The Hollowness of ‘We’
Only a portion of human beings, not humanity, are responsible for our ecological crisis
Popular portrayals of our ecological crisis are suffused with narratives that ‘we are all to blame’. These stories position humanity as a whole as “responsible for the climate crisis”, guilty of centuries of negligence.
Yet the story of climate change is inseparable from inequality. Put simply, not everyone has contributed equally to the emissions driving our ecological crisis. Who is then responsible?
The answers lie in the approaches we take. If we assign responsibility by country, the United States carries 40 per cent of world emissions debt. There are also ‘carbon creditors’: states whose share of CO2 emissions has been smaller than their share of global population, including Bangladesh, China, India, Indonesia and Pakistan.i
In 1825, Britain was responsible for 80 per cent of all emissions from fossil fuels; by 1850, it was still responsible for 62 per cent.ii The ‘richest states’, despite having less than a fifth of global population, has been responsible for four-fifths of historical carbon emissions. Until 2000, the United States had emitted 27.6 per cent of historical emissions, while Nigeria had emitted 0.2 per cent and Brazil 0.9 per cent.iii Today, El Salvador’s average emissions per capita are 45 times lower than the Qatari average, and 15 times lower than the US average.iv
If we blame the companies where the emissions originated, then the figures look somewhat different: only 90 companies are responsible for nearly two-thirds of all emissions since 1750.v Half of those emissions were emitted after 1988, by which time the threat of climate change was widely known.vi. One study found Exxon Mobil alone responsible for 3.22 per cent of global emissions between 1751 and 2010.vii
But what if we allocated the blame to individual consumers? Oxfam reports that the richest 10 per cent of the world population is responsible for half of global emissions.viii The poorer half of the world is responsible for a mere tenth. History shows that the richest one per cent have emitted around 175 times more than the poorest 10 per cent. ix The richest one per cent of Saudi Arabians have an emissions footprint 2,000 times greater than the poorest Malians.x
Neither is every molecule of gas emitted into the atmosphere identical; there is a difference between superfluous and subsistence emissions.xi Some scholars have argued that a sixth of the global population should be exempt from responsibility, and excluded from emissions counts, given their minimal level of resource use.xii
Whatever arithmetic we adopt, the sheer asymmetries stake out a few general rules of climate inequality:
- The world’s richest peoples tend to use more energy, drive larger cars, heat larger homes, take more flights and buy more things. Around 80 per cent of the planet’s resources are consumed by a fifth of its population.
- Inequality can exacerbate emissions. The more economically unequal a country, the higher its carbon pollution tends to be.xiii
These rules run parallel to the laws of unequal impacts:
- Those most responsible for climate change are likely to be the most unaffected, and the most able to adapt.
- Those least responsible for climate change are likely to pay the highest costs and experience the strongest impacts.
These laws clearly undermine the usefulness of inculpating humanity — an all-encompassing “we” — as the root source of ecological devastation. Although the reach of climate violence is planetary, and thus universal, its origins and its implications are thoroughly particular.
Why does the genealogy of emissions matter? By looking at inequality we gain a clearer understanding of the genesis of our ecological crisis, and the obstacles that prevent a bold response. We begin to see that the story of climate change is not a millennial tale of indiscriminate human negligence, but a contemporary one, where unequal power has been obtained through unequal pollution. Given the tight link between power and pollution, it has served the interests of the powerful, from states to companies, to deflect attention from the origin of their wealth. Laying the blame for climate change at the feet of humanity as an abstract whole is far more convenient for many interests, than narrowing our focus to the structural roots of unequal consumption, histories of colonialism, and our exploitative economic system. This analytical sleight of hand is not just recurrent across ecological issues. Whether it be institutional racism or the insidiousness of patriarchal norms — it is highly misleading and disempowering to view systemic problems as mere outcomes of the callous acts of individuals.
There is another deeper flaw with the idea of us all being responsible for climate change. The story of universal ecological blame implicitly associates humanity with destruction, hubris, and an inability to think along long timescales. We destroyed because we could not stop ourselves, or inhibit our unrestrainedly acquisitive and aggressive instincts. Humanity, the flawed species of boundless intelligence and cruelty, overrode boundaries, looting and polluting. Tackling climate change thus requires a correction of ‘human behaviour’.
This idea not only grossly overcomplicates the climate crisis — after all, how do we change what is innately inevitable — but relies on a narrowly inaccurate depiction of human nature. To be human is to be able to shape the environments we inhabit. But to be human is not to destroy. Just as we have eroded the ecosystems we rely on, human beings have also enhanced and restored them. The history of nature is one both of destruction and defence, protection and plunder, attention and carelessness. When we see vast stretches of rainforest, we often imagine pristine areas, unspoiled by the damaging touch of humans. Many of us have grown up with the myth of separation, taught to see safe nature as empty of human life. But forests have always been inhabited by human beings. What we imagine as virgin forests are often cultural landscapes. The vast majority of our planet’s territory has been inhabited and marked by humans across their history.xiv
The inhabitants of these lands held diverse visions of nature, some rooted in distance, but most in devotion. Forests, seas and all spaces of life, were populated by forces outside of human control, the venerated homes of spirits and gods.xv Many peoples saw and continue to see themselves as inseparable from the rivers, trees, air currents, rains and animals that surround them. This nonhuman world was imbued with language, spirit, and soul. Life evolves as dialogue, mutual and reciprocal connection with other beings.
