Words&Dirt

“When the Big Green groups refer to offsets as the ‘low-hanging fruit’ of climate action, they are in fact making a crude cost-benefit analysis that concludes that it’s easier to cordon off a forest inhabited by politically weak people in a poor country than to stop politically powerful corporate emitters in rich countries––that it’s easier to pick the fruit, in other words, than dig up the roots.

The added irony is that many of the people being sacrificed for the carbon market are living some of the most sustainable, low-carbon lifestyles on the planet.  They have strong reciprocal relationships with nature, drawing on local ecosystems on a small scale while caring for and regenerating the land so it continues to provide for them and their descendents.  An environmental movement committed to real climate solutions would be looking for ways to support these ways of life––not severing deep traditions of stewardship and pushing more people to become rootless urban consumers.

Chris Lang, a British environmentalist based in Jakarta who runs an offset watchdog website called REDD-Monitor, told me that he never thought his job would involve exposing the failings of the green movement.  ‘I hate the idea of the environmental movement fighting among itself instead of fighting the oil companies,’ he said.  ‘It’s just that these groups don’t seem to have any desire to take on the oil companies, and with some of them, I’m not sure they really are environmentalists at all.'”

––This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate, by Naomi Klein, pg. 222-3