019, around 12 protesters were arrested after undressing and gluing themselves to the glass in the House of Commons viewing gallery during a debate on Britain's intended departure from the European Union, with two of the protesters wearing grey body paint and elephant masks to draw attention to "the elephant in the room".[70] XR activists attributed inspiration for the direct action to a suffragette protest in Parliament in 1909, when (non-nude) protesters chained themselves to statues.[71]
Mid-April occupations[edit]
The pink boat with a slogan "tell the truth", named after Berta Caceres, was located in Oxford Circus on 18 April
Starting from Monday 15 April 2019, Extinction Rebellion organised demonstrations in London, focusing their attention on Oxford Circus, Marble Arch, Waterloo Bridge and the area around Parliament Square.[72] Activists fixed a pink boat named after murdered Honduran environmental activist Berta Cáceres in the middle of the busy intersection of Oxford Street and Regent Street(Oxford Circus) and glued themselves to it,[73][74]and also set up several gazebos, potted plants and trees, a mobile stage and a skate ramp whilst occupying Waterloo Bridge.[75][76] Five activists, including XR co-founder Simon Bramwell, were arrested for criminal damage when they targeted Shell's headquarters, near Waterloo.[75] After the police imposed a 24-hour Section 14 condition at 18:55 requiring activists to move to Marble Arch[77] the police tried to clear Waterloo Bridge arresting 113 people, without gaining control of the bridge.[78][79]
On the second day of actions on Waterloo Bridge police began making arrests of the activists at 12.40 pm,[80] but stopped a few hours later,[81] after running out of holding cells.[82] By the end of Tuesday 16 April an estimated 500,000 people had been affected by the disruptions and 290 activists had been arrested in London.[83] In Scotland, more than 1,000 protesters occupied the North Bridge for seven hours in Edinburgh, bringing one of the main routes into the city centre to a standstill. Police said they made 29 arrests.[84][85]
On the morning of Wednesday 17 April two activists climbed onto the roof of a Docklands Light Railway train at Canary Wharf station whilst another glued himself to the side, spreading disruption to railway services.[86] The following day the three activists were charged with obstructing trains and after pleading not guilty sent to jail for four weeks, with no bail, whilst awaiting their next hearing.[87] In response to the protests, the British Transport Police suspended access to public Wi-Fi at London Underground stations the same day.[88][89][90] Towards the end of Wednesday a large force of police marched on the camp at Parliament Square, arresting people and partially removing roadblocks[91] before it was retaken later the same night by protesters who arrived with a samba band and re-established the roadblocks.[92]
Video of an interview with the Extinction Rebellion protesters in London, 19 April 2019
At the start of Thursday 18 April, the fourth day of continuous occupations at four locations, the arrest figure had risen to 428, the majority for breaching public order laws and obstructing a highway.[93][73] During the morning of 18 April about 20 XR activists spread traffic disruption wider with a series of swarming (short duration) roadblocks on Vauxhall Bridge.[94]
A mural appeared at Marble Archafter the closing ceremony on 25 April and this was attributed to the artist Banksy.[95][96] The slogan "From this moment despair ends and tactics begin" is a quotation from The Revolution of Everyday Life.[97]
On the morning of 19 April, after significant media speculation about a threat to Heathrow Airport,[98][99][100]around a dozen teenagers, some aged 13 and 14, approached the access road holding a banner which read “Are we the last generation?” Some of the teenagers wept and hugged each other, as they were surrounded by a far larger squad of police.[101][102][74] In the middle of the day police moved in force to surround the pink boat as Emma Thompson read poetry from the deck, eventually removing the people who were either locked-on or glued to it. After seven hours police had moved the boat without clearing Oxford Circus.[73][103] By late evening police were saying that 682 people had been arrested in London.[74]
On 25 April thirteen protesters blocked the London Stock Exchange, and held the LED sign outside the stock. Despite this, the operation of the market was not affected. Another 4 protesters climbed on to a Docklands Light Railway train at Canary Wharf, and held the banners, which resulted in a short delay between Bank and Monument station and Stratford/Lewisham station. 26 people were arrested.[104] In the afternoon, the activists gathered at the Hyde Park as the "closing ceremony" of the movement, which ended the 11-day demonstrations in London. A total of 1,130 people were arrested during the demonstrations.[105] As of June 2019, one protester, Angie Zelter, has been convicted of a public order offence for taking part in the occupations.[106]
Near Marble Arch, 15 April
Waterloo Bridge, 17 April
Near Parliament Square, 19 April
Hyde Park, London, 21 April
"Summer uprising"[edit]
Bristol Extinction Rebellion, blocking Bristol Bridge on 16 July 2019
On 13 and 14 July a weekend of protest was held in East London, with a series of seven-minute Dalston traffic blockades, a mass bike ride through the A10, Olympic park traffic blocks, a people’s assembly outside Hackney town hall, and all-day talks and panels in London Fields.[107]This was the predecessor to a "summer uprising" from 08:00 on 15 July to 11:00 on 20 July, in Bristol, Leeds, Cardiff, Glasgow and London. Protests in the different cities focused on different threats: rising sea levels, floods, wildfires, crop failures and extreme weather, with five different coloured boats marked "Act Now" and other messages in each location.[108]There was significant disruption to traffic in protest locations.[109]
Legal consequences[edit]
