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3 Responses to “Planet - how do we ensure survival?”

1. Lesley Hedges says:
   27/02/2008 at 10:39 am

   I agree and think that the planet and environment has to be included in any debate about the future state of the world and what kind of structures of production and distribution we want. The strap line of Peru’s Green Party is the environment is a luxury for the rich and a necessity for the poor. The rich are benefitting from climate change and will buy themselves out of it’s worst effects.

   We need drastic changes in consumption and an end to a system that advertises wasteful luxuries that do not bring happiness.

2. Jason says:
   08/04/2008 at 04:08 pm

   An interesting contribution on a vital subject. I think that one of the keys to getting people involved is workplace activity, both overtly political campaigns about the environmental destruction of global capitalism and struggles around workers’ control.

   This latter should of course include control over production to make our workplaces greener but be linked with a politics that shows that it is the profits of the corporations laying waste to the rainforests and ripping up the earth’s resources and that however much the masses change we need most of all to change the ways in which we run society.

   Socialism is after all the democratic control of society and resources on the basis of need not profit.
   Here’s something I wrote for NUT conference- focused on schools and colleges

   NUT bulletin: Learning to Change the World

   Young people rate climate change as one of the biggest challenges they’ll face in their lifetimes and more than two thirds are ready to take action to try to minimise its effects.

   CO2 levels are at the highest ever in human history; glaciers are melting at an alarming rate; forests, the lungs of the earth, are razed to the ground by rapacious corporations burning the earth and our future along with it.

   The debate on climate change is no longer is it really happening, but what can we do about it. A few people switching off light bulbs may be a start, but it is not going to lead to the massive and immediate change necessary to draw us back from the precipice of irreversible climate change.

   And why should the poor of India and China, or anywhere else, pay for the destruction when others are making massive profits from the earth’s natural resources? While we are busy turning off our taps, private water companies are making thousands of pounds of profit every minute (£2 billion- £3,800 per minute in the UK in 2007). We might recycle more paper and perhaps even use less in the first place, but who’s going to tackle logging companies? The World Bank estimates that 4m hectares of forest every year, an area the size of Belgium in the Amazon and another area the size of Belgium in Indonesia, are razed to the ground, mainly for palm oil production in the case of Indonesia which is paradoxically and fraudulently sometimes sold as an eco-friendly bio-fuel.

   Experts estimate that between 50% and 70% of Indonesia’s rainforests have now been destroyed. By 2015 99% of it will be gone. What can we, as teachers and trade unionists, do?

   First NUT activists need to be part of a network of activists. The Campaign Against Climate Change Trade Union conference saw some 300 trade unionists meet to plan how to bring this issue centre stage into the working class movement.

   Of course, trade unionists must demand that our workplaces are more environmentally friendly. But to make a real difference we also have to address the politics behind the situation. This can be related to exposing the role of corporations in deforestation, damaging transport and food waste. For example, UK households dump around a third of their food, supermarkets dump around £18 million worth of food every year whilst, according to the United Nations, 800 million people worldwide don’t have enough to eat. Food itself in terms of production, transportation, processing and storage accounts for some 20% of global carbon emissions. In place of this madness we should demand free public transport, sustainable food sources and distribution on the basis of need, not profit.

   We need to involve our students, helping to facilitate student groups that can campaign on the wider politics and carry out carbon audits of how the college or school expends energy, how much it recycles and a plan to improve both energy efficiency and recycling and re-use targets.

   School groups – teachers and students - can examine both in and out of lessons the politics of the global food industry and ask why we spend millions transporting food when 10 million children die every year from easily preventable diseases. This will bring us into conflict with both market-driven education provision- how much does that new academy cost, why are catering workers paid so little by fat cat companies making low grade meals? And it will contradict the government’s model of regimented test bound learning. In the process of debating these questions and learning what knowledge is state sanctioned and what blocks are put in our way, students will be learning a lot more than regurgitated facts- they will be learning to think, act and organise. This way we can perhaps really bring about a culture of learning- “debating complex political, ethical and social topics; engaging in local and school issues; investigating diverse cultures and human rights, working together, understanding others and finding out about themselves” which the government tells us we have to do!

   We should fight for schools and colleges run by the education workers, working class students and communities they serve - not geared to the narrow curriculum of the private profit system pared down to its utilitarian basic skills knowledge. We want a rounded education of enquiry, of individual and collective self-development based on knowing what we fight for and loving what we know. This way we can link the everyday politics of controlling our workplace and curriculum to global issues. Community activism and workplace struggles can play a vital role in connecting the issues and reconnecting politics with the popular imagination and a sense of our own collective power. This way our learning, our teaching and our trade union struggles can truly lead to schools for socialism and we can build a world worth living in for the children of the future.

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