Essay: Scientists link climate/ecological crisis to social transformation

February 4, 2025

by Franklin Dmitryev

The catastrophic barrage of fires in California is one of the most visible outbreaks of the climate and ecological crisis growing across the world. Official actions to combat the crisis are strikingly ineffective, even as the effects rapidly get worse and worse.

SCIENTISTS WARN OF CATASTROPHE

Scientists are trying to help by warning that the climate crisis, biodiversity, food, water, and human health are so closely linked that efforts to address one without taking the others into account often backfire. That is the core message from a new report by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), the Nexus Assessment Report (official title: “The Thematic Assessment Report on Interlinkages among Biodiversity, Water, Food and Health”). It was formally adopted in December at the IPBES plenary in Namibia.

As Grist reported, “Planting trees, for example, can be done in consultation with local communities and taking into account unique ecosystem needs. Or…a big company seeking to generate carbon credits could evict Native peoples from their land and start a plantation of fast-growing, nonnative tree species.”

The Maasai people in Kenya. Photo: Jaipatova, CC BY-SA 4.0

What is called fortress conservation means creating preserves to save forests or other types of biodiversity by banning human interference. Indigenous peoples and other communities that depend on the “protected” ecosystem often get violently evicted and abused when they practice their traditional lifeways (see “Maasai Evictions,” Sept.-Oct. 2022 News & Letters), and the ecosystem loses its most effective defenders. Economic pressure leads to human activities being allowed in the form of oil drilling, mining, or tourism, with the pretense that these enterprises follow the “highest environmental standards.” In fact, they degrade biodiversity and increase greenhouse gas emissions from the protected area.

The scientists’ warning calls attention to a basic truth: addressing systemic crises as if they were isolated or accidental problems fails, and often spawns new problems. This basic truth has been widely recognized in the ecology movement at least since Barry Commoner’s 1971 book The Closing Circle, with its “First Law of Ecology: Everything Is Connected to Everything Else.” In any case, it should long have been glaringly obvious from the disastrous results of many projects. The disregard for this fact can only be due to ideological reasons—in the sense of ideology firmly rooted in the material interests and structure of capitalist society.

Another example is the offsets that companies use to claim they have balanced out their polluting emissions that are dangerously heating the planet. These allow companies to pretend they have washed away their sins while creating a new financial industry trading in carbon credits. Meanwhile, the projects like forest protection that are granted carbon credits to sell are rife with scandals. One of those is the vast number of acres of protected trees that were storing away carbon until they went up in smoke in West Coast wildfires.

PIECEMEAL SOLUTIONS SERVE CAPITALISM

More generally, it benefits capitalists to convince us that piecemeal solutions can save us. That is meant to keep us from thinking about how we can leave behind the capitalist system that put us on the path toward climate suicide and keeps increasing emissions when the worlds’ nation-states promised in the Paris Agreement to decrease them fast enough to keep the world from heating up by 1.5 degrees Celsius compared to the pre-industrial climate. Last year already hit that threshold—there is still time and the technical possibility of preventing a long-term breach, but not if the present economic-political system continues.

One very big way the piecemeal approach is being pushed on us is the way fighting climate change has been reduced to an “energy transition.” Politicians and corporations can proudly point to increasing generation of electricity from solar and wind power, as if that is all that needs to be done! In reality, it just adds to the electricity being used while oil, methane gas, and coal continue to be burned—and plans for a vast expansion of data centers for AI and cryptocurrency translate to such an increase in demand for power that shuttered coal, gas, and nuclear plants are being reopened. The so-called energy transition is a smokescreen hiding the unmet need for a vast, deep social transformation to avoid a bleak future for humanity.

Climate action by Extinction Rebellion in London, April 2019. Photo: Vladimir Morozov/akxmedia, CC BY 4.0

Simon Pirani pointed out that Saudi Arabia’s “energy transition,” endorsed by the UK Labour government, amounts to using carbon capture and generation of hydrogen as fuel “to dress up Saudi Arabia’s criminal fossil fuel expansion drive in ‘green’ colours….It has joined the ‘transition’ mapped out by international energy companies and governments of fossil-fuel-producing countries: fossil fuel burning will continue to expand for decades; hydrogen and carbon capture will be used to give it a ‘green’ face; and renewables will be added to fossil fuels, rather than used to replace them.”

The main culprit behind addressing the linked crises piecemeal, according to the IPBES report, consists of “institutions that are fragmented and siloed and policies that are short-term, contradictory or non-inclusive.” Pirani’s analysis makes it clear that the silos (projects or systems acting in isolation from each other) are not just a habit or arbitrary choice. They serve the interests of industries trying to stave off systemic change. In other words, the root of the problem and of the resistance to solving it is the capitalist system itself.

Scientists live in this world and the IPBES report shows how they are responding to the pressure from both climate justice movements and catastrophic effects of the climate and ecological crisis. In the first place, the report not only analyzes the effects of social actions, it takes a critical look at scientific practices themselves as part of the social process.

Their response to pressure is also shown in a companion IPBES report, nicknamed the transformative change assessment report for short, which proclaims from the beginning: “Transformative change is urgent, necessary and challenging—but possible.” It boldly names capitalism as part of the “deep historical roots” of the crisis. The first of “three key underlying causes” is:

“Disconnection from and domination over nature and people [which] has deep historical roots and has had widespread impacts through colonialism, slavery, modernism, capitalism and growth-driven economies.”

CLARITY ABOUT CAPITALISM NEEDED

It is heartening to see such a report single out capitalism, colonialism, and slavery, reflecting the way they have been widely recognized as key barriers to overcome by many people in climate justice movements. Still needed is a lot more clarity on what capitalism is, and therefore how to abolish and get beyond it. That too reflects the state of the movements as well as the Left in general, not to mention the abysmal level of general social discourse, where the word has lost almost all meaning beyond signifying what team someone is on. (We can only judge by the executive summary, which neither defines nor explains capitalism, since the full report is not yet available to the public.)

Some of that lack of clarity is seen in the ambiguity of whether capitalism, etc., are causes or effects of “the view that humans are separate from and superior to nature.” Also, the two other key causes are “concentration of power and wealth” and “prioritization of short-term, individual and material gains”—as if those were not integral to capitalism! It is true that both existed before capitalism, but they have vastly intensified and are central to the way the global system works now.

Transforming the “views” and “silos” that the report criticizes ultimately requires not only a battle of ideas—which is crucial—but a transformation of the social relations that set the material ground for those views and silos to proliferate. It calls for us to develop the second negation—not only what we are against in this rotting society but the kinds of new human relations we are for as a foundation for a totally different society.

The sweeping rise of fascist tendencies in countries across the world (see “Trump grabs power, spreads hate, stirs resistance”), which is linked to climate denial and obstruction, only makes it more difficult to fight those ideas and practices. The opening these scientists have made to the climate justice movements and their associated ideas call for support and further development, as do the movements themselves, and for clarification of the ideas and elaboration of the depth and scope of the social transformation that is needed.

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