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1. In the Shadow of
2. Grassroots Sustainability in a Concrete Landscape: An Urban Ecovillage in the Pacific Northwest
3. Urban Oasis: Socioecological Sustainability in Cuban Urban Agriculture
4. Beyond Neoliberalism: The Promise of a Communitarian Story
5. Scaling Up the Values Themselves: Real Utopian Stories for the Climate Apocalypse
Preface
Imagine it is the year 2050. Everything has improved since the publication of this book. The global community does better than meeting the Paris Agreement targets, and limits global warming to below 1.5°C. All nations transition away from fossil fuels and meet carbon neutral and negative goals. A climate migrant program successfully relocates people to permanent homes abroad. Poverty has been eradicated globally, and everyone is able to comfortably meet their needs. All people can expect quality care and a voice in matters that affect their lives, regardless of ability, age, gender, race, religion, or sexuality. Global indicators of health and happiness are high. Conflict, violence, and war are on the decline everywhere. You, yourself, regardless of age, are happy, healthy, and surrounded by a loving and supportive community. How did we get here? Be bold and creative. Imagine the impossible. What does it take for the world to be in this great a state? Be specific. What does the global economy look like? What are local communities doing? How are their economies shaped? Are they beholden to global markets? How has agriculture changed? How have ecosystems and Indigenous ways of knowing been protected? How is your community organized? How do you make decisions? Is everyone involved? Is everyone’s input valued equally?
It may be challenging to consider a world that is completely different than the world you know, but, based on the ecological and social crises we face, a completely different world is necessary for our survival as a species. This book offers lessons from two very different communities that attempt to do the impossible work of living in opposition to the homogenous globalized arrangements of conspicuous consumption, industrial agriculture, and single-family households, and they are thriving. They maintain small environmental footprints while their quality of life remains high. Understanding how they do this is necessary if we are to comfortably survive the challenges ahead. And these examples should help to fill your well of creativity to help you envision, and begin living, an alternative future in the face of pressing catastrophe.
As this book goes to press, the year is 2020. This year began with unprecedented bushfires in Australia, whereby the whole country/continent was on
fire. Over ten million hectares burned, claiming thirty-three human lives, burning over 3,000 homes, and causing the deaths and displacement of three billion animals (Richards, Brew, and Smith 2020; World Wildlife Fund 2020). A pandemic, the novel Covid-19 virus, has sickened over thirty-five million and killed over one million people, and climbing, globally. It has reorganized peoples’ lives, forcing them into isolation, learning and working remotely, and it has caused mass unemployment and mass evictions as economies around the globe are in decline (Dong, Du, and Gardner 2020). Fires raging in the Amazon rainforest—called the lungs of the earth because it produces 20 percent of the world’s oxygen and absorbs about 5 percent of carbon dioxide emissions—are the worst in a decade, outpacing the devastation left by the 2019 fires, which had been previously called the worst fire season since 2010. Smoke from the fires has impacted air quality, hospitalizing thousands of people with respiratory illnesses and worsening the symptoms of those afflicted with Covid-19 (Woodward 2019; Amazon Environmental Research Institute et al. 2020). In the United States, wildfires in the western states, especially along the coast, are among the worst ever recorded. California is currently enduring its worst fire season on modern record, with close to 1.7 million hectares burning and thirty-one fatalities. Evacuations have been complicated by an historic heat wave and the ongoing pandemic. Officials blame the effects of climate change and poor forest management for the fires’ intensity (Cal Fire 2020). In addition to unprecedented droughts, floods, and hurricanes, these fires are among only a few examples of the intensifying natural disasters the world has seen this year.
If the environmental disasters weren’t enough, fascism is on the rise globally. Fascism is characterized by authoritarian politics based on leaders who create a cult of personality, brook no dissent, dismiss scientific rationality and evidence, expand policing and surveillance, incite fierce nationalism, proliferate myths, and use perceived victimization of the majority against minorities to allow and promote violence against minorities. Evidence of fascism’s recent global ascendency abounds: including Brazil’s President Bolsonaro, who has endorsed violence and killing as legitimate political actions; the United States’ President Trump, who has emboldened white supremacists and neo-Nazis; Germany’s rise of the Alternative far-right political party; and India’s Prime Minister Modi, who is a member of a Hindu nationalist organization that engages in a Hindu religious conversion program and has alleged ties to anti-Muslim violence, among many other examples (European Economic and Social Committee 2018). Each of these aforementioned
leaders have rolled back environmental protections in their respective countries and openly reject the scientific consensus on climate change. Moreover, they stifle alternative, coalitional, and green political imaginaries essential for change and human survival by polarizing people within their nations through divisive means, such as breeding distrust, fear, and hate of immigrants and racial and religious minorities. However, tyrannical figures also foment antifascist revolutionary formations.
