#climate summit

"Humanity stands at a crossroads and must come together to realize dramatically different and supportive relationships with one another, the Earth, and all life on the planet, if we are to surmount cascading ecological and social crises now underway."

That was the message of Chief Arvol Looking Horse, the spiritual leader of the Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota peoples, who on Sunday welcomed hundreds of attendees to the 12th World Wilderness Congress convening this week in the Black Hills, or He Sapa in the Lakota language. Though these gatherings, dedicated to assessing and often resetting global conservation work, date back to the 1970s, this is the first such congress being convened by a tribal authority. The agenda is dedicated heavily to centering Indigenous perspectives in the global struggle to protect wild lands and waters.

Indigenous peoples articulate alternative environmental perspectives and relationships to the natural world. Indigenous mythologies and oral traditions express a non-anthropocentric environmental ethic. Indigenous groups offer ancient tried-and-tested knowledge and wisdom based on their own locally developed practices of resource use. And, as Native peoples themselves have insisted for centuries, they often understand and exhibit a holistic, interconnected and interdependent relationship to particular landscapes and all of the life forms found there. Despite making up a tiny fraction of the world's population, Indigenous peoples hold ancestral rights to some 65 percent of the planet. This poignant fact conveys the enormous role that Native peoples play not only as environmental stewards, but as political actors on the global stage.

All over the world, Native peoples are engaged in battles with hostile corporations and governments that claim the right to set aside small reserves for Native people, and then to seize the rest of their traditional territory. They are confronting the destructive practices of industry and leading the charge against climate change while defending the rivers, forests and food systems that we all depend on. At the same time, they are blocking governments from eroding basic rights and freedoms and turning to the courts of the world to remedy 500 years of historical wrongs. Native peoples are putting their lives on the line and fighting back for political autonomy and land rights. And all the while, they are breathing new life into the biocultural heritage that has the potential to sustain the entire human race.

Looking Horse, the 19th Keeper of the Sacred White Buffalo Calf Pipe and Bundle, is as revered among the original people of this land as the Dalai Lama is by the people of Tibet or the Pope for Catholics around the world.

"We warned that some day you would not be able to control what you had created. And that day is here. Mother Earth is sick and has a fever," Looking Horse told the group assembled from nations, tribes, and communities across the world.

The chills of that "fever"--the accelerating shocks of climate destabilization caused by centuries of colonial extraction, fossil fuel combustion, and ecological destruction--rocked communities around the world in 2023, with 2024 continuing to break heat records. A "State of the Climate" report that drew on the work of nearly 600 scientists pointed to unprecedented levels of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere as the cause of Earth's overheating. Records were similarly broken for ocean heat, sea-ice loss, and sea-level rise. In all, industrially-driven global warming exposed nearly 80 percent of the people on the planet to at least 31 days of extreme heat, another study found. This level of heat was virtually impossible if not for the burning of fossil fuels and development-driven deforestation, Climate Central researchers have reminded us.

But organizers and attendees at WILD12 aren't there to haggle over carbon credits or debate the benefits and risks of carbon capture technologies and blue hydrogen, the substance of so many climate gatherings and debates. Instead, The WILD Foundation, through decades of international gatherings, aims to interrupt one driver of climate crisis that gets far less air time than carbon emissions: the global loss of the planet's wild spaces, which for millions of years have served as the planet's lungs and carbon sinks.

Yet even conservation spaces and agendas have offered a shallow understanding of problems and solutions, overlooking the deeper cultural--and thus colonial--roots of ecological collapse. What makes this year's congress so significant is its aim to reformulate the global conservation agenda not only by placing Indigenous leadership at the forefront of conservation action, but more foundationally, by centering Indigenous knowledge and worldviews in understandings of what Western cultures call wilderness.

In other words, the cultural roots of the collapse of our shared biosphere lies not in the make, model, or brand of the tools we use to clearcut forests or fuel plastics production. Rather, it lies in a fundamental misunderstanding that goes all the way to the bottom of Western thought: the hierarchical dualism that imagines the "human" as both separate from and superior to "nature".

Perhaps the most important aspect of Indigenous cosmology is the conception of creation as a living process resulting in a living universe in which a kinship exists between all things. Thus the Mother Earth is a living being, as are the Sun, Stars and the Moon. Hence the Creators are our family, our Grandparents or Parents, and all of their creations are children who are also our relations.

What needs to be understood and challenged, then, is the very basic conceptual groundings of Western culture itself, which gave birth to capitalism as a global economic system for extracting profit both from the bodies of people racialized and gendered as "others" and from land, treated as a dead thing or "resource" to extract from. For it is these philosophical and economic assumptions that--especially from an Indigenous perspective--facilitated colonization and enabled the genocides, slavery, and racial capitalism that followed.

الصورتان التقطتا في نفس الوقت البارحة

الأولى لطفلة من غزة لا تظهر معالم وجهها من فيض الدماء

This week there is the big Climate Change Summit in Glasgow. There’s going to be a lot of talk, and I fear a lot less action.

As we saw in the last week

Emissions continued to climb in 2020 despite the pandemic induced slowdown, and

A report came out saying that plans to reduce emissions are FAR below what is needed.

So things are not looking good.

A lot of terms are going to be thrown about during the meeting. The thing is, I’m old enough to remember when the tobacco companies were faced with clear evidence that their product killed people. First they denied there was a problem. Then they pushed solutions, like low tar and nicotine cigarettes and vaping that were supposed to be safe, but really weren’t. They were lying to maintain their own profits and didn’t care how many died because of it.

