Читать книгу Environmental Political Theory - Steve Vanderheiden - Страница 8

By the end of January in 2020, 1,333 local governments, in 26 countries and representing 814 million people, had declared climate emergencies, as have 16 national governments and the European Union, calling upon themselves and others for a more urgent response to climate change than had yet been taken. The Climate Mobilization, which advocates and tracks such declarations, describes them as “a critical first step” in an effort to “rescue and rebuild civilization.”¹ A similarly dire assessment and urgent call to action is expressed by the Extinction Rebellion movement, which proclaims “an unprecedented global emergency” in which humanity is “in the midst of a mass extinction of our own making.”² In May 2019, The Guardian Editor-in-Chief Katherine Viner (following a call to do so by teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg earlier that month) issued new language guidelines, advising her staff to use “climate emergency, crisis, or breakdown” rather than “climate change,” in order to convey the requisite urgency “when what scientists are talking about is a catastrophe for humanity.”³

While such apocalyptic rhetoric is hardly new to the environmental movement, its recent coalescing around a discourse of crisis or emergency reflects not only what scientists describe as a closing window of opportunity to avoid catastrophic climate change, but also the recognition that the scope and scale of human-caused environmental change on the planet over the past half-century represents a multidimensional crisis. It will likely involve social, economic, and political crises for those affected by it, intensified as meaningful action to mitigate its various threats is postponed or otherwise avoided. “Ecological crisis” is probably an understatement for the expected period of mass extinctions that threatens to irreparably harm the planet’s biodiversity and ecological stability. Many will experience personal crises, whether from loss of places and livelihoods or through the anxiety that psychologists link to the awareness of increasing environmental insecurity. For our purposes here, however, the crisis is also one of ideas about what matters in the organization of politics and society.