With authoritarian, forceful, and oppressive control comes political resistance—insurgency and counterinsurgency, perpetuating cycles of violence. In the United States, uprisings continue over the state-perpetrated killings and policing of Black, Indigenous, and Latinx communities. Specifically, mounting tensions between police and Black people recently came to a head after centuries of patrolling, police killing, and targeting of Black people as well as their inordinate imprisonment since the 1970s—all preceding the Black Lives Matter protests (Alexander 2010).
In terms of immigration, considering the border wall and the atrocities committed by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials within, and outside of, detention centers—such as children separated from their families (American Civil Liberties Union [ACLU] 2020), the preventable deaths of ill detainees (ICE 2020; Nowrasteh 2020), human trafficking (Pierce 2015), sexual abuse (López and Park 2018), and nonconsensual hysterectomies performed on detained women in ICE facilities (Treisman 2020)—I shudder to think of what the nation’s response will be to the 78 million people projected to immigrate to the United States by 2065 (Pew Research Center 2015). By 2050, 17 million people from Latin America are projected to migrate as a result of climate change (World Bank 2018). Most of them will migrate within their own countries. However, many of them will attempt to find respite from rising temperatures, droughts, and floods by migrating north to the United States. Internationally, climate migrants are not considered refugees, and countries are not obligated to take them in. Without a climate refugee policy in the United States, and with intensifying xenophobia and nationalism, border conflicts will worsen. As an example of this, the US military speaks of climate migrants as potential national security threats and warns:
Among the future trends that will impact our national security is climate change. Rising global temperatures, changing precipitation patterns, climbing sea levels, and more extreme weather events will intensify the
challenges of global instability, hunger, poverty, and conflict. They will likely lead to food and water shortages, pandemic disease, disputes over refugees and resources, and destruction by natural disasters in regions across the globe. . . . In our defense strategy, we refer to climate change as a “threat multiplier” because it has the potential to exacerbate many of the challenges we are dealing with today. . . . We are already beginning to see some of these impacts. (U.S. Department of Defense 2014, 1)
Treating indigent human beings as a threat is dehumanizing and puts them in danger of more deprivation and violence. In addition to violating human rights, treating immigrants or minorities as political threats creates unnecessary conflict. Within the United States, internal climate migration is expected to total 13 million people by the end of the century (Hauer 2017). Globally, the United Nations (UN 2016) predicts that there will be 200 million (with reports of up to one billion) climate migrants by 2050 (Milan, Oakes, and Campbell 2016). If the rise of fascism, nationalism, and xenophobia continue unabated, more border and resource wars are immanent.
From where I sit, things look apocalyptic. Despite the ominous connotation of the word apocalypse, which in its modern form means “the end of the world as we know it,” the word has a hopeful etymology. From its Latin and Greek roots, the word means a revelation or to reveal, disclose, or uncover. In its Judeo-Christian form, it is a prophetic revelation, whereby a cataclysmic event allows the forces of good to permanently triumph over evil. I choose to interpret this apocalyptic moment as a reckoning and unveiling, a moment where a light is shed over the contradictions and the unjust and unsustainable practices bolstering our current social structures. This revelation, as horrific as current conditions are, presents an opportunity. As the old structures crack and break under the pressure of repeated catastrophes, visionary socioecological modes of living already underway present a multiplicity of alternative paths. The challenge for us all is to be bold and imaginative and to work within our communities to build upon these alternative models. Our collective creativity is needed to scale up regenerative socioecological cultures and practices that will mitigate past harms and keep us adaptive into the future. Again, I urge you, be brave, be bold, be creative. Imagine the impossible and begin living it. The stories in this book will give you some ideas about how and where to begin.
Acknowledgments
As some of my respondents would say, “it takes a village.” Of course, they mean this in reference to raising a child (from an African proverb), but I think it applies to writing a book, too. There are many people in my village, separated by space and time, that made this publication possible. I am forever indebted to my gracious participants, the Cuban urban farmers and the US ecovillagers, who shared their homes, stories, time, trust, and wisdom with me. I admire and appreciate all of the important work that they do.
