Conclusion

A recent essay in a Flemish quality newspaper carried a title that struck me: “The truth exists (but doesn’t matter)”, Subtitle: “Why facts are not so important in politics.”²³² That’s scary, at a time when 20,000 scientists say we’re fucked if we don’t change our ways. At the end of 2018, even the too soft and slow IPCC panel said that “unprecedented changes are needed”²³³.

If facts would be important in politics, all politicians would say that the era of oil, coal, gas and uranium is basically over, and having gorged on it, so is the relatively stable climate in which humanity has thrived. They would say: “our economy is built on sand, but the sand is running out of stock”. They would admit that until now, they have utterly failed in addressing the sixth mass extinction of all life on earth and tell all voters that no matter what they once promised, this civilizational crisis is now too big to put behind other priorities. What humanity needs is political leadership that declares war on mass extraction to avoid mass extinction. What humanity has is a liar-in-chief at the White House. Trump promotes the extractive industry like no other, because he doesn’t care about facts and because the scene has been set for fact-free politics over the years.

The truth is constantly under siege from a polluter’s paid army of merchants of doubt. They sell lies for a living. Too many corporate-funded media give unchallenged airtime to such truth-deniers. We need the most inconvenient facts of all always at arm’s length. When I got a chance to speak at a business TV channel I ignored communication rules (and the proposed frame) to talk about the sixth mass extinction of life on earth, because I felt it was necessary that the science on this also reached an audience that is used to discussing barriers to more economic growth.

Some people confuse my message with my personality, or say they get depressed from my book. That’s neither the purpose nor helpful. It’s not because there’s a lot of bad news that I’m a negative person, pre-coffee morning’s aside. I do believe we can change the way humanity lives on this earth, radically. Private banks can be public, or in the hands of groups of people with good ideals on what to fund and what not. Similar story for energy, water, schools and more. There’s no nature law forcing us to trade in hot air to enrich traders and industrialists while not helping to reduce emissions. We can quit calling everything that is of value a “trade barrier”. It all starts by admitting that when it comes to trying to save humanity from an ugly civilizational collapse, greening capitalism failed as a solution and is in fact a dangerous illusion. The choice we face is between sleepwalking to a civilizational crash that will probably be unlike anything since the fall of the Roman Empire or to reconnect the bonds in communities and with the earth and from there find a social and fair way to radically slow down a vastly overheated industrial economy before it burns out all people. Most green labels and green growth myths are only hopium for the people. False hope to keep us from coming together and revolting.

Facts are important, but only stories stir people into a revolution. Stories have far greater power to move people than facts and that’s why I choose to bring story after story to show what is going on. Laudato Si from Pope Francis was just an example of a positive religious rewriting of the greatest of all stories, the story of the journey of humankind of planet earth. I’ve been particularly inspired and moved into action by several touching stories of people on the frontlines, which is one reason why I wrote this book. The better story doesn’t have to be confined to one particular -ism but it sure can’t be a form of neoliberalism or capitalism. Neoliberalism is just a way to put capitalism on steroids. Capitalism needs growth but the earth’s resources aren’t giving us that option. Capitalist growth is causing ever more conflicts to pop up all over the world. The +-3000 conflicts in the Atlas of Environmental Justice are like the always harder hurricanes and hotter heatwaves: warning signs of a system that is failing. Naomi Klein was right when she said it’s capitalism versus climate, but not complete. The climate breakdown is just one of so many signals that illustrate how humans have overreached. All the evidence is in place to say that it’s capitalism versus thriving as a species. Any big story about the future journey of humanity on planet earth that does not put into question the volume of stuff we put into the global economy or the rising costs of pursuing GDP growth is a fairy tale, a distraction. In short: the new story will have to be a positive post-growth story.

