21/05/20, 12(38 PMWe Will Survive the Coronavirus. We Need to Make Sure We Survive Ourselves.

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OPINION ENVIRONMENT

We Will Survive theCoronavirus. We Need to MakeSure We Survive Ourselves.‘Ordinary’ people around the world have shown extraordinaryinnovation in forging practical, socially and ecologically sensitivesolutions to everyday needs. Now it's up to the rest of us to buildon that.

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21/05/20, 12(38 PMWe Will Survive the Coronavirus. We Need to Make Sure We Survive Ourselves.

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Ashish Kothari

C U L T U R E E N V I R O N M E N T P O L I T I C A L E C O N O M Y W O R L D 31/MAR/2020

A few weeks ago, children in Delhi were wearing air pollution masks. Now they are being told to wear masksagainst the coronavirus. Photo: PTI

What an astonishing slap in humanity’s face, thiscoronavirus. But the silver lining is that it is also a rudewake up call. I say ‘silver lining’, for at the centre of thisis a massive humanitarian crisis of illnesses and deaths –

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and for working classes who cannot switch to ‘online’work, whose workplaces are shut and who unlike theirbosses do not have wealth to fall back on. The COVID-19pandemic has generated historically unprecedented globalaction, partly because it has hit the rich and brought theglobal economy to its knees, but like always, the ‘poor’are paying a higher price.

And yet, we have been handed an incredible opportunityto right many historic wrongs. These relate to how wehave treated our earthly home, and each other as humans… and the two are connected.

Images of cleaner, less crowded cities, and news of thedrop in pollution and carbon emission levels are beingflashed worldwide, as ground and air mobility plummets.Likewise wildlife must be breathing a bit easier asindustrial scale fishing and hunting reduce. In The Swarmby Frank Schätzing, deep sea micro-organisms withcollective intelligence wreak mass scale revenge onhumanity for its complete ecological disregard. Whoknows if viruses are not doing precisely the same thing?Why should we think only human beings have agency,and the rest of nature is a mute bystander?

But even if the message of the viruses is not consciouslygenerated, we should heed it: the earth cannot take anymore abuse. Massive extraction of minerals and oil,humungous infrastructure slashing across landscapes, andindustrial levels of natural resource use (hunting for theglobal market, monocultural commercial agriculture andfisheries), have disrupted natural systems irreversibly. Thefatal consequences for the livelihoods of billions people,for humanity as a whole, and for countless other species,

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is starkly visible; but also clear now is how this isunleashing micro-organisms that were not earlieraffecting human beings, but now are latching on to us asnew hosts.

We have let the forces of capitalism, state-domination andpatriarchy run amok. The ever-growing chasm betweenthe rich and the poor allows the elite to run for their well-stocked nuclear bunkers, hoping they can escape thevirus, while half of humanity wonders how it will get itsnext meal if it can’t earn its daily wage to buy it.

The lack of accessible healthcare for millions in so-called‘developed’ countries like the United States, where thepharmaceutical and medical industry has been profitingshamelessly, and the impunity of the fossil fuel andmilitary-industrial complex (the Pentagon alone being theworld’s biggest carbon emitter), is clearer than everbefore. As an immediate response, we need urgentgovernmental and civil society steps for the mostvulnerable, such as what the Working Peoples Charter hasdemanded of the Indian government. But simultaneously,we have to demand more fundamental, long-term change.

21/05/20, 12(38 PMWe Will Survive the Coronavirus. We Need to Make Sure We Survive Ourselves.

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And so, here is the opportunity. We have the means torefashion the economy and polity, local to global, to beecologically respectful and socially just. But this requiresnot simply some cosmetic managerial fixes, like bankbailouts after the 2008 economic collapse, nortechnological fixes such as giant screens that willsupposedly reduce global warming. These will not stopthe periodic global crises that patriarchal capitalism andstatism set us up for. No, it means systemictransformations that replace these structures with moreequal political, economic, and social relations. We need adramatic transformation towards genuine democracy, aswaraj that encompasses all of life.

From globalisation to open localisation

This means, firstly, a focus on reversing economicglobalisation. This neo-liberal panacea promised to bringprosperity to all peoples, but instead brought enormousdistress, growing inequality and ecological devastation.The integration of production, consumption and trade intocomplex global relations, has meant that no community orcountry is able to strive for self-reliance or to protect itsown livelihoods and environment from damage bymultinational corporations and unfair trade.

Along with this is the domination of one way of beingand knowing (‘western’) over all others, colonialismonwards, and in an increasingly precarious worldaffecting even previously secure middle classes, an easyfallback to convenient scapegoats and rigid religiosity(‘those refugees and minorities are to blame’). Whichpartly explains the electoral swing to the right in so manycountries.