I wish to express sincere gratitude to my mentors, Professors Yvonne Braun, Jim Elliott, Greg McLauchlan, Kari Norgaard, and Stephen Wooten for their assistance with my work in preparation of this manuscript. Of course, the most important mentor of them all is part advisor, family, and friend; I am profoundly grateful to Richard York for supporting me through life’s troughs. Richard is second only to my partner, Jacob Eury, who has always appreciated me exactly as I am, idiosyncrasies and all, and who is genuinely proud of me, without competition or envy. Special thanks are due to colleagues old and new, especially Kathryn L. Miller for helping with edits during the dissertation phase of this manuscript (despite volcanic eruptions), and new colleagues who engaged in conversations with me, read various chapters, and provided thoughtful feedback: Lo Presser (who read most of the book!), Michelle Brown, Bobby Jones, David Pellow, Tyler Wall, Kasey Henricks, Jon Shefner, Stephanie Bohon, Meghan Conley, and Louise Seamster. Michelle Calderone’s edits and support were invaluable. And special thanks to my hardworking editor, Nancy Doherty, who saw too many older drafts and continued working with me anyway! I also want to extend appreciation to the OUP editors, especially Emily Mackenzie, for helping me through the publication process and the anonymous reviewers. This investigation would not exist if it were not financially supported, in part by the Wasby-Johnson Dissertation Research Award and the Center for the Study of Women and Society Research Grant at the University of Oregon.
I would like to thank my chosen family and friends—Theresa Koford, Sarah and Steve McNeale, Caroline Kaiser, Will Steele-Long, Joy Winbourne, Hannah Holleman, Matt Trimble, Daniel Galvan, Resham Arora, Mary
Laube, Jenny Crowley, Martha Camargo, Julius McGee, Ryan Wishart, Matt Clement, Patrick Greiner, Patrick Grzanka, and Kim Donahey—for conversations, feedback, and good times during the process. I have much appreciation for June Zandona who barely knew me but wanted to work on my documentary idea anyway. Thanks to Albert Wolff and Sam Evans for listening to me talk about the climate crisis while serving me cocktails! I would be remiss if I neglected to mention my dedicated students who work tirelessly to realize ecojustice; they remind me why I bother. Thank you, Emily Landry (Medley), Sam LaVoi, Evora Kreis, Dani Urquieta, Mariam Husain, Kiran Hussaini, Isabella Killius, Sally Ross, Nadya Vera, Bryan Clayborne, and the many motivated young people to come. To the activists, scholars, and scientists unwaveringly doing the thankless work of helping the planet, I see and appreciate you.
I am thankful for the trees who frame my office window: their place-based wisdom reminds me to remain present and calm, and the birds and diversity of life they house and feed bring me endless joy. To the beautiful Earth, I am deeply grateful and indebted to you for providing the diversity of life that inspires me, the ground that supports my body, the food that nourishes and animates me, the energizing and cleansing air, and the water that quenches my thirst and soul. Thank you for being the perfect home despite some unfortunately ungrateful individuals among my species. I am humbled to have been a speck of your dust temporarily imbued with a modicum of your consciousness. I hope to use your gifts to honor you.
Special thanks are in order for my spirited and hilarious cat family, especially my sweet cow-cat who sat with me as I wrote most of this book, and to the memories of my animal friends of the past, a turtle and dog, who taught me that nonhuman animals feel and have agency. To my family, thank you, Noli Ergas, for loving and honoring the Earth as much as I do. Thank you, aunt Lynn, for showing me that women are capable and competent. And to Angela and Enrique, thank you for showing me kindness; I wish I had gotten the chance to know you better. I especially appreciate my mother, Rosa Ergas, for always believing in me.
Innumerable teachers of my past have inspired my curiosity, and because I cannot remember them all by name, I thank anyone who teaches. Indeed, I’m grateful to anyone who does the hard work of caring for their
fellow community members; whether as nurses, farmers, doctors, nannies, ecojustice activists, or foresters, thank you for doing care-work. Care-work is the work of the future. If I’ve left anyone out, please know that I appreciate you. And to anyone who reads this book, thank you for considering my words, and please show your love to the Earth.
Introduction
Building Socioecological Community
We have learned that it is not enough to define utopia, nor is it enough to fight against the reactionary forces. One must build it here and now, brick by brick, patiently but steadily, until we can make the old dreams a reality: that there will be bread for all, freedom among citizens, and culture; and to be able to read with respect the word “peace.” We sincerely believe that there is no future that is not built in the present.
