I would hate to see the global environmental movement that has been focused around Copenhagan make the same mistakes as the global justice movement, ie pouring lifetimes of energy into noisy protest and token resistance against the status quo, rather than into building viable alternatives to it. We know that the globalized military-industrial society is unsustainable, yet most of us (myself included) are still dependent on it for our daily survival. Surely some of the energy we put into radical direct action could be used regenerating independent (and interdependent) living systems that can sustain us into the future, and documenting what works and what doesn’t so we can learn from each others’ experiences?
Ultimately, no matter how many times we hold protests to demand that renewable energy replace fossil fuels, it can only happen if low-tech renewable technologies are developed and shared with the majority of the world’s people. The state-corporate elites are not going to do that for us. To the degree that they develop renewable energy systems, they will be think-big, capital-intensive projects like the mega-dams, and offshore wind farm, or encumbered with “intellectual property” restrictions, so that only those who can afford to buy them as consumer products will have access. We need to be experimenting with community-scale energy systems that can be made from readily available materials. We need to be documenting them, online and in print, using tools like Creative Commons and ‘open patents’ to prevent them being made into property, and sharing them as widely as possible.
Don’t get me wrong, protest and campaigning have their place. As we build our alternative systems and become less dependent on the corporate gridlock the global elite will work hard to find ways get away with sabotaging and frustrating our efforts. The elite are doing everything in their power to shut down the free and open internet, through international treaties like ACTA, harassment of online services like the Pirate Bay, and state-imposed filtering systems. There are big battles ahead, most importantly the battle to defend free access to water for drinking, cooking, washing, and irrigating our food. The climate change campaign is important too, in the context of fighting against the privatization of the climate/ air and the legitimization of air pollution which threatens our access to quality water through acid rain, drought etc. I now believe that the anti-NWO climate skeptics are partly right that the green movement has been hijacked - that our climate change activism has been spun as support FOR privatization of the climate, through carbon trading. This must change.
