Violence. Brad Evans

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FIVE

      OUR CRIME AGAINST THE PLANET AND OURSELVES

      We are both offenders and victims. But some are more guilty than others.

      While mainstream discourse continues to debate whether or not catastrophic climate change is caused by humans, discussions about what sort of disasters we’re facing—and how they might yet be prevented—are stymied. Throughout her career, Australian philosopher Adrian Parr has addressed the problems of environmental degradation as being inseparable from the vise grip that capitalism has on our lives and political imaginations. Against a neoliberal landscape that might recognize the dangers of climate change but deploys a language of perpetrator-free disaster, Parr insists that we understand environmental degradation as not only a form of mass violence but also a crime against humanity, which demands no less than a questioning of what it means to be a human. Here we discuss why it matters to talk about the environment in terms of structural violence, and what justice could even look like for a crime in which we are all—to differing degrees—both perpetrators and victims.

      Natasha Lennard interviews Adrian Parr

      May 18, 2016

      Adrian Parr is a professor of environmental politics and cultural criticism at the University of Cincinnati and the director of the Taft Research Center. Her books include The Wrath of Capital and Birth of a New Earth: The Radical Politics of Environmentalism.

       Natasha Lennard: In your work, you raise the idea of framing climate degradation as a form of violence and potentially as a crime against humanity. What does it mean to speak of the human destruction of the climate in terms of criminal justice? Is there a distinct guilty party that can be held responsible for this crime?

      Adrian Parr: There are three components to the claim that environmental degradation is a crime against humanity. First, it is an appeal to a universal, common humanity that stretches across space and time and that is oblivious to geographic and historical differences. Second, the crime in question is an existential one that is committed against the very experience of being human, the human élan. Third, it is a crime that calls the established legal order into question, because everyone, yet no one specifically, can be held responsible.

      What is the nature of this crime? The human species is the agent of a terrible injustice being perpetrated against other species, future generations, ecosystems, and our fellow human beings. Examples include contaminated waterways, mass species extinction, massive fossil fuel consumption and greenhouse gas emissions, and unsustainable rates of deforestation, to name just a few. This is leading to extreme and more frequent weather events, expanding deserts, loss of biodiversity, collapsing ecosystems, water depletion and contamination, and the rise of global sea levels.

      However, humans are not all equally guilty of this crime. Some, such as those advancing the interests of the fossil-fuel industry, or those whose high-income lifestyles carry a heavy environmental footprint, are implicated more than those living in poverty. Present and past generations are collectively more at fault than future generations.

      At the same time, the human species is an agent of justice, having crafted laws designed to hold criminals accountable. Troubled when we witness violence, discrimination, and unnecessary cruelty, we also individually serve as vehicles of justice.

       Yes, so if we consider our relations with our environment to be criminally violent in nature, we find ourselves in a tension as both potential perpetrators and victims but also as the vehicles whose obligation it is to deliver justice. Why do you think it’s important or useful to frame climate degradation this way?

      A crime against humanity is an action that causes severe and unnecessary human suffering, and environmental destruction unquestionably degrades the quality of human life.

      The degradation of the environment is a record of past and present human activities. Ours is a landscape that bears the burden of human atrocities waged against other humans through war. The battered and burnt-out environments of Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan are a few recent examples of this. The more than four million refugees fleeing the conflict in Syria reported by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees is the horrifying consequence of years of conflict decimating not only that country’s social, cultural, economic, and political systems but its environmental resources as well. Then there is the continual annihilation of numerous habitats which both humanity and other species depend upon for their survival. All of this provides evidence of an environmental crime being committed against humanity.

      If this situation continues unabated it will cause extreme harm to future generations and eventually a gratuitous loss of human life. Let me ask: should we confer greater existential importance upon present generations of human beings than future ones? Environmental degradation, and in particular climate change, denies future generations their agency through no fault of their own, leaving them with a world that could very well reduce what life remains to that of mere survival.

      This is a crime against what makes us uniquely human—the creative agency that comes from a combination of reasoning, imagination, and emotion. We may all have different capacities and opportunities through which to realize our agency, but we share the same ability to collectively and individually realize our innovative potential.

      Because human activities cause this environmental damage, our species is culpable for a crime we are committing against ourselves. But in our defense, humanity is largely trapped by the political form of liberal state power, which facilitates the smooth functioning of global capitalism—the source of the problem.

       On that point, you suggest that climate change cannot be properly challenged with the tools or “innovations” of the neoliberal, capitalist system that caused it. Can you expand on this?

      Absolutely. In my view, it is futile to try to solve the harms being inflicted upon the environment using the same mechanisms that produced the problem in the first place. Environmental degradation is the concrete form of late capitalism. The failure to recognize and respond to this situation is in bad faith.

      For instance, the idea that we can “green” a capitalist economy without radically rethinking the basic premises at the heart of neoliberal economic theory is truly an example of misplaced politics. The system is premised upon a model of endless growth, competition, private property, and consumer citizenship, all of which combine to produce a terribly exploitative, oppressive, and violent structure that has come to infuse all aspects of everyday life.

       Yet you have worked with UNESCO in the past—an example of an organization that I think it’s fair to say is more interested in mainstream climate “solutions” than in radical political change. How do you approach this contrast?

      It is important to strategically work across a variety of political platforms in order to be effective. I am completely realistic about the limitations of my role as a UNESCO water chair, meaning I acknowledge СКАЧАТЬ