Taking care of the territories

What can we do while so many governments march towards a world war and an irreversible climate and environmental catastrophe? We can start with measures to adapt to the increasingly hostile conditions in which the inhabitants of each territory will find themselves. Those measures, according to Guido Viale, are the link that can bind the global with the local, the inertia of governments with the response of communities that have already begun to self-organize.

Governments of almost the entire world – the large and important ones as well as the small and insignificant ones, including those who govern a large or small armed gang – march like sleepwalkers towards a world war that is increasingly less “piecemeal”; increasingly closer to a general conflagration. Irresponsible and criminal. But they also march, doubly irresponsible and doubly criminal, towards an irreversible climate and environmental catastrophe… The dilemma now seems to be only that of seeing which of those two events will come first, making the advent of the other superfluous. But the opposite is also true: if all the economic, technological and “human” resources spent on weapons – now over 2000 billion dollars a year – had been used to address the climate and environmental crisis, the course of which has been known to governments around the world for at least thirty years (Rio Summit: 1992), that senseless march towards war would have stopped: because a process cannot be fought and accelerated at the same time. Thus, both catastrophes would have been put on hold.

There has long been talk of the need for an Earth Constitution. But a constitution cannot be just a set of rules. It must first and foremost be a shared project, which today can only be the commitment of all available resources, situation by situation, to stem the course of the climate and environmental crisis: something that cannot be done by just a few, because it requires the contribution of everyone. This is the only real urgency of our time: the one on which all the others depend, starting with the fight against gigantic economic and social inequalities.

Everyone, except idiots and bad-faith politicians, now takes the ongoing environmental crisis for granted; but no one, neither at the top nor at the base of the global social pyramid, believes they have the possibility, or that it is worth it, to truly commit all their resources to address it. We must first safeguard the economy! That is, this economy: growth, development, the accumulation of capital. And launch, and then perhaps withdraw them immediately afterwards, only the measures deemed compatible with the economy, with the consequence of making them ineffective and useless, of damaging some and alienating others; and thus leaving the field open to war: this is the story, among others, of the European Green Deal. Thus the race towards the abyss proceeds at an ever-increasing pace.

Even when the global climate and environmental crisis hits hard, and increasingly often in a territory we inhabit or a distant region, which we are informed about on the news anyway – with a hurricane, a flood, a drought, coastal erosion, the disappearance of a glacier, a heat wave, an uncontrollable fire, the disappearance of one or many species – no one makes the effort to connect these phenomena to a general trend, to understand how our lives will change as these events become more frequent and more serious…