poverty, protest and popular education in discourses of climate change scandrett, crowther, mcgregor...

8/2/2019 Poverty, Protest and Popular Education in Discourses of Climate Change Scandrett, Crowther, McGregor Draft-1

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Poverty, protest and popular education in discourses of climate changeEurig Scandrett (Queen Margaret University), Jim Crowther and Callum McGregor

(University of Edinburgh)

Abstract

Discourses of climate change emerged in scientific epistemic communities, were taken

up by activists in the environmental movement and found their way into policy. During

this journey, this discourse shifted and adapted to reflect the interests of competing

social groups and divergent social interests. Issues of redistributive social justice

emerged as a fringe component of the discourse, largely as a result of development,

international and Southern NGOs. Although environmental movements of the poor

and victims of environmental injustice have increasingly been a significant component

of political contestation, the extent to which these movements, or indeed the voice of

the poor and victims of climate related policy, have contributed to narratives of

climate change is negligible. This paper explores the implications of this exclusion for

such a narrative and critically analyses initiatives of popular education, protest and

culture which have attempted to engender dialogue between anti-poverty and climate

justice activists.

Introduction

All environmental-ecological arguments are arguments about society and,

therefore, complex refractions of all sorts of struggles being waged in other

realms Each one of these composite discourses shapes a unique blend of

complicity and dissent with respect to existing beliefs, institutions, materialsocial practices, social relations, and dominant systems of organising political-

economic power. This is their specific virtue: they pose problems of defining

relations across different moments in the social process and reveal much about

the pattern of social conflict in all realms of social action. (Harvey 1996 p. 373)

Discourses of climate change emerged from within the scientific community.

Although the greenhouse effect had been known since the nineteenth century, the

phenomenon of accelerated anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions leading to

increased average temperatures at the earths surface was identified in the 1970s and

recognised internationally as an environmental problem by the World Meteorological

Organisation (WMO) at its World Climate Conference in 1979. Scientists, as anepistemic community, remain at the centre of climate change discourses, not least

through the powerful position of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

established in 1988 by the WMO with the UN Environment Programme (van

Beukering and Vellinga 1996, Simms 2005).

However, climate change discourse was quickly taken up by the environmental

movement, including environmental non-governmental organisations (ENGOs), and

international policy makers, especially within the auspices of the UN. The 1970s

witnessed a period of unprecedented growth in ENGOs. Friends of the Earth was

founded in 1969 and Greenpeace in 1972 as the older organisations, such as the Sierra

Club grew in support and membership. The Club of Rome published its seminalLimits to Growth in 1972. Thus, the ENGO sector emerged as a significant social


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movement (at least in North America and Europe) by the time climate change was

recognised, and this became a significant component of their campaigning

programme. As the ENGOs became institutionally established, direct action

environmentalism subsequently emerged, and this sector of the movement has made

climate change a core part of its focus.

The year 1972 was also the date of the UN Conference on the Human Environment in

Stockholm, and the acknowledgement in the policy community that environmental

issues constituted a recognised area of social policy. The United Nations Environment

Programme was established following the Stockholm conference and was therefore a

key recipient and subsequent generator of policy led research and debates on climate

change in the early 1980s when policy entrepreneurs in the scientific community were

mobilising on the issue.

It is important to recognise the origins and subsequent pathways of discourses on

climate change because knowledge is never neutral but always carries with it

accretions from the social groups through whose hands it has passed. Moreover, thisprocess is ideological: it serves social interests through what is assumed, what is

ignored and who is positioned in the discourse to speak. Not surprisingly, within the

historical development of climate change discourse is embedded the material interests

of the classes who have worked on them. The sectors with the most influence

therefore on the early development and ongoing climate change discourse are the

scientific epistemic community, the environmental movement, and the UN orientated

international policy community. Moreover, these sectors, although representing

discrete sets of interests in themselves, are also disproportionately drawn from similar

social classes, the professional class, or knowledge class, which in the period between

the second world war and the neoliberal turn at the end of the 20th

century occupied a

powerful position in global class dynamics.

Other class interests have subsequently contributed to climate change discourse.

National and transnational capitalists have mobilised around what has alternately been

seen as a threat to their interests and an opportunity for promoting them through new

forms of capital accumulation and achieving political power. The trope of sustainable

development has been useful for this, especially in the decade 1992-2002, between the

UN Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro and the World

Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, during which time UN policy

shifted markedly from a state-led policy of stakeholder involvement to corporation-

led entrepreneurial voluntarism. Sklair (2001) describes this process as thedevelopment of a historic bloc of class realignment, achieved by the transnational

capitalist class in order to divert a threat to its power base and transform it into an

opportunity for new forms of capital accumulation.

The various subaltern classes have, however, been largely absent from their

contribution to climate change discourse. National and international working class

interests, the urban and rural poor, peasants and indigenous communities have so far

failed to engage with, or at least to influence, the language, values and analyses which

are dominating policy and political discussions around climate change. As a result of

this, most climate change discourse is blind to the interests of these subaltern classes.

The ideology of the production, translation and distribution of knowledge and culture,the implementation of policy and the social processes which interact with these are


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reflecting powerful and elite classes and constituting a hegemonic bloc which is

excluding the vast majority of the worlds population.

The development of climate change discourse in the absence of significant

participation by subaltern classes is a problem principally for three reasons.

