Western colonial structures continue today to steer the binary categories of Human vs Nature, through Enlightenment and Darwinist thinking that enables the Man’s ‘right’ to dominate over the Earth. With capitalism and war, this has resulted in great environmental devastation over three centuries, which is ongoing in the forms of greenhouse gas emission, deforestation, ocean acidification, ice caps melting, pandemics, desertification, biodiversity loss and much more.
Third World and Indigenous people experience the brunt of environmental racism. Many have become climate refugees, who are dispossessed from their homes, lands, or forced to live amongst the wreckage of climate catastrophe. Workers put themselves and their health in danger digging for minerals, sorting out plastic rubbish, dealing with industrial waste. Climate crisis is a mass disabling process.
The state is uninterested in taking meaningful climate action, and this includes ‘green’ political parties that advocate short-sighted policies around carbon prices and fossil fuels. A parliamentary path to climate justice totally contradicts what is actually needed to overturn colonial structures and ways of being in relation to the Earth. We believe you can’t consume your way into saving the environment, as this excludes people without money to afford ethically produced goods, and disregards the multinational corporations and states that create the most damage. We also disagree with Climate Leninists that dealing with environmental crises necessarily requires further centralisation of power via a state.
We believe in the necessity of Indigenous sovereignty for a decolonial ecological justice. We seek to learn from past and ongoing campaigns led by Indigenous peoples, as well as their community-based management methods, environmental knowledges to look after nature and biodiversity. This requires solidarity with Indigenous peoples’ in defending their lands and their ways of life.
We also believe in building working class movements that can undertake direct action for environmental justice at a mass scale, through radical unions. Workers deserve to have their livelihoods protected within the industries they are in, and this requires workers’ self-management and common ownership. Our understanding of common ownership is not ‘nationalisation’ as a way of centralising power. We seek the restoration of land ownership to First Nations, but also for workers to self-manage industries in alignment with treaty agreements.
We are in solidarity with environmental activists under state repression, even if we have strategic disagreements. While we recognise the urgency of climate change and those experiencing climate disaster, we are keen to do that through building relationships with First Nations communities and organisations, as well as agitating within workers movements.
While there are limitations of campaigning for legal and heritage rights methods to protect the Earth, this does not mean we refuse such tactics if it aligns with our politics and strategy. In order to halt environmental destruction in the short term, we are supportive of reforms such as Just Transition, as a starting point to common ownership and control of energy, departing from corporate control, and moving towards renewable energy and technology that is accessible for everyone in the world – not just the Global North.