Juan Manuel Sánchez Gordillo, mayor of Marinaleda, Spain1
A few years ago, when this book was just a few thin chapters and jotted notes, I lived in Providence, Rhode Island. I regularly commuted on the I-95, an elevated highway by the harbor. One afternoon, as I inched along in rush hour traffic, I turned my gaze toward the industrial port that sits a couple thousand feet below. A thick haze surrounds this New England highway and the nearby port industries, emitting smells of sulfur, exhaust, and other unidentifiable fumes. What could be a beautiful view of a quiet bay is instead an industrial row of barges and freight, rusted scrap metal heaps, and a coal pit. On this afternoon, the blare of ambulance sirens felt like the final assault on my senses, and my thoughts escaped to the winter five years earlier when I worked on an urban farm in Havana, Cuba. There, from the second-floor window of my apartment in the northeastern edge of the city, I could see a sweep of green: the farm was just a short walk across the street. Although there was some traffic, the farm’s twentyseven acres of trees, crops, and ornamental plants cleaned exhaust from the air and provided habitat for hundreds of bird species. The bustle began early as neighbors visited with each other on their walks to work or taking their children to school. Most items that residents needed were within walking
Surviving Collapse. Christina Ergas, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2021. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197544099.003.0001
distance. Connected to the neighborhood street was the farm’s vending area, where residents stood in line to purchase papaya, mixed-spice packets, and cassava, or, on a hot day, freshly squeezed sugarcane juice.
In Havana, my workday began at eight o’clock in the morning in the plant nursery. Four other workers and I planted seeds and cared for seedlings. The pace was moderate and steady, with long breaks for morning snack, lunch, and afternoon banter. All my work took place outside under the shade of neem trees or thatched roofs made from palm branches. At the height of the sun’s full beam, the shade provided a respite where we could sit and enjoy a cool breeze. People sang as they worked and listened to music from radios at their workstations. The red limestone soil coated our boots and clothes with a rust-colored film. The farm smelled of wet clay, leafy greens, and flowers.
It was a far cry from this New England view. The last two years I lived in Providence, residents began a community effort to stop the siting of a natural gas liquefaction (LNG) facility at the main port, only three miles from where I worked and five miles from where I lived. The purpose of the facility is to liquefy natural gas in order to condense it, thus making storage and transport more convenient; it also will serve as the main distributor of LNG to the Northeast region. The port already contained a variety of hazards, including a chemical plant, a petroleum terminal, a cement plant, and coal, propane, and natural gas storage facilities, to name a few. Another such facility would increase the risk of potential disasters. Indeed, complications caused by sea level rise, a hurricane, or a terrorist attack could trigger a cascade of explosions, unleashing a toxic cocktail and sending a chemical plume into the air over a fourteen-mile radius, which would completely envelop the city. The resulting explosions would kill the closest people on impact and injure many others further away. Unsurprisingly, those who live nearest the port are the city’s poorest and most ethnically diverse and have the least political sway. As of this writing, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has approved the natural gas liquefaction facility. The state Department of Environmental Management has reviewed the plans and issued the final permits, and the facility is in the process of being built.
The US fossil fuel-driven economy thrusts social and ecological costs onto many communities similar to the residents of South Providence, RI. These sacrifice zones appear in stark contrast to urban agriculture and reforestation efforts I observed in Havana, Cuba. I don’t mean to make light of the fact that Cubans suffer from a lack of material resources, including serious energy deprivation, especially in fossil fuels. However, through their ingenuity
and development of community resources, Cubans have managed to inspire hope worldwide despite their energy shortages. I argue that Cubans are able to thrive under austere conditions because they have prioritized social and community resources, and their experience offers valuable insights for every community facing the impacts of climate change—primarily caused by the burning of fossil fuels.
I.1. Running on Fumes
Ever-increasing amounts of fossil-fuel energy feed the globalized growth economy, enabling society-wide addictions to excess consumption. This unabated economic expansion is driving us toward self-destruction as well as to the destruction of most other species, a phenomenon scientists have termed the sixth mass extinction (Ceballos, Ehrlich, and Dirzo 2017). For decades, international scientific associations, such as the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), have been warning inhabitants of the Global North, especially its most affluent, to change their relationships with the environment and with each other.