1. Any policy which attempts to tackle climate change whilst excluding the vastmajority of the poor is not going to tackle climate change effectively. Policy

discourses are just one component of social processes which, if they exclude subaltern

interests, will hit against class conflicts in other areas. There will be resistance, both

of the weapons of the weak form (Scott 1985), in which those who are oppressed

will seek to obtain marginal benefits with minimal risk through neglect, non-

compliance or even sabotage. There are likely to be divisions amongst subaltern

interests which will be exploited by those classes benefiting from these discourses.

Thus there will be no effective solution to climate change by drawing on narratives

which exclude the interests of the subaltern classes.

2. As with all forms of environmental damage climate change is already affecting the

poor to a greater extent than the rich. If we are to understand how climate change issocially constructed in discourses, we need to start from those who suffer most from

its effects. Moreover, social movements which emerge from ecological distribution

conflicts provide a distinctive form of critique to the extent that they oppose the logic

of economic development with an insistence on incommensurable languages of

valuation (Martinez-Alier 2002).

3. In order to achieve a socially just solution to climate change, rather than delaying

its onset, a transformation of economic processes is needed. Since capitalist

accumulation is a core generator of climate change and producer of poverty and

exploitation, any socially just and ecologically sustainable solution needs to involve

the interests of the subaltern classes.

Discourses, as a constituent part of social practice, contribute to the social change

which is required for transforming society. As the quotation from Harvey at thebeginning of this chapter points out, discourse is one moment in the social process

and stands in dialectical relation to othersof which he identifies power, desire,

institution building, material practices and social relations (Harvey 1996: p.78-83).

Nonetheless, as educators, the authors are especially interested in discourse, and in

particular the generation, distribution and production of knowledge and culture. As

popular educators moreover we are interested in thepedagogy of the oppressed

(Freire 1972), those forms of education and learning in communities in which

knowledge from below, in critical dialogue with other sources of knowledge, is anintegral part of struggles against oppression.

We therefore explore the discourse of climate change by identifying diverse narratives

and story lines, and relating these to major discourses with class agendas: social

democracy, neoliberalism, ecological modernisation, socialist transformation. We

look at barriers and opportunities between climate change narratives and the thematic

universe of people living in poverty or with the consequences of climate damage. We

also explore some of the initiatives which have been used to create a dialogue

between the narratives of environmental activists and communities living with

poverty and the consequences of climate change. This work is based on the reflections

of fifteen years of observation of and participation in environmental justicecampaigning, including on climate justice, by Eurig Scandrett; research into learning


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choice in which products are marketed as climate friendly, through to the more

demanding calls for individual carbon rationing of some activists and ENGOs. Across

this range of versions, lifestyle choice stories have in common a liberal focus on

individualised choices within a competitive market. Likewise, a wide range of

ideological versions oftechnologicalnarratives are used in end of pipe discourses,

as in carbon capture, or the more demanding power down accounts ofthe ZeroCarbon Britain project (2010) as well as the more laissez faire approaches of weak

sustainability, in which technology is expected to be driven by market forces to

substitute less damaging solutions. At the far end of laissez faire isclimatechange

denialwhose advocates may be technological (Lomberg 2001), obfuscating (Lawson

2008) or even militant particularist (eg. fuel protestors).

Narratives ofausterity are also used in the individualised arguments of carbon

rationing, anti-consumerist and the more pietistic approaches to simple living, as

well as the more utopian alternative communities. These can range between the UK

government-sponsored Sustainable Development Commissions Prosperity without

Growth (Jackson 2009), through to the anarchist direct action activists in the Campfor Climate Action. Communitarian approaches vary from ecovillage proponents to

transition towns. Transition towns constitute a 12 stage process of mobilising

communities to take action to reduce oil dependency (as resilience to peak oil and

climate change prevention), starting from easy win community projects and lifestyle

choices often attached to romantic win-win communitarianism and leading to a more

radical utopian energydescent plan. Some radical utopians also combine with a

form ofapocalyptic narrative, which ranges from direct action climate campers to the

more resigned dark mountain project (Kingsnorth 2009). However, elements of the

direct action movement also incorporate a strongsocial justice narrative which can

overlap with more socialist versions such as just transition and climate justice

campaigns (STUC 2010).

Combinations of these narratives are drawn on to support discourses which serve

particular class interests or shifting alliances of classes struggling for hegemony. Here

we explore three discourses representing blocs of different class interests before

exploring the possibility of a discourse of transformation.

b) Social democratic discourseSocial democracy constituted the hegemonic political discourse in most parts of the

western capitalist world from the end of the Second World War until its influence

started to decline from the neoliberal 1970s. Combining a large welfare state withKeynsian state intervention in the economy, the significance of social democracy lay

in its compromise between on the one hand the interests of local, national and

transnational bourgeoisie in capital accumulation, and on the other, those of the

working class and the poor. Social democratic discourse remains significant in

Europe, reflecting stages of hegemonic struggle between these classes. In February

2002, Jack McConnell, the Labour First Minister of the Scottish Executive

(government) gave a speech in which he committed his government to environmental

justice by incorporating the environment of the poor into a discourse of social

democracy.