As a European I can’t conclude without saying something that strikes me about the risks facing Europeans in particular. I simply can’t escape the impression that the European project is a lot more fragile than it seems from the surface of it. I’m not talking about Brexit, which, at least for the rest of the EU, is just a nasty bump in the road. When I see the European project, I see exponential volumes of mostly unfair trade imports and I wonder what will happen when the competition for the world’s dwindling resources gets even more brutal and people all over the world refuse to play the neoliberal free trade game that the EU wants it to play. The EU has already snatched an unfairly big slice of the cake and all over the world, people and their governments are sick of it. Not only has all the low hanging fruit been picked already, the EU is increasingly arrogant by thinking it can simply continue to pick from other more remote orchards – as it does with everything from uranium to wood. But it all requires ever more resources, coercion and violence. Our hands are already black and dripping with oil from tar sands in Canada. The fuel only barely warrants the name, consuming almost as much energy as it gives and leaving behind what could easily pass for Mordor in Tolkien’s book Lord of the Rings. Our oil imports are the reason for supporting so many brutal regimes. For gas we “solved” our unhealthy dependency on an anti-democrat East of Europe by adding an unhealthy dependency on an anti-democrat West of Europe, across the Atlantic. But it’s not just our unhealthy fossil fuel addiction and how Europe’s dependency on it is detrimental to democracies in and out of the EU. We’re chopping wood all over the world like no other, with subsidies whose official use is preventing climate change. We send our e-waste and toxic ships in return. That won’t last. China’s ban on importing our plastic waste and Trump’s trade tariffs are early warning shots. It is the stubbornness of a neoliberal European elite that puts Europeans in this fragile position while paving the way for the extreme-right to steer a justified frustration of Europeans towards some easy scapegoats. Where are the other European leaders who are not from the far right with the balls to say that what Europe really needs is a well planned and executed de-globalization, for all the good social and ecological reasons? We need protectionism. Not patriotic protectionism but ecological protectionism: a trade policy that faces the ugly truths about the century we live in.

Of course it’s not just the EU that has an addiction problem from which a rude awakening is bound to happen. The whole GDP focused global economy is akin to a desperate junkie, hooked on GDP. Either by its own will or with a little help from the IMF dealer. It gets its kicks from fossil fuels and it leaves its dirty needles lying around. As an example: every year, oil leaks in the Niger Delta are equal to that spilled in BP’s massive Deepwater Horizon disaster. The GDP junkie badly needs rehab, but he’s far beyond reason or arguments to go there. Who’s going to bring him in?

It turns out there are ever more volunteers for making that happen. One group in particular is boxing far above its weight. Indigenous peoples make up only a few percent of the population worldwide, but in almost half of all environmental conflicts, they man the battle line. It sounds simple but it has strong empirical backing; if we protect them, our frontline defenders, we protect our common home, the earth. The number of them being killed has risen fast, from one to four martyrs a week. It’s about time we recognize them as martyrs not for their community, a country or God but for all of us on this earth. Facts and stories both tell us to protect the protectors. We need them as much as they need us.

But this resistance goes far beyond the bravery of so many indigenous peoples. There are always precedents but it’s fair to say that in this global war, a new round of global resistance began at the turn of the Millennium with the successful undermining of the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle. Later, movements like Occupy and Anonymous followed. Now there is Blockadia, the collection of direct actions trying to stop environmental destruction. There is a financial divestment movement, draining the bad guys of their finance mojo. There is the degrowth or postgrowth movement that reveals our most fundamental myth, GDP growth, as one big lie. This movement is busy spilling from the activist and academic spheres into the political sphere, with members of the European Parliament coming straight from that movement and a postgrowth conference in the European Parliament organized by members of five different European party groupings, as well as by this author. Then there are transition movements that show how things can be done very differently at the local level. There are civil movements like Hart boven Hard, which combine local actions with national alternatives to the austerity regime. The divestment movement convinced around a 1000 institutions to ditch around €7000 billion in fossil energy industry stock. The largest private coal company in the world went belly up in 2016, as did a record number of oil and gas companies.²³⁴ At the time of writing these last lines, just before the 2018 US mid-terms, signs of a political swing in the US were on the rise and the model that got Bernie Sanders so far is bringing justice democrats into Congress. Imagine what could be possible if in 2020 in the US, an eco-socialist like Bernie Sanders rose out of Trump’s ashes, or what a revolution it would be if Jeremy Corbyn took the helm in the UK. Neoliberalism is finally dying and that’s a good thing. Yes, the bad news is that fascists are leading the new narrative but this could still flip in a radically different direction, if we open enough eyes before someone shuts them down the hard way.

