Each day, the environmental news gets worse. A record heatwave in the state of Bihar in India has killed 184 people, with temperatures over 40 degrees for 32 days. Greenland's ice has started melting earlier and faster than ever before, while the most recent summer in Australia was the hottest ever recorded. Not surprisingly, we're increasingly hearing the situation described as an 'emergency'.
The term now occupies a central place in the strategies of many environmentalists. The civil disobedience group Extinction Rebellion, for instance, lists as one of its key demands the need for 'the government to tell the truth by declaring a climate and ecological emergency'. Along similar lines, the Climate Emergency Declaration and Mobilisation group wants 'governments to declare a climate emergency and mobilise society-wide resources at sufficient scale and speed to protect civilisation, the economy, people, species, and ecosystems'.
In early May, the UK became the first national government to formally declare an emergency. This week, Hobart recognised 'a climate and biodiversity emergency', the first Australian capital city to do so. By one count, some 83 million people now live the 623 jurisdictions in 13 countries that have made similar gestures. Yet though I've used the 'climate emergency' slogan myself, I now worry about its implications.
For the most part, activists use such rhetoric to invoke the huge mobilisations undertaken by all the combatant nations during the Second World War. The conflict spurred governments to restructure with extraordinary speed, subordinating other priorities to the needs of the war. After the attack on Pearl Harbour in December 1941, for instance, the United States transformed production with such rapidity that, two years later, some two thirds of the economy had been integrated into the war effort.
It's an obvious historical referent for climate activists. The difference between the Australia of 1939 and the Australia of 1945 proves that, under the right circumstances, massive social and economic change can take place very quickly indeed.
Yet we can't use that analogy without considering its implications. The declaration of wartime emergency meant, almost everywhere, a suspension of certain liberties and a corresponding expansion of state power. That was, in fact, the point of such declarations: they allowed governments to ban strikes, implement censorship, prosecute pacifists and do whatever else they deemed necessary to win the war. Is that what we want today?
It might be objected that today's declarations constitute symbolic gestures, nothing more. But why should people in the ER campaign go to gaol simply for symbolism? If the declarations don't mean anything, we should stop calling for them. If they do, we should think through their implications. As Raven Cretney argued recently in Overland, we need to discuss 'what this "state of climate emergency" will look like and — most importantly — to what extent it will allow for democratic participation'.
"It's hard to imagine a society in which humanity no longer treats nature as an enemy without also thinking of one in which democracy and freedom have been massively expanded."
Historically, a declaration of emergency — whether in response to war, civil unrest or natural disaster — allows the state to abolish politics, suppressing debate and discussion so as to enable a militarised response to an urgent problem. You can see why that might appeal, in the abstract, as a solution to the environmental catastrophe. With the major Australian parties unwilling to formulate adequate climate policies, it's tempting to imagine someone cutting through the bullshit to do what needs to be done.
But whom, exactly, would that someone be? We've seen, already, scattered calls for a climate dictatorship, most prominently from the environmental scientist James Lovelock. 'Even the best democracies agree that when a major war approaches, democracy must be put on hold for the time being,' he told the Guardian. 'I have a feeling that climate change may be an issue as severe as a war. It may be necessary to put democracy on hold for a while.'
Whatever else might be said about such arguments, they totally misunderstand the nature of climate change. You can't suspend politics to tackle the environmental crisis. The environmental crisis is politics. The intensifying degradation of the natural world stems, after all, from an economic system in which the pursuit of profit drives unplanned, exponential growth.
While most of us suffer from climate change, certain corporations have grown dizzyingly wealthy from their role in driving it. We don't all share responsibility for the crisis. We don't all have all the same interest in resolving it. That's why any attempt to separate climate action from democratic struggle must be resisted.
For there is, of course, an obvious rightwing response to the crisis, one that centres on excluding climate refugees, mitigating the suffering of the wealthy and suppressing the protests of the poor, while fighting other nations to profit from the remaining resources.
It's on that basis that the European far right's now taken an interest in environmentalism, with, for instance, Marine Le Pen's National Rally (formerly the National Front) laying out a new policy on climate change. 'Borders are the environment's greatest ally,' explained a spokesperson. '[I]t is through them that we will save the planet.' Obviously, that's not the outcome that Extinction Rebellion wants.
The most exciting aspect of the new environmental resistance is its insistence on grassroots action, with ER calling for ordinary people to take to the streets and put their own bodies on the line. If we're going to resolve the environmental crisis with any measure of justice, we need more of that participation, not less. We need the entire population involved in debating and discussing how the burden of rapid economic and social change might be equitably shared.
As Casey Williams argues, 'refusing a national emergency logic is not a call to "do nothing"; it is an insistence that climate change demands the resuscitation of democratic politics ... It means rethinking political action on the basis of popular mobilisation, not using and then defending the state's most repressive tools.'
You only have to start thinking about genuine solutions to see the point. It's hard to imagine a society in which humanity no longer treats nature as an enemy without also thinking of one in which democracy and freedom have been massively expanded.
Obviously, for most people, the new rhetoric of emergency simply expresses their recognition of the need for urgent action. In that sense, it's entirely to be welcomed. Yet we should guard against those who would use urgency as a pretext for authoritarianism. The response to climate change requires more participation, not a saviour from on high.
Jeff Sparrow is a writer, editor and honorary fellow at Victoria University.
Main image: An Extinction Rebellion campaigner waves a flag in Hyde Park in London in April 2019. (Photo by Dan Kitwood/Getty Images)