Too often the environment is dismissed as the concern of those who are notconfronted with bread and butter issues. But the reality is that the people who


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have the most urgent environmental concerns in Scotland are those who daily

cope with the consequences of a poor quality of life, and live in a rotten

environmentclose to industrial pollution, plagued by vehicle emissions, streets

filled by litter and walls covered in graffiti In the late 20th Century the big

political challengeand the greatest success I believefor democrats on the

left of centre was to develop combined objectives of economic prosperity andsocial justice. I believe the biggest challenge for the early 21st century is tocombine economic progress with social and environmental justice. Scottish

Executive 2002a

Moreover, McConnells environmental justice also included a global dimension, in

which the unequal cause and impact of climate change became an extension of the

argument for social democracy.

I am clear that environmental in-justice is at its most shocking when you

consider the situation of the developing world. The entire African continent is

responsible for a mere 3% of the world's carbon emissions - yet it pays the sameprice in terms of climate change as the rest of the world - but with less capacity

to protect its citizens from the impact of this climate change. Scottish

Executive 2002b

However, as Scott and Mooney (2009) have argued, the particular variant of social

democracy practiced in the devolved Scottish government constituted an uneasy

hybrid with neoliberalism. Whilst Scotlands Labour Party arguably was able to

sustain a higher level of social democratic discourse and policy than the UK Labour

Party, there was still a compromise, with neoliberalism dominant. This was evident in

environmental justice policy which, whilst influencing social policy, made no impact

on economic policy, and therefore on the causes of environmental injustice (Scandrett

2007, 2010).

c) Neoliberal discoursesFrom the 1970s onwards, neoliberalism has been a project of re-establishment to

power of the capitalist class, unhindered by compromise with any other class group

(Harvey 2005). The discourse combines laissez-faire free market with a rhetorical

commitment to reduction in the role and size of the state, although in practice, only

certain sections of the state tend to be reducedthat which is considered to be in

competition at any time with private capital. Other sections of the state, those which

serve the interests of capital accumulation, are often strengthened as in MargaretThatchers Authoritarian Populism (Jessop et al 1988) in the 1980s, the bilateral and

multilateral trade agreements initiated from the 1990s, the neoconservative project

mobilised around George W Bush in the 2000s and, in different ways today, Indias

security state and Chinas capitalist Communist Party.

There is no single discourse on climate change from the neoliberal perspective. At one

extreme, neoliberal discourses simply deny that climate change is occurring, treating

the scientific discourse as a constraint on business freedom and economic growth in

the self-interest of the professional class. More sophisticated neoliberal discourses

focus on weak sustainability, in which financial capital and natural capital are

treated as substitutable, so allocating property rights to elements of the carbon cycle(carbon dioxide emissions, carbon sequestration capacity) creates a free market which


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responds to scarcity through substitution. Further to this logic involves creating

carbon derivatives markets, in which trade in carbon leads to a speculative secondary

trade in carbon derivatives, future carbon markets and risk, with the capacity for

subprime carbon credits (futures contracts to deliver carbon that carry a relatively

high risk of not being fulfilled, Friends of the Earth US 2009). In one of its more

ludicrous forms, neoliberal discourses accept the reality of climate change, yet regardit as irrelevant to the principle task of capital accumulation. Matt Ridley, non-

executive chair of the Northern Rock bank in the UK in the years prior to its

spectacular collapse in 2007, nonetheless still believes in the god that has clearly

failed himand most of the world. Referring to the developing countries of the

global South he argues that The richer they get, the less weather-dependent their

economies will be and the more affordable they will find adaptation to climate

change. (Quoted in Gray, 2010, p. 51).

Thus, despite being the dominant policy discourse throughout much of the world,

neoliberalism has yet to develop a coherent narrative on climate change. This is

perhaps part of the reason for the near universal failure of climate change policy.Climate change remains a constraint to the accumulation of capital and therefore to

the power of the capitalist class. For this reason an alternative discourse of climate

policy has received approval in some policy contexts, in which the state retains a

more interventionist role in supporting the accumulation of capital: Ecological

Modernisation.

d) Ecological ModernisationEcological Modernisation (EM) can be understood as an emerging discourse

potentially of the same level of organisation as the more conventional ideological

frameworks of social democracy and neoliberalism (Hajer 1995, Harvey 1996,

Dryzek et al. 2003). EM differs from neoliberalism in the extent that it embraces state

intervention and concedes some power to other class sectors whilst maintaining

overall capitalist control and accumulation. EM attempts a systematic integration of

ecological interests into market forces by such means as allocating property rights to

natural commons (eg. water privatisation, enclosure of the atmosphere in carbon

trading) and socio-environmental knowledge (eg. biopiracy, dispossession of

indigenous technology); constructing commodities from waste, directly (energy from

waste) or indirectly via state constructed quasi-markets (pollution permit trading), and

other quasi market formation through state-manipulated price feedback (eg. fuel tax,

cap and trade) or contingent valuation (eg. willingness to pay). Dryzek et al (2003)

differentiate between what they call weak EM which makes capitalism less wastefulwithin the existing framework of production and consumption (p. 167), and its

stronger variety which would democratise the state by including

environmentalists in the core, creating the green state.