The polluting industries have followed the same pattern. First they put out a lot of crap reports about how climate change wasn’t real. That created a totally bogus “controversy” where there was none and bought them a couple of decades. Now that the environmental impacts are undeniable, they are pushing “solutions” that would let them keep polluting, if only they would work, which they won’t.

Here’s a quick guide to some of the “solutions” and “terms” that people will be talking about in Glasgow.

Carbon Capture and Storage.

The idea is that you have a system that will filter what is coming out of a smokestack and remove the carbon dioxide. This is an interesting one because on some level it DOES work. You can put a scrubber inline and take out a good portion of the CO2, not all, but a goodly portion of it. The first problem arises when you have to do something with it. Remember it’s Carbon Capture and STORAGE. Where do you store it? A few decades ago they tried pumping it underground into old abandoned oil wells. The trouble was that it didn’t stay there. It soon started seeping back up. So now they talk about doing some chemical process and then pumping it underground where it will form rock and be stable. But that brings up the second problem. All of these scrubbers, and compressors, and transportation, and chemical processes, and pumping it underground use energy. Energy that likely will have its own carbon footprint. The net result is most of not all of the carbon you prevent going into the atmosphere, is offset by the amount you produce to do that. Add to that that the process is really only applicable to large factory smokestacks. It is inapplicable to cars, or aircraft, or ships, or agriculture, or livestock, or small gas appliances, or non carbon dioxide greenhouse gas sources, or home heating, or well, basically the vast overwhelming majority of sources of greenhouse gasses. Carbon Capture and Storage works, but despite how it is advertised, will not make any meaningful impact on the problem.

Carbon Offsets.

When people talk about Carbon Offsets they usually mean planting trees. Yes we emitted a million tons of greenhouse gasses, but we offset that by planting a million trees. More often they did it by buying credits from someone, or some country that planted a million trees. That sounds great, however there are several major problems with it. First trees are only temporary storage. They live twenty five, fifty, for a very few species a hundred years. Then they die, and release all that carbon. That assumes of course they aren’t cut down and used for lumber, or processed into paper, or just burned. That releases the carbon much sooner. Planting trees doesn’t solve the problem, it just pushes dealing with it onto the next generation. Then of course there’s the question of where to plant all these trees. I read an article that pointed out that at the current rate of tree planting we’d cover all the available land in trees in just a few decades, leaving no land for food production or living. It’s not really a realistic short term OR long term solution.

Carbon Neutral.

This is a marketing term. It’s presented to make companies or projects look like they have great environmental credentials, but don’t be fooled. It doesn’t mean they are not polluting. They still are, but they are buying offsets, from someone else to make it look like they are the good guys. Sometimes these offsets are from groups planting trees. Other times they are carbon credits. That is, some other company was given an allowance of how much pollution they could spew out, but didn’t use all of it. They sold the remainder to some other company with deep pockets and a desire to poison the air for profit, rather than doing the right thing. Carbon Neutral in the end still means polluting.

Net Zero

Closely related to Carbon Neutral, it’s a weasel word, a term that hides more than it informs. The critical part is the word Net. Not that the country, the term is most often used by countries, is not emitting, they’ve just defined their way out of the problem. The major export is heavily polluting fossil fuel? They don’t count it, they just say it’s the responsibility of the country buying the oil or coal. They’re major industries are heavy polluters? Change the definition. Say that the pollution belongs to the country that sold them the oil or the coal. Can’t make a previously defined target? Move the goalposts until it looks like they can. Still can’t make the targets? Define something as an offset to bring the books back in your favour. As with Carbon Neutral, Net Zero is a handy term when they want everyone to think they are doing something when in fact they aren’t.

Geotechnical Solutions

This surfaces every few years. The idea that rather than stopping polluting, we can just modify the planet. Throw up millions of satellites to shade the earth. Spray sulphur compounds into the stratosphere to block some of the sunlight. There are all sorts of ideas. They all share the same flaws. First, they all would be hideously expensive, but the companies proposing them would profit handsomely. Second, the side effects are unknown and downplayed by the people pushing them. After all no reason to mention the embarrassing details. Lastly the calculations never seem to include the environmental impacts of enacting the solutions. What would sailing thousands of cloud generating boats in the ocean, not to mention building the boats, do to the climate? What would building and running the hundreds of thousands of factories to pump atmospheric air and scrub it for CO2 cause to the planet? Not to mention to what it would do to insects, and birds, and pollen, and such that gets caught up in them? What would filling the stratosphere with sulphur compounds do to croplands when that sulphur settled out as acid rain? That’s not to mention the cost and environmental impact of mining and distributing that much sulphur if there would even be enough for the project. What would these solutions do the the monsoons that billions rely on for survival? What would these solutions do to the forests, and phytoplankton that all of us rely on for the very air we breathe? The few that have progressed beyond the theory stages to field tests have all failed. Either the technical challenges were far greater than they realized, or as with seeding the oceans with iron to promote plankton growth, they simply did not work, and produced unexpected environmental damage. No, the geotechnical solutions all look great in a TED talk or on a CGI advertisement, but in the end they would at BEST be an expensive failure. More likely they would end up being a counterproductive disaster.

The only solution to the problem is a real carbon free economy. There is a term for that:

Real Zero

No tricks. No gimmicks. No fast talking salesmen. No carbon shell games. Just stop burning fossil fuels. Move as fast as humanly possible to other energy sources. There are other sources of energy. Will it be easy? No. Will some industries collapse? Yes. But we’ve done it before. We used to light homes with whale oil and beeswax candles. We don’t do that now. We used to use wood to heat our homes and run our factories. We don’t do that now. We can move from fossil fuels to renewables, it’s just a matter of doing it. Indeed, that is the only option we have, and it has to be enacted immediately and aggressively.