Participating in the global resistance and protection movement is a double-edged sword. First there’s the living differently thingie. Eat, live, move, clothe, pay and do almost everything greener. In my view, finding fun and low footprint lifestyle hacks just gives positive energy for yourself and it usually connects you with other people. But I fully realize we are never going to save humanity from a major collapse by just urging everyone to cycle. Eating tofu won’t stop Chevron. This book is not about the individual choices you and I make, but about our collective choices. Personal change merely gives me the positive energy to deal with the more difficult part of the struggle, the political battle against injustice and degradation on a global scale. Even the greatest transition town is destroyed when a category 5 hurricane hits. Buying an electric car will not stop AREVA from ruining Niger to supply us with nuclear power, rather to the contrary.

The revolution must be collective and it must also be social and ecological. Even that will not be enough. We have to fix our broken democratic system. The revolution will need to overcome over 2 centuries of capitalism. Does that mean throwing everything we know out of the window and every culprit under the bus? Well, not if you ask me. Despite all the critiques that can be made on them, I think that we can use many good EU laws and even the way they are made, with a thriving civil society as an important player. I also believe in Chinese know-how on how to be bold and also implement anti-pollution laws. From Bhutan we can sure learn something about a holistic vision that comes with better targets and indicators than GDP. I’m against religious politics but pragmatic enough to advise reading and spreading one very useful text from the Pope. In all examples, as well as in the example of the multinational with at least a few really good practices like radical choice editing and industrial upcycling, I think we need to be pragmatic as well as revolutionary. We should park prejudices, air well-deserved critiques where appropriate but still look at everything that is useful with a fresh mind. As I wrote earlier: some schizophrenia will be needed. Some mental flexibility on the set of ideas that can help us forward will be needed. I hope we can cherish a pluriverse of narratives, focus on what works and just do things. Get the ball rolling.

The pioneers highlighted in this book have often been forced to choose sides. Most have been angry, sad and fearful at some point in their struggles. All faced seriously polarized situations that were created not by their choice. Rather than being consumed by their feelings, they turned them into constructive action. Their gaze remained steady, however uncomfortable the truth was to behold. Easy but compromised ways out were always there, but they recognized them for the dead ends or flimsy excuses they are. They loved others and our earth as much as themselves. They also found connections with other heroes on other frontlines far away. They formed their multinationals, those of the resistance. That gives me some reason for hope at a time when the relationship between humanity and ecosystems on earth is in an undeniable crisis. Frontlines have opened everywhere. On the one hand, you have major mining companies, neoliberal economists, post-truth politicians, merchants of doubt and a small but powerful elite that has lost all sense of fair play and justice. Rising from the swamp they made in the first place are fascists and racists, who sharpen their daggers against refugees and other scapegoats. But on the opposite side are people who stand for fairness and who see through all that. Groups that want to close coal mines instead of borders. People with due respect for the planet we live on. They don’t just want the polluters to pay for cleaning up the crisis they have caused, they want an end to the “co₂lonisation” of the earth. More and more people in this group are either forced to find themselves on a frontline or volunteer to be there. Why not join them voluntarily before some frontline opens up at your doorstep?

The final question for you, dear reader, is not so much which party will win this political, ecological, economic and global struggle that is raging around us. Nobody can give you any guarantees on that. The key question is: what will you do after putting down this book?