However, just as social democracy, which made possible the welfare state, constituted

a temporary compromise between the interests of capital accumulation and the

material interests of the working class, so EM may be regarded as a compromise with

the material interests of ecology, or more accurately, the self proclaimed

representatives of ecological interests in the knowledge class. Dryzek et al (2003)

inadvertently concede this by treating environmentalists as if they are a class of

equivalent status as the bourgeoisie and the working class


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We owe the liberal state to the movements of the bourgeoisie against

monarchy, church, and aristocracy. We owe the welfare state to the movements

of the organised working class against a capitalist-dominated liberal state

Long banished from the core of the state, environmentalism is tied up with some

contemporary developments that may, in the end, produce a new kind of state

whose emergence is of comparable historical significance to the earlieremergence of the liberal capitalist state and then the welfare state. (p. 2)

Through the influence of environmentalists the green state would be expected to

employ EM in order to manage the constraints on capital accumulation in the

conditions of production (physical limits of the environment to provide a climate

conducive to capital accumulation) through finding new forms of dispossession.

Just as the welfare state embedded a contradiction between class interests which

eventually led to its fissure in the 1970s, so too there is a contradiction in EM.

On the one hand, ecological modernisation provides a common discursive basisfor a contested rapprochement between [the environmental movement] and

dominant forms of political-economic power. But on the other, it presumes a

certain kind of rationality that lessens the force of more purely moral arguments

and exposes much of the environmental movement to the dangers of political

cooptation. (Harvey 1996. p. 378)

Writing before the hegemonic bloc had emerged in the 2002 World Summit, Harvey

suggests that the environmental justice movement and environmentalism of the poor

have influenced EM to the extent that some sort of configuration has to be envisaged

in which ecological modernisation contributes both to growth and global distributive

justice simultaneously (p. 379). As we shall see, this has been the case in some

sectors of the ENGOs and environmental activists who have attempted serious

dialogue with environmental justice struggles and other working class movements in

order to build a dissenting discourse (see Scandrett 2007).

e) Socialist transformationChallenging climate change involves a transformation of capital accumulation.

Dissenting discourses of climate change which have the capacity to contribute to such

a transformation must include, as a necessary but not sufficient element, the

contribution from subaltern classes and in particular the victims of climate change, the

fossil fuel industry and other environmental injustices (Bellamy Foster 2010).Environmental justice movements, or environmentalism of the poor (Martinez-Alier

2002), have been documented from a wide range of contexts throughout the world,

where people who are directly affected by environmental damage mobilise into

community or workplace campaigns and social movements to resist. Those directly

affected by environmental damage tend to be the poor, working class, racialised

minorities, indigenous peoples, politically disenfranchised and geographically isolated

communities. Environmental justice campaigns tend to form around issues of social

justice: racial segregation, land rights, workplace hazards, industrial compensation

claims, poverty and urban decay (Faber and McCarthy 2003). The movements are

often distinct from mainstream ENGOs whose membership largely comprises

educated middle class professionals, although there are attempts to build alliancesbetween them. Martinez-Alier (2002) argues that environmental justice movements


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emerge when the cost-benefit analysis of development, which puts an exchange value

on the environment, is resisted by those whose poverty and social position denies

them leverage in this market. Such movements develop languages of valuation which

are incommensurable with the cost-benefit analysis of economic development, leading

to discursive, social and political conflicts.

Climate change can be regarded as the ultimate conflict in the conditions ofproduction (OConnor 1998), in which capitalism may destroy the environment which

makes capital accumulation possible, thereby leading to an irresolvable crisis. In such

analysis, social movements are likely to emerge amongst the victims of climate

change with common interests in challenging its causes.

the main historic agent and initiator of a new epoch of eco logical revolution is

to be found in the third world masses most directly in line to be hit first by theimpending disasters They too, as in the case of Marxs proletariat, have

nothing to lose from the radical changes necessary to avert (or adapt to)

disaster. (Bellamy Foster 2010).

But following Harvey (2006) climate change may also be regarded as accumulation

by dispossession in which the global commons and significant geo-ecological cycles

which make life possible on earth are being appropriated in the interests of capital

accumulation. In which case:

Accumulation by dispossession entails a very different set of practices from

accumulation through the expansion of wage labour in industry and agriculture.

The latter, which dominated processes of capital accumulation in the 1950s and

1960s, gave rise to an oppositional culture (such as that embedded in trade

unions and working class political parties) that produced the social democratic

compromise. Dispossession, on the other hand, is fragmented andparticular

It is hard to oppose all of this specificity and particularity without appeal touniversal principles. (Harvey 2006 p.52-3)

Such fragmented forms of militant particularism can therefore only unite against the

causes of climate change through access to abstracted knowledge which has largely

developed in the professional class.

It is the poorest and most vulnerable who are already suffering from climate change

and will continue to do so at an increasing rate. The elite are already discussingadaptation, investing in the defences and technologies to protect the few from

devastation. The knowledge class, dependent on high levels of public expenditure in

education and public services, is at high risk of material loss, potentially sinking back

into the working class from which it largely emerged over the past few generations. It

is the knowledge class, whose ascendancy contributed to the flowering of social

movement activities in the postwar welfare capitalist countries, and who are the

scientists, policy developers and public sector workers who make up the membership

of the ENGOs, which will decline most steeply as a result of climate change.

However, whilst this class will certainly suffer from climate change, it is the poorest

who are the primary victims. Unlike most environmental justice movements, the

campaigns against climate damaging activities are being led by the educatedprofessionals in the ENGOs in the global North and their more recent offshoots in the


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direct action environmentalists (Seel, Paterson and Doherty 2000). Any discourse

which might provide a challenge both to the causes of climate change and to the

powerful interests which protect these, must draw on the knowledge class and the

poor.

