Is Climate Justice possible? Part 3

Justice requires elder wisdom and a willingness to be vulnerable, not an immature willingness to fit in at any cost.

This is Part 3, you can read Part 1 and Part 2 first. It was also going to be the FINAL part, until the International Court of Justice’s huge ruling this week. So there will be a Part 4!

XR Grandparents + Elders outside Buckingham Palace, 2020. Img: Crispin Hughes.

I’ve been figuring out my feelings in relation to ‘climate justice’ by spending time writing these pieces. I want to invite you to reflect on the issue too. There’s something I’ve been thinking about in all of this that seems to make a lot of sense in what’s going on in the world right now, and why we need a radical change to our leaders and our structures of how we make decisions together (‘democracy’). But bear with me as I go on the scenic route, coming back to what to do about climate justice.

So I want to invite you to think back to when you were in school. If you’ve read Part 2, you know last week I watched Mean Girls and reflecting on the archetypes and roles modelled in Hollywood films, especially around growing up, and this thought experiment has been partly stimulated by that. So, here goes:

Think for a moment when you were a child at school, or a teenager. Can you remember a time when you did something you really didn’t want to, didn’t find appropriate, or didn’t agree with, just to fit in with the other kids? Maybe it was to fit in with your parents and something they were doing you just knew wasn’t right, but went along with, because you didn’t know how or were too frightened to question it.

Take a moment to really remember something. I bet you can. I know I can.

And when you’ve got that memory, think of what’s happening in the world right now. Take just two examples: the British government’s complicity with Israel’s genocide in Gaza, or the U.S. media companies such as Paramount making multimillion dollar settlements and sacking their stars critical of Trump.

Doesn’t how you behaved as a child to fit in, and what the British government is doing, or the media companies are doing, seem similar in shape, even if much more consequential? It does to me. Don’t those who run our institutions often act like they’re childish, afraid, and terrified of losing their status and belonging — so they go along with the worst behaviour? Don’t too many grown men (and it’s overwhelmingly men) seem like babies to you, behaving out of arrogance, childishness, and a desperate fear and need to belong, to be part of the winning crowd?

The fear of being watched

Some of this is about what we do because other people are watching. Some speculate that the concepts of an All-Seeing-Eye and the idea of an Ever-Seeing-God emerged precisely because of this human psychology: we act differently when we know we are being watched. The Panopticon is there to make sure we self-censor and self-correct – it’s human psychology made external. It’s there in physics, too, after all: matter behaves differently if it is being observed.

Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon.

What’s worse, is that this blind fear to fit in and belong that drives some of the worst behaviour has an escalatory, captured dynamic to it. Once you’ve behaved badly or signed up to something you don’t agree with, what do you do? You often double down. You’re too frightened of changing your mind or behaviour, for what it admits of your existing behaviour. Watching the atrocities unfold in the world right now, we see this escalatory dynamic of violence at work. Isn’t this what’s happening?

We’ve lost our useful role models

Watching Mean Girls when I did, in between writing Parts 1 and 2, just happened to be one of the most useful and enlightening things I could do, even if it was a weird accident!

In the film, one of the girls adopts a very nasty set of behaviours and manipulates others, primarily to fit in. She does it by mimicking what the others are doing — which is already quite nasty. She even brokers a deal with another girl, who she is secretly friends with but who’s ‘off limits’ to the Plastics (the cool, rich, mean girls), to be honest with her privately even while she has to be a bitch to her in public… all to stay ‘in’ with the Plastics. So she’s publicly doing things we know she doesn’t want to, just to fit in, a double whammy of lying and shitty behaviour.

The reason why these films are so popular is because everyone recognises this behaviour. We all did things just to fit in — sometimes lie, sometimes cheat, sometimes shit on people, do things we don’t agree with. We all felt that we had to live up to badness just to fit in.

This is still going on all around us all the time. For god’s sake, this is the whip system in the British parliament — vote our way or you’re out of the party! This is basic, factual human psychology that really we should have grown out of, but many don’t. Our institutions are structured to maintain this way of being. In Falling Upward, the theologian Richard Rohr even argues that our entire western civilisation hasn’t grown out of this stage of being driven by our egos and a ‘need to fit in’ and have stuff.

In older cultures, these childish and ‘first half of life’ behaviours are carefully stripped from the growing adult through rituals and role models — things our western secular world have discarded or replaced with bad, commercial simulacrums. You could argue that films and social media platforms (well, some of them) now play these roles for us to model: in our modern world where old states of being have been erased, and we don’t get to be with people without our screens, or where we no longer have councils of elders or villages of wise people, it’s the media that gives us the roles to model.

Like the girls in Mean Girls. When the teenage audience of Mean Girls watch the film (or for that matter the 42-year-old woman audience!), what do we think of the roles the girls play: as devious-shit stirrers, as peacemakers, as a girl finding her social safety and belonging in a group? Which do we identify with? (And which do we want to identify with… possibly someone else?!) How do we learn?

Look at any successful film or franchise, especially the teen ones: the different personality, skillsets and body types in Netflix’s Stranger Things, or the four houses in Harry Potter, are all structured on purpose to appeal to different personalities in the audience, to give them different role models. It’s not new of course: The Famous Five did the same. So did Huckleberry Finn.

Where do we turn then?