The current global economic prescription for our converging environmental and social crises is more sustainable development, or, as the most widely cited Brundtland Commission (UN 1987) defines it, development that “meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” As the term “development” implies, this consists of continued economic growth through new “green” technologies and the expansion of global markets. In terms of agriculture, sustainable development includes corporations genetically engineering seed to increase herbicide and drought resistance in monocultural harvests rather than changing production processes to allow for biodiversity as well as carbon and water retention.
As this book will reveal, Western production and consumption of new technologies at ever-increasing rates is in part what created this situation in the first place. Instead, we should be questioning technological production processes, whether there is need for so many new gadgets, and prioritizing technological production that serves community resilience. We are reaching the limits of Western societal hubris. Business-as-usual is not going to pull us out of this mess. In this book, I identify the roots of socioecological problems, and I argue that changing social relations, or systems of power and inequity,
through more socially sustainable practices, is what is needed for greater societal resilience. The cases that I describe offer lessons on how people adapt to pressing ecological problems; they do so by fostering community and reclaiming self-sufficiency. Insights from these communities can help us imagine different stories of survival. I maintain that with a solid vision, we can move beyond debilitating fear and denial toward a just transition to a new economy. This new economy is based on social equity and environmental regeneration, or a radical sustainability that is at once socially and ecologically transformative—dismantling hierarchies toward total liberation—and regenerative—healing and restoring the health of people and the planet.
One way to wean nations off of fossil fuel addictions is through food sovereignty, or the relocalization of food production and consumption. According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (2017), modern food production, including “input manufacturing, production, processing, transportation, marketing, and consumption . . . accounts for . . . approximately 30 percent of global energy consumption” and produces more than 20 percent (or, depending on the source, from 24 percent up to one-third!) of global greenhouse gas emissions (Gilbert 2012; Environmental Protection Agency [EPA] 2017). Specifically, in the United States, agriculture accounts for 80 percent of nitrous oxide and 35 percent of methane emissions—two powerful greenhouse gases—and, worldwide, up to 25 percent of the carbon dioxide emissions (Shiva 2016; EPA 2017). The US Department of Agriculture (USDA; 2017) reports that in the United States, fossil fuel-derived energy makes up 93 percent of the energy used in agricultural production. The type of fossil-fuel energy depends on the region. In most of New England, such as Rhode Island, 98 percent of electricity comes from natural gas, whereas other regions, like West Virginia, rely mainly on coal.
Food sovereignty produces food for the local community by the community, which allows members to decide on the most locally desirable and suitable foods and best practices. It reduces food transit miles and the need for refrigeration, and it allows for regional variation and diversity. Regenerative organic agricultural practices that utilize crop rotation, no-tillage, and composting also have the potential to sequester, or remove from the atmosphere, up to 15 percent or more of global carbon emissions (Lal 2004; Gattinger et al. 2012).
This book explores in depth two cases of living arrangements and food alternatives that differ from the dominant global, United Nations vision of sustainable development. Urban agriculture in Havana, Cuba and in an
urban ecovillage in the Pacific Northwest are examples of experimentation in more holistic sustainabilities that encompass food self-sufficiency, participatory democracy, and equitable social relations. They differ in context, as the case of Cuban urban agriculture is part of a top-down government plan, while ecovillages spring up in the United States independently and in opposition to government and corporate policies. These cases illustrate how cultures and individuals respond differently to their environments, working within the limits of scarce resources and in relation to their unique ecosystems. In ecosystems, diversity is important because biodiverse systems are more resilient to rapid environmental change—our current global reality (Jenkins 2003). From these two cases, and many more like them, we can learn that building an economy that cooperatively and symbiotically works with nature—rather than the hegemonic, competition-driven, domination and control orientation toward nature—is the way out of converging environmental crises. These cases demonstrate some, though by no means all, of the ways to begin healing individual and societal rifts from nature. We can expand on these lessons to move toward a radical sustainability that is at once a socioecologically regenerative and transformative, rather than “sustainable,” way of life.
I.2. Anthropocene (or Capitalocene?)