We propose that the methods and methodologies of popular education have acontribution to make to developing and reinforcing discourses of dissent. By methods

of popular education, we mean the deliberate educational techniques devised

originally by Paulo Freire and adapted and developed through the practices of radical

professional educators and by grassroots social movements (Freire 1972, Hope and

Timmel 1984, Crowther, Martin & Shaw 1999, Kane 2001, Crowther, Galloway &

Martin 2005). By methodologies of popular education we refer to activities which are

not explicitly educational but which engender dialogical exchanges between forms of

knowledge and culture, in particular between climate change discourses and thecultural activities of one or more subaltern class or group. This knowledge from

below is not necessarily better but it widens the opportunities for engaging with

different knowledges. Such engagement might include meetings, networking,correspondence, electronic communication, publication exchange, joint campaigns,

common struggles etc which includes a component of dialogical collective learning.

In short, any activity in which subaltern class interests might be incorporated into

climate change discourses which lead to new forms of discourse in the interests of

those classes is a relationship of hegemony and therefore, necessarily a pedagogical

relationship (Gramsci 1971, p. 350).

Case studies

We present several case studies in which there is some genuine attempt at dialoguebetween environmental activists and working class communities directly affected by

climate change, climate affecting policies or other forms of exploitation during the

lifecycle of the fossil fuel industries. Some of these use popular education approaches,

in others can be discerned elements of popular education methodology. Case studies

are presented on the basis that they provide examples of highly particularistic attempts

to build on climate change discourse with subaltern classes, and expose contradictions

and problems of practice, the analysis of which can lead to further work.

1. Environmental NGO: Friends of the Earth Scotlands

environmental justice campaignIn 1999, a devolved parliament was instituted in Scotland. Friends of the Earth

Scotland (FoES) used the opportunity to launch a campaign for environmental justice

which explicitly linked together local environmental injustices with the globally

unequal distribution of resource consumption, especially fossil fuels and their

resultant waste stream, climate change. The campaign employed a strapline No lessthan a decent environment for all, with no more than our fair share of the earths

resources which became widely influential amongst NGOs (see Agyeman 2005,

Boardman, Bullock & McLaren 1999, Dunion 2003, Dunion and Scandrett 2003,

McLaren 2003).

FoESs practice shifted to include active support for communities, primarily working

class or poor communities, directly affected by environmental pollution and


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degradation, explicitly drawing on the methods of community development and

popular education (Scandrett 2000, Wilkinson and Scandrett 2001, Agents for

Environmental Justice and Scandrett 2003). Over a period of six years, FoES engaged

in sustained dialogue through structured educational programmes with communities

fighting against waste landfills, opencast coal mines, quarries, polluting industries,

fish farms, poor quality housing and workplace hazards. Similar popular educationmethods were also used to generate dialogue between campaigners in Scotland and

activists who are victims of the fossil fuel industry elsewhere in the world. Several

exchange visits took place involving Ecuadorian activists, including from the

industrial city Esmeraldas where a leak from an oil refinery led to a fatal explosion,

and representatives from the Cofan nation, an indigenous people whose ancestral land

has been expropriated, exploited and polluted by oil extraction (Scandrett, OLeary

and Martinez 2005).

As a direct result of the political practice of FoES, the Scottish Executive, under Jack

McConnell embedded environmental justice into its policy discourse, including

positioning climate change within narratives of inequality and social justice as alogical extension of social democracy, subject to neoliberal economic growth.

Moreover, during this period, as environmental justice became incorporated into the

policy discourse, its meaning was diluted towards the management of what Curtice et

al (2005) have called environmental incivilities (Scandrett 2007). By contrast, and

through ongoing dialogue with directly affected communities, FoESs narratives

increasingly focused on the common causes of diverse environmental injustices

reflected in the wider movement.

However, the subsequent trajectory of FoESs campaign for environmental justice

reflected the tension between the dialogue with community-based campaigns and

servicing its own membership. FoESs members, in common with most western

ENGOs, are predominantly drawn from the professional class whose interests do not

always correspond with the working class victims of environmental injustice. Whilst

the environmental justice campaign constituted a significant and relatively successful

attempt to build alliances between these classes and to shift the ENGO discourse in

order to incorporate the interests of the working class (Scandrett 2007), there was a

limit in the extent to which this was achieved.

In 2005, the G8 summit took place in Gleneagles, Scotland. In the context of the crisis

in the Kyoto protocol created by George W. Bush, climate change was put on the

agenda by the UK, and FoES, along with other NGOs mobilised around demands forclimate justice. In collaboration with the student group People & Planet, FoES

organised a demonstration at Grangemouth industrial estate (home to five of

Scotlands highest carbon dioxide emitters) along with an open letter to the Chief

Executive of the Inneos (formerly BP) oil refinery, and also coordinated a low

threshold protest at the symbolic time of 13:45 on the first day of the summit (the G8

countries represent 13% of the worlds population and produce 45% of the worlds

carbon dioxide). However, there were tensions within the movement over the focus on

climate justice and relationships between participants in the oppositional movement,

and the climate narrative was lost in demands to Make Poverty History and the

depoliticised populism of Live 8 rock concerts.


