Soil Not Oil: Environmental Justice in an Age of Climate Crisis

Posted January 16th, 2009 by admin

by Vandana Shiva

“Work is energy. Two crises of our times are intimately connected — the climate crisis and the unemployment crisis. As long as we address these crises separately, we will not solve either. The climate crisis is normally addressed scientifically in diagnosis and economically in terms of solutions. However, economic solutions are offered only within the global market and commodification paradigm. The most recent example of this is the Stern report [a 700-page report by economist Lord Stern of Brentford for the British government on the effect of climate change on the world economy]. In it, people do not figure anywhere. However, substituting the work of people with work done by machines running on fossilized carbon is a major contributor to the pollution of the atmosphere and the climate crisis. Bringing work to people and people to work can be a significant solution of the crisis of human disposability and the crisis of climate disruption.”
“The mechanistic worldview and the industrialization process have promoted the overextraction and overconsumption of resources, and yet it externalizes the energy and resources it uses, as well as the waste and pollution it generates, from the calculus of productivity and profit. This has led to three interrelated effects: the exhaustion of natural resources; the build-up of pollution; and the destruction of people, communities, and cultures.”