We live in a time that is heavily marked by human activity: every space on this planet has been affected by people. As a result, scientists are calling this epoch the Anthropocene, after the root Greek words for human and new (Zalasiewicz et al. 2008; Stromberg 2013; Barnosky et al. 2014; Steffen, Crutzen, McNeill 2007; Steffen et al. 2015). Crutzen, the Nobel-prizewinning atmospheric chemist who popularized the term, defines it as “human dominance of biological, chemical, and geological processes on Earth” beginning in 1800 (Crutzen and Schwägerl 2011). Others characterize such dominance as the Capitalocene to reflect the specific burden that capitalism as a global economic system has placed on the planet (Haraway 2015). What is clear is that our converging environmental and social crises are social in origin. The evidence is mounting; scientists are coming to see that the way Western societies live, especially the more affluent among them, wreaks havoc on ecosystems. What we need are revolutionary changes in social and economic arrangements, a radical sustainability that is at once regenerative
and transformative. This book is about what making these changes might entail.
The global economy is characterized by perverse incentives. Its operating logic situates cyclical ecologies in a linear, factory-like, output-oriented system called commodity chains. It is set to promote unyielding growth; it encourages cut-throat competition, orienting corporations to focus on profits, ignoring the external costs or so-called negative externalities. These externalities are the social and environmental harms—such as toxic waste and its associated community health problems—that corporations comfortably avoid paying for. The value of nonrenewable natural resources is systematically underpriced, because the needs of future generations are not accounted for in a short-term profit structure (Wright 2010). In this growthdriven economy, consumerism is promoted through market-expansion around the globe; privatization and commercialization of common resources; marketing and advertising; as well as the planned and perceived obsolescence of goods (goods intentionally made with limited lifespans) to keep consumers buying things that they don’t need (Schor 1998; Dawson 2003; Wright 2010). The consumption of goods implicates the chain of resource extraction, manufacturing, packaging, selling, and waste production common in the global economic system (Bhada-Tata and Hoornweg 2012).
To accomplish this, multinational corporations—which are facilitated by international trade agreements negotiated asymmetrically between hegemonic nation states and less developed countries—market rugged individualism, promote excessive work hours, and buy up once communal land and parcel out private property, thereby dividing and conquering peoples and lands. The tactics in effect atomize, exploit, dominate, and control.
Through the charade of sustainable development, this exploitative way of life is exported to countries, many of which are former colonies of Global North nations, around the globe. With the goal of economic development, multinational corporations and development agencies promote Western values that homogenize cultures and economies, coaxing them to participate in global economic activity. Thus, impoverished people around the world are marketed, and may welcome, excessive consumer lifestyles like those in the West. Why shouldn’t they want the comfort and convenience that Westerners enjoy? However, rather than enjoying the spoils, the poor among the poorest and richest countries are deceived, their labor exploited, and their natural resources and wealth taken from their lands to benefit some at the expense of many others (Sekerci and Petrovskii 2015). In order to combat the converging
environmental and social crises that scientists are calling anthropogenic, or human caused, in origin, Western societies will need to radically alter their lifestyles in accordance with ecological limits and social equity.
In this book I argue that under the above paradigm, newly created, “green” technologies fall short of creating more sustainable environments and social relations: only affluent people can afford them at first, and when they become affordable, then many people may purchase the technology, which requires more resource exploitation and production and does not necessarily phase out less efficient technologies. Specifically, in the following chapters, I detail how those green technologies miss the mark when they are scaled up in the current global economic context, as even industrial organic agriculture does not fulfill the promise of cleaner streams and reduced greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Therefore, “mainstreaming” green in the current context is not the answer. Instead, the cases featured in this book offer hopeful and doable examples of sustainability that offer paradigmatically different approaches to combating socioecological disintegration. Volumes of books exist that expose greenwashing—marketing misinformation designed to give a product an environmentally responsible public image—and how market mechanisms and green capitalism have failed us (Rogers 2010a, 2010b; Holleman 2012; Zehner 2012; McGee 2015). This book explores elegant, low-tech alternatives that mitigate socioecological harm and are adaptive to already changing environments.
As a citizen of the United States, I think it’s fitting to look at my country first. The United States accounts for less than 5 percent of the world’s population, but consumes about 25–30 percent of the world’s energy and produces about a quarter to a third of the world’s waste (Ponting 2007; EPA 2013; Hoornweg, Bhada-Tata, and Kennedy 2013; World Watch Institute 2016). Further, US citizens emit about sixteen metric tons of carbon dioxide per capita yearly, as compared to the five metric tons people emit worldwide (World Bank 2021). The United States is not alone in excessive consumption and waste production; it’s just one of the top contributors. Member countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, including the most developed economies of the world and a few newly emerging economies, are among the highest waste generators as well2 (Hoornweg, BhadaTata, and Kennedy 2013).