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Following the G8 summit, FoES reviewed its priorities. In 2007, Jack McConnell lost

the election to a minority Scottish National Party government which abandoned any

policy discourse on environmental justice, and by this time FoES had oriented its

practice more explicitly on members interests of lifestyle environmentalism,

technology and policy focused lobbying. Climate justice had reverted to climate

change.

Research into FoES cyberactivists (FoES members who participate in on-line

campaigns) associated with FoES illustrates some of the complexities of discourse

alliance in ENGOs (Scandrett, Crowther and Hemmi 2010). Surveyed during 2008,

78% of cyberactivists prioritised campaigns on global climate change, whereas 47%

prioritised poverty and pollution, a significant figure which is almost certainly due

to the environmental justice campaign conducted over the previous decade. However,

specific environmental justice campaign issues which predominantly affect people

living with poverty were given low prioritisation in cyberactivist campaigns: local

planning issues (7%); fuel poverty (5%); incinerator campaigns (0%). On the other

hand, environmental issues with negligible or negative associations withenvironmental justice received higher prioritisation: renewable energy technologies

(48%); wildlife conservation (38%); population growth (24%). Cyberactivists could

support environmental justice in the abstract but without a major shift in political

practice.

Dialogue between FoES and community-based environmental justice struggles had

contributed to a construction of a discourse synthesising the interests of the

knowledge class and the subaltern classes disproportionately affected by

environmental injustice. The process was not sustained however, and a combination

of internal conflicts of interest, changing political opportunities and the neutralising

impact of vested interests led to its dissipation and a weakening of the movement in

Scotland.

2. Community Development and the Climate Challenge Fund

The Climate Challenge Fund provided 27.4 million between 2007 and 2010, to 250

community level carbon reduction projects across Scotland. The Fund was the

initiative of Green Party Members of the Scottish Parliament in return for their

support for the first budget of the minority Scottish Nationalist Party government in

2007. Many community projects were able to take advantage of the Fund and deliver

projects in ecological renovation, local food production, heating and transport etc,which benefited local communities as well as delivering reductions in carbon dioxide

emissions. Some of the beneficiaries of the Fund were projects which integrated

climate change into community development work designed to tackle poverty.

Interviews were conducted with a community education worker in one such project in

a working class community with a long history of poverty and deprivation.

For this community worker, the purpose of engaging with the Climate Challenge was

partially to respond to the changing policy agenda in order to access funding for anti-

poverty community development work, and partially to build on community

education practice in order to generate discourses on climate change from the

perspective of those struggling against poverty.


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[W]eve tried to tackle issues to do with poverty in this community

for a long time[W]e were very straight with the Climate Challenge

Fund right from the start that we would be taking a poverty approach

to this...So in a sense, were doing a classic community education

thing which is trying to use the policy agenda to bring about outcomes

that the community would value.

The implications of a community development approach are explained by the worker

in relation to a workshop on communicating about climate change.

It wasnt a bad workshop, but the facilitator said different people

have different interests and therefore if somebody is interested in

money well then thats what you sell them; how they could save

money if they reduce their energy. They dont bother with the science

of it Ive been a community development worker a long time, and

one of the principles of community development is that people often

come into activism out of self-interest. But the idea in communitydevelopment is [that] thats fine because youve actually engaged

them, but then you try to broaden their interests so that its not just

about whats happening in their street, its about the wider community,

and other people, and its about collective interests. ... And I would say

the same principle applies to climate change. You may come in

because you want to save a bit of money. But you try to actually widen

their understanding of climate change through that: where that actually

leads to, why cut down CO2 emissions, what impact that will have,

and the whole broader political debate and what have you. Because

otherwise, youre actually not crediting people with intelligence Its

about ownership of knowledgeYou know, how do you engage

critically with the world.

This is an explicitly dialogical agenda: responding to policy opportunities presented

by climate change discourse with activities which generate both material benefits and

educational opportunities for a working class community struggling against poverty.

Thereby, the praxis of reducing poverty and carbon dioxide emissions generates new

discourse on climate change. It also exposes contradictions, and through employing

informal popular education, community workers are able to exploit such

contradictions for educational purposes, seeking to expose at a local level the socio-

economic realities that lifestyle and technical discourses fail to recognise:

[W]eve now got 11 local householdsand weve done training with

them and all the different things that they can do through behaviour

change to lower their carbon emissions and their energy use in the

home. Weve provided them with a range of gadgets. They are now

conducting this experiment in their own home and I meet with them on

a monthly basis to bring back the results of their experiments.

Weve had thermal images of their home, so theyre able to see what

theyre up against 'cause weve emphasised very much right from the

beginning that its as interesting to find why it's difficult to lower your

carbon emissions as it is to find out how easy it isAnd weve said to


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them that were looking at how much behaviour change alone can

effect their energy use and carbon emissions and what theyre up

against in terms of the structural fabric of their home, their personal

living situation, their income, all of those things that are kind of going

on in their lives as well, so that we can get a picture of: if we were to

try and seriously lower the carbon emissions of a community like this,what are the real issues, and how much is down to individual

behaviour and how much is down to other issues.

The practical aspects of such work however can encounter contradictions relating to

other moments, including structures of power, social relations, material practices and

institutions (Harvey 1996 p. 78). In constructing questions for a survey on energy use

the community educator recalls an incident which illustrates in a small way the

discursive nature of power and the practices which constitute it.

