Waiting to be led

Hats off to Aditya Chakrabortty for sticking his oar in – and neck out – on the Green New Deal debate.

Regardless of how much I like or dislike the policies that people do or don’t include in their version of the Green New Deal (there are too many versions), I’ve never been particularly warm to New Deal as a framing. The framing suggests that someone (presumably powerful) will come along to lead us away from danger.

For me – because climate change is a truly global issue – this is neither likely, nor desirable. The idea that a few ‘world leaders’ are going to save us with a GND (of whatever form) is a fantasy, and if anyone tells you that they have the solution, or the set of policies, my advice would be to be very wary of them – not least because they might be a fascist.

The revolution will be leaderless, it is starting to happen and you can see it starting to blossom in both the structure and the messaging of the climate justice movement. People are becoming very disillusioned with ‘globalised’ processes like COP26. They’ve stopped believing in the notion that we will be ‘led’ to safety.

Instead, with climate breakdown now lapping at their doors, they’re quietly getting on with the task of adapting to climate change and doing so in ways that transform the social and economic fabric of their locality – this practice is being dubbed ‘Transformative Adaptation (TrAd)’.

Tradders are no less committed to mitigation, no less internationalist, and no less motivated by social justice, they’ve just gone local – hyper-local in some cases. It is what Murray Bookchin called Eco-decentralism. The Make Rojava Green Again movement in Northern Syria is one example, but it is happening in more places than you probably think. In ten or fifteen years time there’s hopefully going to be a lot more of it.

More on these themes in my new book “Great Adaptations – In the shadow of a climate crisis”