The amount of US-based waste and emissions should not come as a surprise. Individual consumption is a vital part of the economy, and household consumption amounts to about 70 percent of the US gross domestic
product (GDP); worldwide the average is about 60 percent (World Bank 2017). Marketing firms and advertisers spend a trillion dollars yearly to ensure that US households continue excessive consumption habits (Dawson 2003; E-Marketer 2014). Consumer culture, with its treadmill of long work weeks, car commutes, excessive product packaging, energy consumption, waste generation, and excessive meat consumption (Pollan 2006), negatively affects the environment and, despite the advertisements, it doesn’t even make people happy!
In fact, depression is on the rise globally, as are mental health conditions related to environmental stressors, like eco-anxiety (Layard 2005; Clayton et al. 2017; World Health Organization [WHO] 2017). Working more to consume more has diminishing returns. Money and consumption only increase happiness and well-being up to a certain point. As researchers have observed, “once a person has a comfortable standard of living, increased income and consumption do not lead to increased life satisfaction and happiness” (Wright 2010, 68). What gives people meaning and makes them happy is connecting with other people and the environment, engaging in creative and interesting work and activities, and participating in community (Layard 2005; Wright 2010; Clayton et al. 2017). Working more to buy more only serves to take time away from what is truly important to people: their relationships.
Problems on every societal level—from the global (material flows and international markets), national (regulations, policy implementation, subsidies and incentive programs, and planned development), local (re-localizing food production and human-scale technologies), all the way down to the individual (processing emotions and changing ideas and behaviors)—are interconnected and contribute to the converging crises. Therefore, holistic systemic solutions are necessary to combat these problems.
I.3. The State of the Biosphere
Climate change is arguably the greatest environmental threat that humanity has ever confronted. It is global in scale, affects all other planetary systems, and is marked by increasing global average temperatures, rising sea levels, and more extreme weather patterns. Ninety-seven percent of scientific articles on climate change agree that it is happening and that human activities are largely responsible for it (Crowley 2000; Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change [IPCC] 2013; Stern and Kaufmann 2014; Smith 2015; Zalasiewicz and Williams 2015; Cook et al. 2016). Climate change is accompanied by other interrelated environmental problems, including ocean acidification (Pelejero, Calvo, and Hoegh-Guldberg 2010; Longo, Clausen, and Clark 2015; WWF 2015), potable water decline, dustbowl-ification (Romm 2011; Holleman 2017), and mass species extinction (Pimm and Raven 2000; Pimm et al. 1995, 2014; Lydeard et al. 2004; UN 2005; Burkhead 2012; Cardinale et al. 2012; WWF 2014, 2015; Régniera et al. 2015). Each problem alone can have grave consequences for human societies, such as resource wars, plagues, and mass migrations. But, of course, these problems are interconnected, and their convergence is catastrophic. To make matters worse, economic trends leading to more consumption and waste have been accelerating since the 1950s (Steffen, Crutzen, McNeill 2007; Steffen et al. 2015). Scientists have termed this the Great Acceleration (Steffen, Crutzen, McNeill 2007).
Anthropogenic climate change is largely driven by rising atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases—primarily carbon dioxide, but also methane and nitrous oxide—that trap the sun’s heat on Earth rather than allowing it to escape into space. The burning of fossil fuels is the main culprit for the steady and rapid rise in concentrations of atmospheric CO2. If global emissions continue to rise, scientists predict a likely four-degree (or more) Celsius rise in average global temperatures by the end of the century, a temperature that few living things could adapt to in such a short time (IPCC 2013; World Bank 2012; Sherwood and Huber 2010). Indeed, temperature increases of even less than that are associated with interconnected environmental problems that exacerbate extreme weather events, such as longer or mega-droughts (lasting a decade or more) that affect food production, more dangerous hurricanes and tornadoes, monsoons, and increased flooding; glacial melt that causes sea level rise, inundating coastal cities and covering island nations; surging human wars and conflicts over resources, mass migrations, malnutrition, deaths due to heatwaves, and pandemic plagues (Hsiang, Burke, and Miguel 2013); expanding regions experiencing exacerbated water and food scarcity; irreversible biodiversity loss; and ocean acidification and marine-life collapse (World Bank 2012; Sekerci and Petrovskii 2015).