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But what will economic globalisation be replaced with?Open localisation, a process of striving for self-reliance inmeeting basic needs (food, water, shelter, learning, health,governance, dignity, livelihoods) from within a certainhuman-scale local region, while continuing socio-culturaland some material relations across regions (especiallyglobal exchanges of cultures and knowledges on an equalplane).

In such a system, each of us in our local communities hasa level of control over decision-making, and localisedfeedback loops bring ecological and social damageimmediately to our notice. This is unlike in a globalisedeconomy in which the damage of my over-consumption isborne by someone a thousand kilometres away. Such asystem will significantly reduce the necessity of globalmovement of products and people, with much lesschances of global pathogen spread. If this could revitalisethe rural economy and society, it will also reduce, evenreverse, the mass migration of people from rural areasinto cities, which has resulted in densely packedpopulations where disease can spread so easily.

But is local self-reliance, and such revitalisation atcommunity level, possible? Thousands of initiatives atfood, energy, water, and other forms of communitysovereignty across the world show that it indeed is. Mostof these have succeeded despite adverse macro-economicand political contexts (e.g. organic farming within asystem that promotes chemical agriculture), so imaginehow much more they could spread if there were positivepolicy environments (e.g. in India, shifting billions ofrupees of subsidy for chemical fertilisers to organicinputs).

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Crucially, this would also entail a shift back to the realeconomy, focused on actual products and services, and notthe crazy roller-coaster virtual economy of shares andderivatives on which a tiny minority of people havebecome immensely rich. It will bring back the importanceof biocultural regions, defined by close, tangible socialand ecological relationships. It will emphasise once againthat instead of the privatisation of nature and naturalresources (including land, water, forests, and evenknowledge and ideas), we need to place these in thepublic domain, with democratic custodianship, as vividlydemonstrated by the global commons movement. It willalso have to press for a significant reduction in elitematerial and energy use, as argued convincingly byEurope’s degrowth movement.

This has to be accompanied by radical democracy, wherepeople take political control in place-based collectives,rather than putting all their faith in elected parties; and bystruggles for social justice and equity (on gender, caste,ethnicity and other fronts). This means there will be noplace for the xenophobic ‘shut the borders’ call of racistand religiously bigoted right-wing forces. Civil societyinitiatives in many European countries have shown thepossibility of localisation while welcoming refugees fromwar-torn areas. In the long run, of course, such conflictzones themselves need to become areas of peacefullocalisation, as in the brave autonomy movement ofKurdish people (led by women) in the Syria-Iran-Iraq-Turkey border area. Both this and the Zapatista autonomymovement in Mexico show how communities can addressmultiple issues through local radical democracy. Thesealso show the potential of redrawing political boundariesto be more sensitive to ecological and cultural contiguity,

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identity, and relations.

The Green New Deal of Bernie Sanders in the US and theLabour Party in the UK, despite some serious flaws, andthe worker-led ‘one million climate jobs’ campaign inSouth Africa, demonstrate in earthy details how societycan move towards justice and ecological sustainability.

The transformation also needs to encompass spiritual orethical reconnection with the earth. Indigenous peoplesand other communities who still live amidst naturalecosystems have long warned of the consequences ofthinking that human beings are outside of nature, notbound by the limits and norms of the earth. In theirmovements, they have brought back a diversity of waysof being and knowing … buen vivir, ubuntu, sumackawsay, kyosei, country, minobimaatasiiwin, swaraj, andmany others … that speak of living with the earth andeach other in harmony.

‘Ordinary’ people have shown extraordinary innovation inforging practical, socially and ecologically sensitivesolutions to everyday needs, across the world. Now it’s upto the rest of us to heed the warnings, resist injustice,undermine the systems of oppression, and learn from thepluriverse of alternatives already available. Thecoronavirus has handed us a great opportunity to movetowards such a radical ecological democracy.

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Am I hopeful we will take this opportunity? We did notwhen the 2008 financial collapse hit us. But this crisis isof a different order, showing much more vividly thedangers of economic hyper-connectivity, as also thepossibility of living slower, more neighbourhood-basedlives (Italians singing to each other from their balconies!).It has awakened our humanitarian and community spiritin wonderfully diverse ways. We can and must use thiscrisis – in Greek, krisis = opportunity – to push for radicaltransformation, personal to global.

Ashish Kothari is with Kalpavriksh, Vikalp Sangam, andGlobal Tapestry of Alternatives.

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