But we aren’t in a film. Although we do play roles, of course, or parts of ourselves — are you exactly the same with your friends as you are with your boss or grandmother? Very rarely. And the roles we play, and how we play them, are clearer to see in our younger years, when they’re forming.

There’s a lesson here in Mean Girls and the way in which the protagonist initially does lots of things she really doesn’t want to, just to fit in and belong.

So how do we learn not to behave like this?

What are the fundamental things that exist and influence us to behave well? Did we used to have more effective mechanisms and social technologies or arrangements for ‘getting the best from us’? Rather than what we have now, where the most abhorrent behaviour is associated with the most powerful and the least loving people. They have the highest material rewards and nothing else counts. Zero sum. Capital. Power.

Well the answer is yes. We did have more effective mechanisms and social technologies or arrangements for ‘getting the best from us’. Some cultures around the world still have them.

They are called elders. Like an extended family. It sometimes takes a village.

My dear friend Paola Bay, who has developed a longstanding bond with the Mamos, Spiritual Leaders of the Arhuaco community, living in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in the North of Colombia, says that elders are the role models we need — people who behave well around us, who we can learn from, not our other childlike peers.

An elder is the kind of person who recognises that, in difficult interactions and where our very social safety feels threatened, where we are driven instinctually to try and fit in, that we can act differently — aligned with our values, not our need to belong. In conflict, elders model that someone has to be vulnerable first. Someone has to say I love you first. Someone has to be willing to be humiliated if necessary to change the dynamic.

That’s what nonviolence is — as opposed to the violence of badly behaving to fit in. It’s why the word courage has ‘heart’ in it. It’s the strength of heart that we need now – the courage to be truly honest.

So I think the same can be asked of how people perform calls for climate justice, as part of their role or identity.

What should we do?

Both on the global and the local levels this whole business of climate justice ends up being a negotiation. Either through excruciating international processes that are failing us (as the play Kyoto shows us), or through local and national politics that we are losing to right wing populism and nationalist bullshitters

I look at this and think to myself: where can truth and compassion survive? How can any person cope staring at this irrational senseless chaos? Are we all slowly losing our minds being dragged into a future nobody wants? To be honest, I am scared shitless.

It’s become really clear to me over the last few years that inequality in negotiations makes everyone’s life impossible. Like, “take your knee off and maybe then we can talk about helping each other out of this mess” is the message from people that want their fair share of energy and emissions. But also: how can you sit in your riches trying to tell others to go gently on the earth, after 200 years of abject extraction, destruction, slavery and theft?

And back at home, inequalities make the political battle easy to polarise because society already is polarised, and no amount of posturing on notions of theoretical international justice will help that, will they? There is no sign that the UK public are ready to scrap climate action, but Reform are winning in places with extreme levels of inequality and they say they will destroy “Net Zero” from the council and local level.

So, what’s missing might be the economic effort to stop the super-rich from spiralling any further away from the rest of society. That’s the action that is needed to fight for the climate, and an action that “climate justice” doesn't articulate well enough.

It’s simply about power, not carbon.

Rich, dominant and supremacist nations have been free-riding on the global poor and structural adjustments whilst the colonial era morphed into the present. If politics is our way of negotiating national management of money and resources and laws etc, we need to negotiate better, have more seats at the table, and know how we want things to go on a practical level. It is a pragmatic and practical requirement upon us to make people more equal, otherwise we won’t be capable of what these circumstances require of us.

And, we must make sure we don't forget that the terrible circumstances we have now were avoidable, and some people made sure we couldn't avoid them. However we’ve let that happen, must be learned from. If we survive this century, could it spell the end of an era of grift and bullshit, where some people got so good at lying they almost killed absolutely everyone? Are future societies going to have to be based on honesty, rather than cunning?

How power and justice are tied

I think this is what some of the climate justice advocates would agree with, possibly, in a kind of “Yeah dur Clare, that’s what we meant” way.

In my mind, though, if power and justice are tied together, then the frame for both is in fact love. If love and power are both missing from the analysis and articulation, we cannot think about what is ‘just’, can we? And perhaps for me that is why the phrase “climate justice” has not worked. It hasn’t communicated the clear need for both a rebalance of power and some acceptance that actually love is more important than justice, because:

it is only love as the organising force for how we come together, both globally and locally, that is going to be strong enough to see us through these crises.

Justice alone is not going to do that.

Perhaps it’s individualism, or the ways in which “climate justice” as an appeal, always weighted towards the global, doesn’t recognise enough the suffering that is happening in our own local — in many UK neighbourhoods. A lack of class recognition and ideas or plans for rebalancing and redress.

Perhaps it is more than this though. Perhaps the only thing that gets us through collapse at all is going to be a radical forgiveness of our neighbours. A giving up of the righteous anger for how everything became so unjust. A reminder that humanity, all humanity, is love.

I’m thinking about all this because my experience in the formation of Extinction Rebellion was hard, and I had to defend what we did a lot against critics. It was okay, but not easy. On a personal level, the reason I did so much work was because it was too interesting not to. Roger Hallam’s research and becoming part of an iterative project that really tests reality and society was thrilling to be part of, and I still find the idea that I can exert any pressure at all on the wider world completely mind blowing!

I feel like we are learning that we are free to make the world at the same time that physics is deciding that maybe we can’t…. Even if we only had a short time I’d still remake the world as much as I could. Plant a tree you’ll never sit under and all that.

As the elders say: if we’re to make it through at all, carry only light.