Beyond Powaqqatsi: Towards an ecological community of communities

‘The imagination of the end is being corrupted by the end of the imagination.’

– Boaventura de Sousa Santos^[i]

The scientific evidence could not be clearer: we are in a state of planetary emergency that presents an existential threat to civilisation.  The rate, manner and ferocity with which human beings are consuming resources is literally destroying our web of life, constructed over billions of years, upon which all of us, human and more-than-human, depend for survival – a phenomenon the Hopi people of North America call Powaqqatsi: ‘an entity or way of life that consumes the life force of other beings in order to further its own.’^[ii]  As a consequence of this Powaqqatsi we can see that biodiversity – the diversity within species, between species, and of ecosystems, is declining faster than at any time in human history.^[iii] In the last fifty years alone, humanity has wiped out sixty per cent of mammals, birds, fish and reptiles.^[iv] At present twenty five per cent of the remaining animal and plant life on our planet is under direct threat of extinction, suggesting that around one million species could go extinct, many within decades.^[v] If current trends persist we could lose more than a third or even half of all animal and plant species on earth within the next fifty years^[vi]  –  just take a few moments to really take that in  – half of all animal and plant species on earth…  That is unless radical transformative action is taken right now to reduce the drivers of this biodiversity loss and the climate crisis, first and foremost being the capitalistic-extractivist values and behaviours driving current production and consumption patterns.

Without such action, any transition to an ecologically sustainable society, let alone a just one, remains at best a fantasy. As the Indigenous activist Ta’Kaiya Blaney of the Tla'amin Nation told the Cop26 meeting in Glasgow – the process is nothing more than ‘a performance… an illusion constructed to save the capitalist economy rooted in resource extraction and colonialism’, and that accordingly: ‘I didn’t come here to fix the agenda – I came here to disrupt it.’^[vii]  In fact, for all the rhetoric of the Cop processes, the IPCC calculates that currently agreed international pledges and targets will still produce a 3.2-degree Celsius median global temperature increase by 2100^[viii] (which will result in the previously mentioned catastrophic consequences to our more-than-human commons), and as Climate Action Tracker confirms: ‘there remains a substantial gap between what governments have promised to do and the total level of actions they have undertaken to date.’^[ix]  It is therefore abundantly clear that in order for us not only to survive this crisis, but to use it as a catalyst for building a just, equitable and ecological society, humanity will need to rapidly transform the ways in which our societies function and interact with(in) natural ecosystems.^[x]  The immediate challenge we face, however, is that current opportunities for imagining, let alone instituting, alternative socio-ecological solutions are straightjacketed by framing constraints set out by existing political systems – tied to an anthropocentric, economistic, growth-oriented model, and gambling on future techno-fixes.  It is now clear that the scale and ambition of transformation necessary to tackle these crises will involve nothing less than a paradigm shift requiring a proliferation of new, innovative, and revolutionary approaches that crisscross previous sectoral and disciplinary boundaries. 

In recent years there have been numerous debates about the promise of deliberative mini publics and citizens assemblies as responses to the current ecological crises.[xi]  However, recent empirical examples of climate assemblies in places like Denmark, France, Ireland, and elsewhere have shown limited success in their ability to foster transformative political change when it comes to instituting concrete and ambitious climate policies.[xii]  In practice, such processes have taken on a largely consultative role with no formal agenda-setting or decision-making powers, and have been greatly hindered by such political constraints – limiting the range of possibilities and imaginaries available to the assembly participants when it comes to socio-ecological topics.  Consequently, responses to ecological and climate-related problems are generally only considered feasible if simultaneously stimulating economic production and perpetual growth – a combination the evidence increasingly shows to be entirely unfeasible.[xiii]  Critically, a fundamental problem persists that for such processes to increase their influence they require a binding political mandate, and yet the politicians responsible for providing them are the very ones who continue to resist doing so.  Sadly, despite persistent calls for stronger mandates from academic experts and social/ecological activists, there is no reason to believe that this situation will change in the foreseeable future.  This is by no means a wholesale rejection of these important experiments in deliberative politics, far from it, but rather a rallying cry for civil society and academia alike to extend our engagement beyond the usual spaces of power in order to avert such stasis.

With this in mind, many of us are now turning our attention to community-based participatory methods as tools for collaboration and collective action – involving group processes of intentionally generating visions that are long-term, expansive, and solutions-driven.  Here in Ireland, one such initiative is the People’s Transition – a participative decision-making model developed by TASC that views climate action as an enabler of local development. By bringing together climate justice, community development, and participatory democratic processes, we demonstrate how citizen engagement and cultural change processes are stronger, fairer, and more sustainable if they involve grassroots climate action. This is particularly true in areas of high deprivation, where disillusionment with current democratic processes is allowing the far right to make inroads across Europe.  The model gives people and communities a voice in, and ownership of, the transition to a zero-carbon society.  It aims to enhance public support for climate action by tackling inequality and raising standards of living through the co-creation and delivery of climate solutions.