Such intimate connections led many societies to assert the importance of care for our life-giving surroundings. Institutions and social norms were developed to manage practices. Self-destruction was controlled through taboo. Everyday rituals and ceremonies celebrated and offered gratitude to the abundance of life. Children, from an early age, were instructed in the library of life that surrounded them, learning ancestral stories about local flora, fauna and topography.xvi
These practices of coexistence and dependence generated mutually beneficial relationships between human beings and their environments. Various studies have shown how the biological diversity of our habitats has been promoted and developed by indigenous and peasant peoples.xvii The Amazon was inhabited by thousands of communities who actively enriched the forest. In the region of British Columbia, First Nations communities nourished coastline forests, improving their fertility and soil quality.xviii In Guinea’s Kissidougou region, local farmers have historically transformed and replenished the landscape, planting protective forests around human settlements.xix European peasant economies, until the 19th century, tended to maintain high levels of biodiversity.xx
In this sense, human beings have been vital participants and contributors within ecosystems, honing a mutually supportive relationship between culture and biology. From Papua New Guinea to Brazil, Mexico to the Democratic Republic of Congo, it is no coincidence the areas of the world with the strongest cultural and linguistic diversity overlap with the areas of strongest biological and agronomic diversity.xxi
As a general rule, human diversity concurs with environmental diversity. Although indigenous territories make up just a fifth of the earth’s surface, they hold four-fifths of the world’s biodiversity.xxii As the Kuna leader Geodiso Castillo notes, ‘where there are forests there are indigenous people, and where there are indigenous people there are forests.’xxiii The geographer Bernard Nietschmann called this ‘symbiotic conservation’. As Nietschmann noted:
‘The vast majority of the world’s biological diversity is not found in gene banks, zoos, national parks, or protected areas. Most biological diversity is in landscapes and seascapes inhabited and used by local peoples, mostly indigenous, whose great collective accomplishment is to have conserved the great variety of remaining life forms, using culture, the most powerful and valuable human resources, to do so.’xxiv
Recalling the diversity of relationships human societies have maintained with their broader environments can help clarify our diagnosis of the ecological conundrums we face today.
The story of climate change is one of the rise to dominance of a particular human relationship with nature, defined by callousness. Today we are blinded by that relationship, locked in its logic of devastation. The fixation of one expression of human nature teaches us that destruction is both our identity and our destiny. We assume that our malice is like air, inextricably part of the background. But humanity as a whole has not generated this crisis. The imposition of a particular worldview has crushed other options, and blotted out non-hegemonic visions of society and the economy, that show us that alternatives are abundantly possible. It is up to us to elevate these alternatives, unifying movements of the many, to dismantle the destructive realities inculcated by a few.
Note: This article appears in the January 2019 edition of Consented Magazine. Extracts of this article appear in the book The Memory We Could Be: Overcoming Fear to Create Our Ecological Future, published in 2018 by New International Books.
i H Damon Matthews, ‘Quantifying historical carbon and climate debts among nations’, Nature climate change, Vol 6, No 1, 2016.
ii Andreas Malm, ‘Searching for the Origins of the Fossil Economy’, Verso Blogs, 4 Dec 2005.
iii Andreas Malm, ‘Who Lit This Fire?’, Critical Historical Studies, Vol 3, No 2, 2016.
iv World Bank, ‘CO2 emissions, metric tons per capita’, nin.tl/WorldBank
v Richard Heede, ‘Tracing anthropogenic carbon dioxide and methane emissions to fossil fuel and cement producers, 1854–2010’, Climatic Change, Vol 122, Nos 1–2, 2014.
vi Douglas Starr, ‘Just 90 companies are to blame for most climate change, this “carbon accountant” says’, Science Magazine, 25 Aug 2016.
vii Richard Heede, op cit.
viii Timothy Gore, ‘Extreme Carbon Inequality’, Oxfam, 2015.
ix Ibid.
x Andreas Malm, ‘Who Lit This Fire?’, op cit.
xi Anil Agarwal & Sunita Narain, Global warming in an unequal world, Centre for Science and Environment, 1991.
xii Andreas Malm & Alf Hornborg, ‘The geology of mankind?’, Anthropocene Review Vol 1, No 1, 2014.
xiii Danny Dorling, ‘The rich, poor and the earth’, New Internationalist, 13 Jul 2017.
xiv Víctor M Toledo & Narciso Barrera-Bassols, La Memoria Biocultural, Icaria Editorial, 2008, p 59.
xv Robert Pogue Harrison, Forests: The Shadow of Civilization, University of Chicago Press, 2009.
xvi Eduardo Kohn, How Forests Think, University of California Press, 2013; Focus on the Global South, From Latin America to Asia, Learning from our Roots: A conversation on Vivir Bien, Aug 2013; Krista Langlois, ‘When Whales and Humans Talk’, Hakai, 3 Apr 2018.
xvii See Víctor M Toledo & Narciso Barrera-Bassols, op cit; César Carrillo Trueba, Pluriverso, Ediciones Abya-Yala, 2008.
xviii Andrew J Trant et al, ‘Intertidal resource use over millennia enhances forest productivity’, Nature communications, Vol 7, 2016.
xix Vimbai C Kwashirai, ‘Environmental History of Africa’, Eolss Unesco Publication, 2012.
xx Joachim Radkau, Nature and Power, Cambridge University Press, 2008, p 22.
xxi Víctor M Toledo & Narciso Barrera-Bassols, op cit.
xxii The World Bank estimates that 80 per cent of the planet’s biodiversity lies within territories and lands of indigenous peoples.
xxiii Cited in Stanley Stevens, ‘The Legacy of Yellowstone’, in Conservation Through Cultural Survival, Island Press, 1997, p 27.
xxiv Ibid.