[W]e did a [carbon] footprint survey with another organisation thats

worked in climate change issues for a long timeThey designed thesurvey based on an on-line survey system. We then looked at the

survey and saidthat on its own is not enough. You would have to

attach several social questions to that[W]e were saying well, just

asking people what their winter bills are; how much they spend in a

monetary senseis going to be meaningless. We insisted we put

questions like how many hours a day is your heating on for? because

a lot of people in this area are unemployed, and theyre at home all

day. And thats a major issue, you have to have your heating up. But

also, I wanted to ask In the winter do you feel your home is warm

enough? So, brought together, [with] those two questions, you

immediately get into a fuel poverty issue.

[]

And at one point the organisation said to us look were experts, we

have done this survey in loads of places, and I said yes, youre

experts in certain elements but were experts on this type of

communityThis is not just for you, were seeing this as a bit of

knowledge for the community to use for their own ends As far as

we were concerned, it had implications for how the community was

seen in terms of their behaviour, and fairly attributing things to their

behaviour and also in the potential [to change]. Because what were

saying is what might come out of this project is actually theres a reallimit to what people can do. And yes we need to encourage people to

do that but we also need to get some of these structural problems

sorted out. We need to be able to use this as ammunition to fight, for

people to be able to fight to get the changes - this is a great

opportunity for people to make arguments about the state of their

homes where theyve never been able to win any ground in the past.

Heres a great opportunity- heres the climate change agenda!

Despite recognising and responding to the opportunities for constructing alternative

discourses from the experience and knowledge of working class groups struggling

against poverty through community development processes, there is a real sense of

the practical difficulties of engaging with this. With a long history of


15/23

disempowerment, the potential for engaged political struggle for social transformation

is limited.

I think were at the real initial stages of trying to engage people. Its

potentially part of a social movement, but its probably not there yet.

Theres potential to build that. To me whats worrying is the fact thata message like climate change for a community like this is going totake a long time to work on its not really got enough of an

immediacy for people and even the issues that do have an immediacy

for people dont necessarily get people going. So how can you get

something like climate change really getting people going?

The problems of longstanding poverty and disempowerment are compounded by the

vested interests of powerful groups engaged in generating climate change discourses.

Another informant with a wealth of experience of community work alongside such

community based organisations to facilitate the development of climate change

related projects articulates well the ambivalent effects of the Climate Challenge Fundon mobilisation potential more generally:

I suppose when you are talking about building movements the one

thing that I have noticed is how afraid bureaucracy is, or

organisations, or government delivery bodies, or even government

funds like the Climate Challenge Fund. They want to keep people

divided. There is strength in numbers and everything that Ive seen

like the Climate Challenge Fund, its all about keeping people

divided [E]veryone gets funded to do stuff but they are so hesitant

to actually link those groups up with each other.

Interviewer: Whos they?

The people who manage the fund, Keep Scotland BeautifulIf

theyve all got the Climate Challenge Fund then they should all be

sharing information about what they are doing, but by dividing people,

and I think also by putting people in competition with each other, you

also slow down change and the strength that these organisations

have...[T]heres some organisations that really get it and they really

want to support the growth of each other but when theyre applying

for the same funding pots, then they dont want to be [sharinginformation] when youre in competition you cant build a

movement Sometimes they cant see their common ground. So I

think maybe something like climate justicethat could become

ingrained, but some of them divide oversocial issues

andenvironmental issue[s], and they dont want to work together;

they dont think theyve got common ground but they obviously do.

They are so ingrained in what they do everyday that they dont see the

bigger picture.

The contradictions of what is, for all intentions and purposes, a progressive policy

context is revealed in the last quotation. Some sections of the environmentalmovement have moved away from trying to exploit the ambiguities of policy


16/23

initiatives or becoming trapped in their potential limitations and taken up direct

action.

3. Direct Action environmentalism: Camps for Climate Action

Direct Action (DA) environmentalism emerged during the 1980s and 90s as aresponse to the growing professionalisation of the mainstream ENGOs and their

apparent lack of success against neoliberal governments in the US and the UK (Seel,

Paterson and Doherty 2000). Drawing inspiration from anarchism, deep ecology,

animal rights and the peace camps, they developed new forms of autonomous

organisation and confrontational political protest which focused on individual

responsibility for directly preventing activities damaging to the environment. The

demography of the DA environmentalists is disproportionately young and, as with

mainstream environmentalism, educated and professional. An important focus of DA

environmentalism in the UK since 2007, is an annual Camp for Climate Action,

during which for a few days hundreds of activists set up camp on occupied land close

to a source of pollution (power station, airport and, in 2010, the headquarters of the

Royal Bank of Scotland, the part-publicly owned bank notorious for financing

ecologically and socially destructive developments).