Intensive industrial agriculture practices not only contribute heavily to greenhouse gas emissions, because of the use of fossil fuel-powered heavy machinery, food transport, refrigeration, processing, and excessive use of nitrogen fertilizers (often emitted as nitrous oxide), but they also degrade
soils and cause soil erosion. Healthy soils are second to our oceans as the best sources of carbon storage. Humans release carbon by clear-cutting forests for large-scale agriculture and degrade healthy soils through monoculture, and these processes only serve to exacerbate climate change. With severe weather changes, an increasing number of regions will experience severe droughts or excessive rains, either of which will make agriculture and soil nonviable (Gattinger et al. 2012; Holleman 2017). There are many other examples of such eco-systemic problems.3
Scientists have formulated potential roadmaps for keeping us at about a 1.5-degree Celsius global temperature rise, an increase in temperature to which they believe humans can adapt. But if we do not begin down this path now—curbing emissions by half every decade until ultimately cutting emissions to net zero by mid-century—it will soon be too late (Rockström et al. 2017; IPCC 2018). Some question whether we have the political will to make the necessary changes (Victor 2009). A US Trump presidency certainly did not bode well for climate legislation (Gore et al 2016; Davenport and Rubin 2017; Merica 2017). Trump-era policies—such as disbanding the federal climate advisory panel, appointing an EPA administrator who actively fought environmental regulation, and suspending environmental risk research (Greshko et al. 2017)—will only serve to propel us further into a climatenightmare future.
What can we do about these global problems caused by economic and social arrangements? As individuals? As societies? At each international climate summit, most recently in Madrid, nations negotiate agreements that don’t go far enough to mitigate climate change (Cama 2015; Davenport 2015). Of course, there are examples of environmental problems that we have combatted at larger scales, such as the universal ratification of the Montreal Protocol that required nations to phase out production of ozone-depleting substances (United Nations Environment Programme 2017); reforestation in some places (Clement, Ergas, and Greiner 2015); and the US Endangered Species Act that has saved numerous species. However, relatively little action is being dedicated to alleviating climate change.
At the time of this writing, the end of the twenty-first century is about eighty years away. If we do nothing more to mitigate climate change, we will likely see a two-degree Celsius or more rise in average global temperatures in the next twenty to thirty years. Scientists predict that this will still change much of life on the planet. We have already seen the hottest years on record every year from 2014 through 2020 (NASA 2021; National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association [NOAA] 2019). The first two decades of the twenty-first century
have seen twenty of the warmest years on record (NASA 2021). We have already experienced extreme heat and weather events the world over. There are already parts of the United States, specifically Louisiana’s southern boot, becoming inundated by water and forcing a whole community to migrate (Marshall 2014). We are already experiencing mass-species extinction (Broswimmer 2002) and coral-reef bleaching (NOAA 2017). The South Sudanese, Somalians, and Syrians are already enduring major droughts and famines that are exacerbating resource wars (United Nations Environment Programme 2007; Biello 2009; Hsiang, Burke, and Miguel 2013; Gleick 2014; Maystadt and Ecker 2014; Beaubien 2017). Temperature rise means that such occurrences will only get worse and spread the world over. In recent years, as the effects of climate change have escalated, some politicians and news agencies in the United States have made blatant efforts to ignore or deny climate change altogether (Cillizza 2017; Public Citizen 2017), which simply compounds an already bad situation.
Perhaps we should pause for a moment. This is indeed bad news, and it is a lot to take in.
Some of us cope by denying the existence of these problems. Some of us are aware of the issues but completely dissociate, watching ourselves contribute to the problem as if we are watching someone else. Some fight with others in social movements; some escape and build their own utopian futures; some are forced to work themselves to death and cannot participate in the conversation, while others profit from the whole mess. Inaction is not an option. Now more than ever we must examine the viability of consumer lifestyles and living arrangements and consider paths different from the globalized and homogenizing forces of sustainable development, which are modeled on a Global North monoculture.
Now is the time to take the work of sociologists seriously, because our insights could help save humanity. Human societies and the social relations within them are causing these converging environmental crises. If we are to stop them, we have to change the way people interact and live. Sociologists should be doing the work of not only illuminating how human societies have created these unsustainable conditions, but also theorizing about and empirically testing projects that model potential solutions. People have been tinkering with alternatives for decades and, in some cases, throughout human history. The technologies and models abound. What are needed are systematic evaluations of these models and the social and political will to scale up radically different social relations.