Following the success of two initial pilots, one in rural Donegal, one in Dublin, the People’s Transition processes have now expanded to multiple communities across the island of Ireland.  In order to scale these processes across, TASC now aims to build a ‘community of communities’ involving towns, villages and rural areas who have already been through People’s Transitions, taking the individual participatory decision-making models to their next stage as this new network expands the participatory process to national level.  Aside from the opportunities for solidarity, mutual support and shared learning this will offer the communities involved, such a model has the potential to create the political agency and ‘people power’ required to overcome the challenges so often faced by deliberative processes as described previously.  Vivien Lowndes and Marie Paxton have argued that such processes are indeed possible if they adhere to five characteristics: they are (1) processual – maintaining an ongoing process of discussion, questioning, and collective problem solving, while resisting the formulation of universal norms; (2) collective – engaging a multiplicity of actors in the active, open-ended construction of a collective will; (3) contextual – acknowledging the embedded nature of democratic formation and the distinctive forms of local agency and environments; (4) contestable – valuing conflict and making spaces for agonistic contests, allowing for passionate expression of differences; and always (5) provisional – harnessing rather than suppressing open-ended processes of political reflection, understood as necessarily incomplete, and rejecting any endpoint.^[xiv]

The academic and climate activist Vishwas Satgar likened the recent COVID-19 pandemic to a ‘dress rehearsal for a world that breaches 2- and 3-degrees Celsius’ – by which time the catastrophic effects on our life-supporting socio-ecological systems will be irreversible.^[xv]  If we are to learn the lessons of previous decades, and avert a collective ecocide, a deep democratisation of our responses to these crises will be essential.

References:

1. Boaventura de Sousa Santos, The End of the Cognitive Empire: The coming of age of epistemologies of the South (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018), p. ix.
2. Vandana Shiva, ‘Forward’, in This Is Not A Drill: An Extinction Rebellion Handbook (London: Penguin, 2019), p. 5.
3. Sandra Díaz; Josef Settele; Eduardo Brondízio, ‘Summary for policymakers of the global assessment report on biodiversity and ecosystem services’. IPBES, 2019, p. 2.
4. World Wildlife Fund, Living Planet Report – 2018, eds M. Grooten and R. Almond (Gland, Switzerland: WWF, 2018), p. 7.
5. Díaz et al, ‘Summary for policymakers of the global assessment report on biodiversity and ecosystem services,’ p. 3.
6. Cristian Román-Palacios and John J Wiens, ‘Recent responses to climate change reveal the drivers of species extinction and survival’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 10^th February 2020. Available online: www.pnas.org/content/early/2020/02/04/1913007117.
7. Libby Brooks, ‘Hundreds of global civil society representatives walk out of Cop26 in protest’. The Guardian, 12^th November 2021.
8. IPCC. ‘Summary for Policymakers’, in Climate Change 2022: Mitigation of Climate Change. Contribution of Working Group III to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2022), p. 21.
9. See: Climate Action Tracker, Temperatures: Addressing Global Warming, December 2023. Available online: https://climateactiontracker.org/global/temperatures
10. Ripple et al, ‘World Scientists’ Warn of a Climate Emergency’. BioScience 70:1 (2020), 4.
11. See for example: Maija Setälä & Graham Smith, ‘Mini-Publics and Deliberative Democracy,’ in A. Bächtiger, J. S. Dryzek, J. Mansbridge, & M. Warren (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Deliberative Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018);  Stephen Elstub & Oliver Escobar, Handbook of democratic innovation and governance (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2019);  John Dryzek & Simon Niemeyer, ‘Deliberative democracy and climate governance,’ Nature Human Behaviour (2019) 3(5):411–413;  Clodagh Harris & Ian Hughes, ‘Reimagining democracy in an era of deep transition.’ Irish Studies in International Affairs (2020) 31: 71-89;  Stephen Flood; Fionn Rogan; Alexandra Revez; Connor McGookin; Barry O’Dwyer; Clodagh Harris; Niall Dunphy; Edmond Byrne; Brian O´Gallachoir; Paul Bolger; Evan Boyle; James Glynn; John Barry; Geraint Ellis; Gerard Mullally ‘Imagining climate resilient futures: A layered Delphi panel approach,’ Futures (2023) 147: 103100. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.futures.2023.103100
12. Mads Ejsing; Adam Veng; Irina Papazu, ‘Green politics beyond the state: radicalizing the democratic potentials of climate citizens’ assemblies.’ Climatic Change (2023) 176:73.
13. See for example:  Timothée Parrique; Jonathan Barth; François Briens; Christian Kerschner; Alejo Kraus-Polk; Anna Kuokkanen; Joachim Spangenberg, ‘Decoupling debunked: Evidence and arguments against green growth as a sole strategy for sustainability,’ European Environmental Bureau, 2019;  Jason Hickel & Giorgos Kallis, ‘Is green growth possible?’ New Political Economy (2020) 25(4): 469–486;  Simone D’Alessandro; André Cieplinski; Tiziano Distefano; Kristofer Dittmer, ‘Feasible alternatives to green growth.’ Nature Sustainability (2020) 3(4): 329–335;  Daniel Hausknost & Marit Hammond, The Political Prospects of a Sustainability Transformation: Moving Beyond the Environmental State (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2021).
14. Vivien Lowndes and Marie Paxton, ‘Can agonism be institutionalised? Can institutions be agonised? Prospects for democratic design’. The British Journal of Politics and International Relations (2018) 20(3):705–707.
15. Vishwas Satgar, ‘Covid-19, the Climate Crisis and Lockdown: an opportunity to end the war with nature’. Kafila, 2020. Available online: https://kafila.online/2020/03/28/covid-19-the-climate-crisis-and-lockdown-an-opportunity-to-end-the-war-with-nature-vishwas-satgar/

Dr Matt York

Dr Matt York is Senior Researcher in Climate Justice at TASC.

Matt is currently working on Phase II of the People’s Transition — focusing on community-led climate action that seeks to address inequality.  He holds an MRes in Development Practice from the University of East Anglia and a PhD in Politics from University College Cork. He has published widely on critical political theory, social and ecological activism, prefigurative politics, the utopian imagination, and the politics of love. Prior to joining the TASC team, Matt worked in a number of community development projects in Ireland, the UK, and South Africa; led participatory research projects with a range of social and ecological activists internationally; and lectured at University College Cork.  His book Love and revolution was published by Manchester University Press in 2023, and he is currently co-editing the book Deep Commons forthcoming with SUNY Press.