In June and July 2019 some of the Extinction Rebellion supporters arrested that April appeared in court. On 25 June a 68-year-old protester was convicted of breaching a section 14 order giving police the power to clear static protests from a specified area, and given a conditional discharge.[110] On 12 April over 30 protesters appeared in court, each charged with being a public assembly participant failing to comply with a condition imposed by a senior police officer at various locations on various dates. Some pleaded guilty, and were mostly given conditional discharges. The trials of those who pleaded not guilty are to take place in September and October.[111]
Actions elsewhere[edit]
"Declaration Day" at the Victorian State Government, 22 March 2019
Extinction Rebellion Australia held a 'Declaration Day' on 22 March 2019 in Melbourne, Adelaide, Sydney, and Brisbane. Demonstrators assembled and protested to demand that governments and media declare a state of climate emergency. On the eve of international Rebellion Day, 15 April, an XR group occupied the Parliament's Lower House.[112]
Extinction Rebellion events were planned for the week starting 15 April 2019, in 27 other[clarification needed] countries including Ireland, Australia, Canada, France, Sweden, Germany, Colombia, New Zealand[6][113][114] and in New York City for a national day of action for the United States.[115]
On 15 April, XR activists occupied part of the International Criminal Court in The Hague, forming human chains before being arrested.[116] Similar actions were organised by XR groups in Berlin, Heidelberg, Brussels, Lausanne, Madrid,[117] Denver and Melbourne.[118]In New York City, on 17 April, an XR group of 300 gathered outside City Hall to demand that the City Council declare a climate emergency with over 60 arrested after occupying the street and hanging banners from lamposts.[119][120] On 19 April XR activists disrupted a railway line in Brisbane, Australia.[121]
Support[edit]
During the 'International Rebellion' which started on 15 April 2019, actions and messages of support arrived from various sources, including a speech by actress Emma Thompson, a planned visit by school strike leader Greta Thunberg, and statements from former Nasa scientist James Hansen and linguist and activist Noam Chomsky.[73]
A study conducted during the first two days of the mid-April London occupation found that 46% of respondents supported the rebellion,[122] however a larger opinion poll later found that support had declined and that 52% of respondents now opposed actions aiming to "shut down London"[123] as the protests on 17 April blocked access to means of transport including buses, alienating travellers.[124][125]
In May 2019, Roger Hallam and eight others stood as candidates in the European Parliament elections in the London and the South West England constituencies as Climate Emergency Independents.[126][127] Between them, they won 7,416 out of the 3,917,854 total votes cast in the two constituencies.[128][129]
In June 2019, 1,000 healthcare professionals in the UK and elsewhere, including professors, public health figures, and former presidents of royal colleges, called for widespread non-violent civil disobedience in response to "woefully inadequate" government policies on the unfolding ecological emergency. They called on politicians and the news media to face the facts of the unfolding ecological emergency and take action. They supported the school strike movement and Extinction Rebellion.[130]
In July 2019 Trevor Neilson, Rory Kennedy and Aileen Getty launched the Climate Emergency Fund,[131][132] inspired by Greta Thunberg and Extinction Rebellion protesters in the UK in April.[133] It donated almost half a million pounds to Extinction Rebellion groups in New York City and Los Angeles and school strike for climate groups in the US.[131][132][133]
Criticism[edit]
The movement has been criticised by some for making unrealistic demands.[134] The Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit, which supports its course of strong action and demands, said that the timeframe being urged by XR was "an ambition that technically, economically and politically has absolutely no chance of being fulfilled." They calculated that to go net zero by 2025, flying would need to be scrapped and 38 million cars (both petrol and diesel) would need to be removed from the roads. In addition, 26 million gas boilers would need to be disconnected in six years.[135]
Bibliography[edit]
This Is Not a Drill: An Extinction Rebellion Handbook. London: Penguin, 2019. ISBN 9780141991443.[136][137]
Our Fight. By Juliana Muniz Westcott. 2019. ISBN 978-1793258366.
See also[edit]
Social movements portal
United Kingdom portal
Environment portal
Global warming portal
Current events portal
Anthropocene
Ende Gelände 2018
Ende Gelände 2019
Environmental direct action in the United Kingdom
Fossil fuel phase-out
Global catastrophic risk
Global Climate March
Holocene extinction
Individual and political action on climate change
Low-carbon economy
Overshoot (population)
Peak oil
People's Climate March (disambiguation)
School Strike for Climate
Societal collapse
Sunrise Movement
The Limits to Growth
World Scientists' Warning to Humanity
Notes[edit]
^ "XR Declaration" from 1hr 39m 15s; see "XR Declaration" in the External links section.
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^ The Climate & Ecological Emergency Independents election candidates
^ European election 2019 – London-wide results, Lewisham Council
^ Results of European Parliamentary Election 2019 - South West Region, Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole Council
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External links[edit]
Extinction Rebellionat Wikipedia's sister projects
Media from Wikimedia Commons
Quotations from Wikiquote
Official website
XR Declaration – The Extinction Rebellion "Declaration of Rebellion" live from Parliament Square with Greta Thunberg, Donnachadh McCarthy, George Monbiot, Molly Scott and Dr Gail Bradbrook – 31 October 2018
Extinction Rebellion | Environment—The Guardian
Categories:
2018 establishments in the United Kingdom
2018 protests
2019 protests
Demonstrations
Direct action
Environmental organisations based in the United Kingdom
Environmental protests in the United Kingdom
Ongoing protests
Radical environmentalism
Climate change organizations
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