The Manichean Mann. A review of 'The New Climate War: The Fight to Take Back Our Planet' by Michael Mann (NY: Public Affairs, 2021) (original) (raw)
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The Bare Life Review, 2021
I provide an account of how the climate issue has been depoliticized in mainstream climate change discourse, especially in the Global North, and particularly how political leaders in the U.S. have displaced the social conflicts driving global warming’s current and future population upheavals by appealing to various kinds of “climate nationalism.” I also briefly examine an alternative climate politics that locates the solution to surplus carbon in diverse, global struggles to submit the global economy to democratic control, and in doing so to redirect the “reproduction of real life” towards the satisfaction of social needs rather than the accumulation of private wealth.
I consider it a breakthrough of sorts. Last September a group of the leading members of the Canadian ecological and social justice movements, including Naomi Klein and David Suzuki, published The Leap Manifesto: A Call for a Canada Based on Caring for the Earth and One Another, which I characterized as “a welcome initiative towards a collective discussion for social change necessary to address the root causes of social and planetary crisis.” Then last May E. O. Wilson published Half-Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life (2016), his last volume in a trilogy, in which he breaks ranks with the conservation movement’s piecemeal and reactive approach by proclaiming and defending the ambitious goal based on the best available science that the only viable way to save biodiversity on which human life depends is to set aside at least half of the planet’s land and oceans as protected areas for wildlife. On August 15, Bill McKibben, co-founder of 350.org and the acknowledged public face of the climate justice movement, published a major policy essay, “A World at War”, in the New Republic in which he outlines an action program for transition to a post-carbon economy by 2050. Four days later, on August 19, The Climate Mobilization (TCM), released an incomplete draft of its Victory Plan, which goes much further in scale and scope than McKibben’s essay. As activist who has been arguing for the need for a broad discussion in the climate justice movement leading to adoption of an action program to use for education, organization and mobilization of largest possible sections of the public (Nayeri, 2015, 2016) I see these as important steps forward. The TCM’s example of proposing a draft action program for discussion and critique by its membership and the public must be commended. What follows is my own critical assessment of these recent important steps. While I focus my remarks on climate change and McKibben’s and TCM’s proposals, the reader will note that they are addressing the planetary crisis and all its manifestation that are in fact part and parcel of humanity’s socioeconomic and cultural crisis. No ecological/environmental crisis exists that is not a manifestation of Our Way of Life.