The world’s ice is melting faster than scientific forecasts, forests are burning everywhere from tropics to arctics, oceans are converted into dump yards, animal population are in a free fall, micro plastics are now in our air, water, food and foetus and environmental activists are being murdered all around the world. But come Saturday-June 5, 2021-the whole world will come together to ‘celebrate’ environment day just like last year and the year before and since 1974. It has been close to half a century of promises, pledges, laws, policies, environmental safeguards and fads that come and gone but the fact of the matter is we as a human race have very little to show for. The collective effort and urgency to deal with planetary level problems such as climate change and biodiversity loss is still missing and the few steps that we see at national and global levels are half-hearted, incapable of ushering transformation to fundamentally change the way we produce food, do business, generate power, manage waste and treat other life forms. It is an open secret that the political-industrial complex has a larger role in undermining environmental integrity than any other special group. Unfortunately, the same groups are slowly hijacking the new global narrative of transformation and building back better. It is true that we can’t solve climate change without governments and corporates taking the lead but there is too little being done to be encouraged.
For instance, fossil fuel. Its days are numbered and it will give way to renewables eventually. However, a mere technological change should not be celebrated as a win. The transformations should bring about structural and systemic change as the intergovernmental bodies (IPCC, IPBES) of UN have been demanding for years. Notice how quickly the fossil industry tried to hijack the build back better narrative by pushing a gas-based (another form of fossil-fuel) recovery on the government agenda.
Even the renewable energy revolution, supposedly about energy independence, decentralisation, local employment, and energy access to the underserved, is very much a corporate affair now. There are cases where large solar parks have demonstrated all the hallmarks of a typical mining or thermal power plant establishment in tribal areas-forceful and illegal land grab of fertile lands, bypassing land rights of local communities, impacting livelihood, police brutality, and corruption, among other things. Greenwashing is not limited to the energy sector and has a strong presence in the land-use sector too.
It is sad that many well-meaning environmental NGOs are unable to think beyond the market approach that shows our mental capitulation to capitalism, which is a reason why there is an environmental crisis in the first place. Nicholas Stern, author of The Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change 2006, famously said climate change is a result of the greatest market failure that the world has seen and yet the global narrative is still dominated by market forces.
The problem is not that there isn’t enough public money to finance restoration initiatives. The problem is that there isn’t enough political will to finance environment. Any proposition of radical change threatens this position and hence the invention of environmental fads like carbon offsets, REDD+ and net-zero.
