The awakening to climate catastrophe

Shah Rukn e Alam

The coming climate catastrophe, the horrors that it will unleash require a political, cultural and spiritual awakening. 

Spiritually we must recognise that we live in an interconnected world, a whole that has been generously supplying life to the planet. Capitalism and consumerism invisiblises everything that is not governed by the logic of profit. Like the exploited worker whose labour may put a product on our menus but his story of exploitation will be erased. In the same way that the exploitation of women by our patriarchal structure is papered over by pictures of happy families and healthy children. In this same way this system ignores the ecologies that provide livelihoods to people, keep our air clean, protect us from the elements and make life on this planet worth living. It is a system that takes the parts of us that should be filled with gratitude and understanding and replaces them with entitlement and ignorance. This spiritual understanding, this recognition of the collective of the whole that gives life to our societies needs to be inculcated through schools and universities, mosques and mandars, our media. Institutions and rituals need to be created that remind us of the whole the collective, that teach us to feel for that whole and be grateful tk it, and take care of it. 

It is through this spiritual awakening that we can reject the values being shaped by our capitalist order and our neo colonial state that teaches us to hate people for their lack of wealth and power instead of being grateful to, and genuinely valuing the work they do. It is only when we recognise that a world where we get to live in cordoned off housing societies surrounded by exploitation and hunger is not a world worth living in that we will be able to build an alternative. 

Politically once we have recognised the whole, and chosen to value it the question becomes how to prepare for the coming climate catastrophe. 

We must prepare for the coming

-food crisis
-Water scarcity crisis
-heat wave crisis
-homelessness crisis
-flooding

To meet the coming challenges we require:

1- Institutions capable of mobilising a collective response
2- Financing that can be put to use to build resilient safe communities. 
3- Proactive democratic institutions that empower local communities and keep a check on capital from disrupting local ecologies. 

Simply put we require a revolutionary transformation in our politics that recognises the collective . 

Our current politics is paralyzed, by a state that has consistently chosen to weaken our collective capacities. It is a rentier state that has gambled our collective future on making wars for the United States. It is a state of housing societies and private security, capable of destroying the collective will for private interests but unable to foster it. It is a state that refuses to tax its rich or hold them accountable. It is a state that has consistently viewed the collective as a geopolitical liability. Again and again we see the destruction of our collective will in our rigged elections, in the banning of workers and student unions, in the a democratic system that gives us no real alternatives. 

It is the reality of our neocolonial state, that it has written off its economic sovereignty to foreign debtors and the IMF. The State Bank is beholden to the politics of United States moreso than the people of Pakistan. The capacity of the state to spend has been curtailed by IMF conditionality. 

And so we have been left in a situation where the collective will and politics can not generate or control investment. It can not shape the cities we need, nor the programs we need to create food security or water security. We can not invest in insulated housing or green technologies. We have empowered a construction industry that can only imagine solutions that displace people. So that rather than investing in aquifiers we create massive dams that endanger locals and intensify conflicts between punjab and the other provinces. Again these conflicts have been generated because the state has invested its wealth in destroying our collective capacities to ‘protect’ the privileges of a narrow elite. The collective has been treated like a threat and so the state has constantly created a state of exception that has allowed it to exploit its peripheries and destroy attempts at collectively organising working class people, people in the peripheries and women. 

But it is only in tapping the power of the collective and the community that we can create an effective response. 

To create a response that recognises the whole we must put the people most vulnerable to the crisis front and centre of the response. This means working class people, people from peripheries, and women must be given representation in the committees we form and the decision making institutions that we create. 

We must tap into the power of the collective to meet this collective crisis. A purely top down technocratic approach will not be able to recognise the needs of the people on the ground nor will it be able to foster relationships with these communities that is essential if we are to create a coordinated response. 

Secondly we need to assert the collective will of the people on investment. This means that we need to develop a non aligned independent foreign policy that rejects our rentier security state paradigm. And focus on asserting national collective control on our state bank. It means controlling import consumption and the redistributing wealth. It means taxing the rich and instituting capital controls if necessary. We need to tax real estate to push that investment into productive enterprises. And we need land reform to press empty land in the service of providing livelihoods and housing and creating food security. 

The point of 

1- State Bank Collectivisation 
2- Land Reform
3- Land Taxation
4- A non aligned foreign policy
5- Revitalising state capacity
6- Building up food security and our capacity to build necessary medicine amd other goods, increasing exports is to assert national control over investment. 
7- Develop internal climate funds from any emissions-based activities

This investment must be directed towards 

1- Provision of public transport, through railways and buses
2- Investing in our aquifiers to store water and build up our water security
3- Building sustainable efficient housing 
4- Nuclear, solar and wind power. 
5- Building and updating our infrastructure to be environmentally friendly
6- Investing in sustainable agriculture that focuses primarily on reducing our food insecurity rather than producing food that fetches high international prices.
Farmers should be subsidized and incentivised to transition to holistic, less water intensive or sustainable crops. Monocropping and monoculture should be discouraged, biodiversity promoted and the use of GMO seeds should be rolled back with farmers allowed to breed and retain ownership in their own seeds. Women’s contribution to farming should be recognised and rewarded, and they be economically empowered to help farming transition to more sustainable practices. Benefit sharing mechanisms should be developed so that commercial entities profiting from developing seeds are required to pay contributions to the farming communities from whom they gathered their knowledge. Halt farming practices that introduce more GHG like methane into the atmosphere. Hand more and more farmland back to nature, so it can have a corrective effect on our carbon emissions. 
7- Building the resilience of front line communites in a way that empowers them and allows them to preserve their way of life
8- Cleaning up our cities and streams, and investing in trash proccessing and collection
9- The programs chosen by indigenous communities
10- Invest in lower riparian infrastructure. Build canals and use them build trading ties with India and Central Asia

Activating the collective

1- Declare a climate emergency and use educational institutions and media to spread awareness about the coming crises and the need for a collective response. People must educated in using their resources like water and electricity in a more sustainable way

2- Create a people’s assembly. Throughout the state create spaces for regular peoples. assemblies where they are encouraged to discuss local issues and national issues. It is essential that we empower these assemblies, and politicise them to discuss the current crises and organise against them. 

3- Immediately acquire funds to provide relief for communities in Balochistan, Siraiki Waseb and Sindh. The media should be mobilised to spread awareness of the climate threat and the current costs. The media must be made to prioritise the publicising the costs of climate change especially in the peripheries. This is essential if we are to create the consciousness of a collective crisis. 

We also need to develop state institutions that can record the costs of climate change, and coordinate reponses to them in this regard we need:

1- A revitalised Bureau of Statistics that has the capacity to measure the costs of climate change. 

2- We need to a create a well funded national climate change authority that is empowered and can generate policy responses to the exceptional challenges we are likely to face.