Clive Hamilton, in his 2015 Scientific American article, “Geoengineering is not a solution to climate change,” pointed out that technofixes — technical solutions to social problems – “are appealing when we are unwilling to change ourselves and our social institutions.”
Hamilton says that unless we change the political system, technofixes will make the situation worse. He adds, “we cannot stop ourselves voting for politicians whom we know will do little or nothing.”
Consider proposals to inject sulfate into the upper atmosphere to cool the planet.
Supporters cite the two-year period of global cooling that followed the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in 1991. It released huge amounts of sulfur aerosols, which reflected incoming solar radiation back into outer space.
Other geoengineering proposals would modify surface albedo – the sunlight reflected from the Earth’s surface. These include putting white paint on roofs and roads, using wind-powered snow-making machines to turn seawater into clouds, growing light-colored crops, or even clear-cutting the boreal forest to eliminate its dark pines and spruces.
None of this is going to happen on a meaningful scale.
Stephen Gardiner, in his widely-cited 2006 article, “A perfect moral storm: Climate change, intergenerational ethics and the problem of moral corruption,” explained how moral corruption “provides each generation with the cover under which it can seem to be taking the issue seriously – by negotiating weak and largely substanceless global accords, for example.”
Moral corruption – distraction, complacency, unreasonable doubt, selective attention, delusion, pandering, false witness, and hypocrisy – creates political inertia that blocks climate action.
Naomi Klein argued succinctly in her 2014 book This changes everything: “It’s not about carbon – it’s about capitalism.”
Brendan Barrett, in a 2015 article, “Eco-modernists versus eco-radicals,” said “the former want us to believe that we can solve climate change through accelerated technological progress, while eco-radicals insist that only through fundamental transformation of our consumer capitalist society (in other words by scrapping it) can we avoid disastrous climate change.”
He says his own thinking has shifted from eco-modernism to eco-radicalism, finally ending up somewhere in the middle.
Dismissing technology as a climate solution may seem extreme, even polarizing. Shouldn’t we hope for a peaceful and just transition from fossil fuels to renewables – one that can avoid, or at least delay, the worst impacts of climate change? Are entrenched corporations and their political supporters so powerful that societal collapse, or violent revolution, is inevitable?
There is a third way. It requires giving rights to Nature.
This does not mean “nature-based solutions.” These involve manipulating ecosystems to meet our own selfish needs. We’ve done that for millennia. It has led to global scale consequences: a disrupted climate and a great wave of human-caused extinctions. The geoengineering proposal to chop down the boreal forest could be seen as a perverted nature-based solution.
Giving legal rights to Nature means rights for all our relations – the two-legged, the four-legged, the crawlers, the swimmers, the plants, the insects, the fungi, the rivers, the marshes, the mountains, the seas. All of us would have the right to reproduce, to evolve, to move, to thrive.
Nature can heal the problems humans have created. Let’s create more places where vegetation is allowed to flourish, maintain hydrologic cycles, and provide homes for diverse native species. This doesn’t have to mean “protected areas.” It can and should be done everywhere: along streams, in city parks, lawns, farms, and woodlots.
Modernizing human legal systems to give rights to nature would empower local communities to protect and restore their natural surroundings. Instead of being exclusively aimed at protecting individual “property” rights, our legal systems would recognize that broader interests are at play – such as mutual survival.
Indigenous legal systems already incorporate a rights of nature approach. They could be joined together with western legal systems. It would be far easier to evolve our legal system in this way than to change our political and economic systems.
Left to herself, Nature will “save the world”. But that future world might not be habitable for humans. By giving rights to other species and ecosystems, and living in harmony with nature, we will be far more likely to achieve good results.
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