Climate Memo Mondays, #54

 

54.  Climate Memo Mondays, #54, December 20, 2021
Foster et al., “Against Doomsday Scenarios”
Bennett, “Resilience, Adaptation--What Happened to Mitigation?

John Bellamy Foster, John Molyneux, Owen McCormack.  “Against Doomsday Scenarios: What Is to Be Done Now?”  Monthly Review (Vol. 73, No. 7 (December 2021)

https://monthlyreviewarchives.org/index.php/mr/article/view/6091
Abstract
We should avoid offering a fatalistic worldview. In fact, the environmental movement in general and ecosocialism in particular are all about combating the current trend toward ecological destruction. Climate change is now "code red for humanity." This is not a doomsday forecast but a call to action.

 

Todd Miller. “Border Militarization in a Warming World: Climate Adaptation for the Rich and Powerful.”  Asylum for Sale, ed. McGuirk and Pine.  2020.  This brief but excellent essay discusses several subjects.  Here I’ll focus on refugees.
   The essay opens with the earthquake in 2020 which killed some 316,000 people and left one million homeless.  The US response to Haritian homeless was already emphatically clear: a blockade by sixteen coast guard cutters.  Following the quake,  space at Guantanamo was prepared for anyone daring to try to enter the US.  It was a glimpse of what is in store for people globally fleeing the disasters of warming: crops wilting, cities inundated, super storms.  Between 2008-2016 “more than 21.5 million people per year were displaced due to climate related hazards,” according to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre.  “Future projections of people on the move due to climate upheavals range …from 150 million to one billion people by 2050.”  According to In Search of Shelter, displacements will “exceed anything” experienced before. (281-82).   MAYBE LENGTHN BY DESC THE FINAL 2 PP ON SAMUEL AND MAYBE DESCRIBE MORE IN JANUARY TO PUBLICIZE THIS EXCELLENT ARTICLE

 

MORE ON RESILIENCE AND ADAPTATION.

Dictionary: wrestling with definition, distinguishing the terms.  Resilience is a part of adaptation.  Resilience relates to an individual’s character, one’s internal response to disaster, catastrophe, collapse, and chaos, the individual’s ability or inability to emotionally and intellectually cope with calamity.   Adaptation relates to the physical changes constructed by individuals or groups of individuals (home, cities, states, nations, UN) that enable individuals to cope.  Thus resilience is a psychological and adaptation is a sociological and political concept.  The publisher’s description of the book Deep Adaptation begins:  “’Deep adaptation’ refers to the personal and collective changes that might help us to prepare for—and live with—a climate-influenced breakdown or collapse of our societies.”  But there’s more to be said!  Mitigation was a familiar term a decade ago for the search for the causes of global warming and, possessing that knowledge, for the struggle to prevent warming.  Now it refers to the reduction and therefore, hopefully, the severity of the consequences of warming.    These distinctions help me clarify the various arguments, but in practice people tend to use the words interchangeably.  See the following. --Dick

Ashley Dawson in Extreme Cities: The Peril and Promise of Urban Life in the Age of Climate Change (Verso, 2017) includes a negative critique of “resilience” because “the vogue for resilience . . .dovetails with dominant neoliberal views concerning the role of the state….” 170). 

Introduction: Extreme City

     The opening pages describe Hurricane Sandy, followed by the context of cities around the world threatened by climate chaos, for cities are the cutting edge of the “coming climate chaos.” Cities house the majority of the billions of humans, contribute most of the carbon, are vulnerably sited on bodies of rising water, and vulnerable to deadly heat waves.  The effects of climate change will be of most consequence to cities.  (1-6).

Chapter 4, “The Jargon of Resilience”

Basic alternating structure throughout:  A. Strategies of Adaptation.  B. Critique “heightened by social injustice.”  

For example from p. 157 at the end of the chapter’s intro.:

“This chapter explores discourses of resilience as they are applied to the extreme city.  I focus on the Rebuild by Design competition” in NYC org. by Rockefeller Foundation and HUD.

“Resilience has become the dominant jargon for addressing the manifold crises of the extreme city without fundamentally transforming the conditions that give rise to these crises.”  [That it, Dawson has conflated the terms resilience and adaptation as I defined them.]

The next section describes the 6 RbD awards.  First the “BIG U,” the 10-mile long berm to defend the southern tip of Manhattan.  Then the “limits of the BIG U”:  It creates ”a false sense of security” because its height is fixed possibly too low; it displaces danger into the future and to other physical locations; etc.  All of the plans pay too little attention to equity in general and poor neighborhoods specifically:  “’history has not shown that capitalism protects poor people.’”

The third section (169-) repeats the chapter’s title and opens with other major national “resilience” initiatives by Rockefeller (100 Resilient Cities), HUD, DHS, World Bank, books by Judith Rodin, Holling, Zolli, and the diverse meanings of the term.   Critique continues:  “Part of the power of the term resilience lies in the sheen of hope it offers. . . .But above all, the vogue for resilience has to do with how it dovetails with dominant neoliberal views concerning the role of the state….”(170).  A quick history of the term follows, a sketch of the UN’s Our Common Future report, then more critique; e.g., the popularizers of “resilience” (e.g. Rodin) “are clearly not allowing for the possibility of …collapse of particular systems.”  Dawson opposes Judith Rodin, who doesn’t explore “root causes” but only disasters, which are inevitable and to which we can only adapt; Rodin emphasizes adversity as an opportunity for profit; and is addressing “transnational business elite and their multinational corporations.”   The decades of globalization and urbanization are not natural but “are the produce of an increasingly unrestrained capitalism, involving neoliberal efforts to abolish public regulation and to throttle the public sector while empowering private sector forces….”  Dawson paraphrases Naomi Klein: “efforts to reduce carbon emissions have failed so dramatically precisely because of the hegemony of neoliberal doctrines that skewer all regulatory efforts.  The discussion of ‘resilience,’ just like the concepts of sustainable development that preceded it, obscures [the] root causes of global instability and suffering….”

There’s much more in the other rich chapters, weaving the history and evaluation of “resilience.”