This was originally posted over a week ago, but then taken down by request as it was being considered for publication elsewhere (but not published there). A shorter version of it appeared yesterday at VT Digger.
The school I work for, the University of Vermont’s Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources, recently undertook a strategic planning exercise that envisioned four different scenarios for how the world might look in 20 years. We settled on two main axes for distinguishing the scenarios: (1) scarcity versus abundance of resources, and (2) integration versus separation or atomization, where what’s integrated is both society (less conflict-ridden, more egalitarian) and its relationship with the natural world (more biocentric in its sensibilities). The resultant four scenarios, named with a little levity, map against the axes this way:
The point of the exercise was to help the School prepare for pursuing its mission in each of the four quadrants. By definition, we are currently at the center of the diagram, so the task is to imagine how we will respond if the world moves in one or another of these four directions.
We all know what’s happened since then.
With the spread of coronavirus taking its toll on our economies and everyday lives, and with local and national lockdowns being implemented to varying degrees, the likely result includes businesses closing, people losing work and not being paid, food becoming less available, anxieties and crime spiking, and the global economy contracting.
How governments respond to these prospects is one of the key variables, but, at the very least, the current pandemic portends an overall shift leftward in the diagram. The question is whether the declines will gravitate into a survivalist, “Handmaid’s Tale” scenario — with “every man for himself” and groups competing against other groups for scarce resources — or if collective organization will enable a “Rational Rations” scenario to emerge, in which the relative scarcity of resources is dealt with reasonably, justly, and without too much conflict.
Disasters are never just disastrous; they are also an opportunity. The literature on “disaster capitalism” is fairly robust now: it documents the ways in which the shock of disasters (“natural” and other kinds) have been taken advantage of in order to bring in regimes more favorable to private economic forces and the government players that support their goals.
Here’s Naomi Klein, who came up with the term, describing its most recent form, “coronavirus capitalism“, and offering a very different alternative:
As a perhaps overly mundane example of a kind of disaster capitalism: universities, schools, and some other employers are moving very quickly in the direction of requiring their employees to work online. This is a good thing insofar as it helps us offer the services our “clients” (students, in the case of universities) have paid for and prepares us for times when learning may need to be exclusively online. But, as Anna Kornbluh argues,
the mandate for this sudden conversion of large swaths of higher education to an online format threatens to trigger a breakneck paradigm shift with unforeseen ramifications. Shock doctrines make emergencies the new normal — they turn temporary exertions into permanent expectations.
Disaster environmentalism?
If disaster capitalists are poised to take advantage of coronavirus, “disaster socialists” (as one might label Klein) can and are doing something similar. Of course, both these terms are contestable. The neoliberal economics Klein and others deride are capitalist in their preference for market mechanisms over democratic norms, but they often constitute the kind of “socialism for the rich, and rugged individualism for the poor” that Martin Luther King, Jr. and, more recently, Bernie Sanders have critiqued.
Libertarians see the current pandemic as threatening to permanently expand government, and point to developments like Spain’s “takeover” of private health care as the tip of the “socialist” iceberg. But expecting a decimated public sector to be able to effectively respond to this crisis is wishful thinking; as Farhad Manjoo puts it, “everyone’s a socialist in a pandemic.” For all its many definitions, socialism in any form contains the central claim that humans are at their best in the pursuit not of individual advantage but of social solidarity. Crises are the moments when such solidarity becomes critical.
Political paradigms aside, what has been less evident in discussions of COVID-19 is its relationship to ecology. Let’s think about some of those connections.
Infectious diseases are spreading around the world much more rapidly than in the past. An obvious cause of this is the globalized nature of our society. Airplane flights alone average 40 million a year (!) worldwide, at least up to this current crisis. But a large part reflects the increasing ubiquity of species-to-species spillovers brought about by human encroachment on the remaining areas where wild animals have been managing to survive. All of that is exacerbated by loss of biodiversity and warming temperatures. China’s wildlife markets have been a source of a few of the best known recent pandemics, but feeding a growing human population will never be free of such risks.
If a disaster like the present one presents an opportunity for capitalists and socialists alike, the ones who are best poised to say “I told you so” may in fact be “disaster environmentalists” — “climate doomers,” “deep adaptationists” like Jem Bendell, Transition Town activists, Extinction Rebels, and some of the local economy advocates, bioregional radicals, and Degrowthers who believe we should all be preparing for a large-scale societal collapse so that we can rebuild a more beautiful world when (not if) it comes.
(The politics of disaster environmentalism can get murky, having come to be as much at home on the far right, in some places at least, as on its more traditional left, but that’s another story.)
An (im)modest proposal
In the spirit of a “disaster environmentalism” of a more intellectual kind, EcoCultureLab and I are reaching out to academics at universities who had been preparing to mark the 50th anniversary of Earth Day by some combination of public events — high-profile speakers, panels, teach-ins, green-ups, climate strikes, and whatever else — to see if we can organize a multi-institutional, and even international, online and public Earth Week teach-in. I’m tentatively calling it the EarthDay+50 Pandemonium Teach-In, though it can operate under many names, some of which are being proposed already elsewhere.
The idea is to substitute regular classes — which by then either won’t be happening or their online versions will be petering out, at best — with a week-long schedule of talks, conversations, and deliberations about how the COVID-19 pandemic presages a time of cascading global crises, and how we can guide those changes in a good direction. (Say, in the direction of “Rational rations,” according to the mapping at the top, if not of “Earth Charter,” its more “abundant” yet socio-ecologically desirable relative.)
Part of this is meant as a reaction against the push for business-as-usual in these strange, new circumstances. I recognize that for some people the best strategy forward in a crisis like this is to “keep calm and carry on,” in the hope that the crisis (in this case, the virus) won’t reach you or in the knowledge that it will likely blow over, sooner or later and with greater or lesser impact. But that can also be an excuse for disaster capitalism: if you can’t work normally, we’ll have you work from home. (That your kids are also suddenly there with you all day is irrelevant. Or that your fridge is getting empty, the neighbor’s been coughing, and your mother’s been taken to the hospital.) We’ll have you work harder to learn new tools that we can then require you to use when things have returned to “normal” (and if you don’t, well maybe someone else can fill your shoes).
The other strategy is to hunker down (though “down” may not be quite right) and to stop worrying about non-essentials and realize that this situation is calling you to figure out what’s important and what isn’t. What do you need to do to protect your loved ones? Do you even know who your loved ones are? (How wide does that circle extend?) What work will keep you going in a world where business-as-usual has become an unaffordable luxury? When there’s so much to do to be happy and safe, some bullshit jobs just might start to look expendable.
It may be time for a “modest proposal” like this one, for instance:
It might even be time to reinvent the university. If you or your institution are interested in either of those proposals (the Earth Week one or the reinvention), let me know.
Further reading
- “‘Tip of the iceberg’: Is our destruction of nature responsible for COVID-19?”
- “Destroyed Habitat Contains the Perfect Conditions for Coronavirus to Emerge” (Scientific American)
- The Commons Transition Primer
- 5 ways coronavirus could help humanity survive the ecological crisis
- Coronavirus and philosophers (a collection of readings)
- And other writings by geographers, sociologists, philosophers, and others on COVID-19
- Justin E. H. Smith, “It’s All Just Beginning“
- Saleem Ali, “How the current coronavirus pandemic links to questions of ecological sustainability in the anthropocene“