When a group of DA environmentalists associated with Earth First! and Climate

Camp realised the growing expansion of opencast coal extraction in Scotland they

decided to take action. For them, there was a clear connection between climate change

and the extractive fossil fuel industry directly affecting local working classcommunities: around 13 new mines all going through various stages of the planning

process simultaneously and some seriously disenfranchised communities, bearing the

brunt of Scotlands climate change impacts at home. Moreover:

Despite the fact that the climate change movement or radical environmental

movement was growing, it was turning further away from achieving the kind

of social change that will be necessary to bring about any kind of revolutionary

ecological society. The movement wasnt really talking about what really

affects [working class] people, and increasingly our politics dealt with abstract

carbon-counting, made worse by our obsession with the financial crisis. Coal

Action Scotland (ca. 2009. no page number)

This led to a series of Digger Diving (immobilising digging machinery) activities at

various opencast mine sites and eventually to the establishment of the MainshillSolidarity Camp at Mainshill proposed opencast site in South Lanarkshire. In a report

of the action, incorporating advice to activists, Coal Action Scotland (ca. 2009)

comment that:

Many community campaigns focus only on the legal process, or pin their hopes

on stopping a project at the planning stage. They know better than anyone the

endemic corruption at local council level but many community groups will want

to have exhausted all the legal options before supporting an occupation

although you may disagree with leaving direct action until all else has failed, be

sensitive to this. As trust is built up with the communities, hopefully direct

action wont just be seen as a last resort to be taken by intrepid eco -activists, but


17/23

as an integral part of a campaign and an expression of the communities (sic)

right to self-determination (no page number)

The Solidarity Campers invested time and effort in building relationships with the

local working class community through informal contact in the pub and other

community spaces. The community, it seems, were generally glad to have the supportof committed activists, invited them in for tea, dropping in to the camp and

contributed food and materials for their temporary shelters. Much of this solidarity

mobilising is very informal and unstructured, and without a concerted attempt to

achieve common platforms or collective dialogue. Because of the illegal nature of

much of the activity, the DA environmentalists mode of operation involves

individuals and small groups carrying out actions secretly, within the parameters of

shared codes of conduct, but without the knowledge even of the other activists. It was

in the context of a piece of secretly conducted sabotage, or pixie action, that tensions

between the two groups emerged.

In the summer, during The Camp for Climate Action at Mainshill some peoplesnuck out in the night and dismantled the conveyor belt at Glentaggart opencast

mine. This was the first pixie action to be reported since the camp had arrived

and it provoked an interesting and difficult discussion between campers and the

local anti-opencast campaigners. At the camp we were excited by the news of

the action and generally pleased that it had happened. But, in a large meeting at

the camp some of the locals told us that they were unhappy with this kind of

actionthat it increased the amount of lorries transporting coal by road in the

area, that wed crossed a line and that if it happened again we wouldnt be

seeing them at the camp any more.

Wed pissed off the very people that we were there to support and it didnt feel

good. This was a hard blow to our enthusiasm to push our limits and step-up our

tactics to take the fight direct to those waging destruction. However, our

relationship with the locals moved on from this point with continuous

communication and although it is difficult to have frank discussion about

anonymous actions I do believe that the supportive locals came with us on a

journey of radicalisation that made our resistance stronger. (no page number)

The conflict which emerged here is between two cultures of militant particularism.

The traditions, codes of conduct and nomenclature of the DA environmentalists have

grown through praxis and debate during actions and camps, on campuses and insquats, online and in the samizdat publications of the movement. This is a culture

outwith the traditions of working class community action which have their own

traditions of collective accountability, a critical respect for legal and state processes

and an intimate knowledge of the local area and workings of open cast mines. The

locals also had more to lose over the long term, and bore the consequences of

increased lorry movements and association with criminality. The informal chats over

tea or a pint were not up to the dialogue needed for mutual learning between cultures.

A comparative conflict occurred during the 2010 climate camp at the Royal Bank of

Scotland (RBS) headquarters in Edinburgh. RBS is financing the extraction of fossil

fuel from tar sands in Canada, a process which, along with perpetuating climatedamage is also dispossessing the First Nation peoples on whose land the tar sands


18/23

occur. The Climate Camp claimed to be acting in solidarity with these First Nation

people, representatives of whom were present. When windows were smashed in an

unsuccessful attempt to gain access to RBS offices, the First Nation representatives

expressed their concern about the damage to property. This led to a wide ranging

debate with views ranging between an unconditional apology, to defence of tactics

which had been developed as part of the DA repertoire, to a desire for more effectivecommunication between the two cultures of protest.

Some DA environmentalists have gone a little further in understanding how dialogue

between cultures develops. In 2009, DA environmentalists associated with the anti-

airport expansion group Plane Stupid organised a convergence with campaigners

against fuel poverty in Clydebank, a working class community under the flightpath of

Glasgow airport which, at the time, was being considered for expansion. These fuel

poverty activists were victims of the oil industry in several ways: living in poor

quality housing they spend a disproportionate amount of their low incomes on fossil

fuels to heat their living spaces and water to provide a basic level of comfort and

hygiene taken for granted in most European homes. At the same time they suffer theconstant noise and gas emissions of low flying aeroplanes taking off and landing close

to their community.

The convergence used the methods of popular education to generate dialogue between

the DA environmentalists and fuel poverty activists, and a number of popular

educators also participated in the event. There were discussions on tackling fuel

poverty without contributing to climate change: the Clydebank activists main focus

was on supplementing their social security benefit income to pay for increased

heating, whereas for the climate activists structural improvements to housing were

necessary. The role of the state was also a source of debate: for the fuel poverty

campaigners, the state was the source of their income and the focus of their

campaigning, for both of which they asserted their democratic right; for the DA

environmentalists the state is regarded as the enemy and inevitably corrupt.

At the time of writing there are several initiatives in process which use popular

education approaches to construct dialogues between DA climate activists and

working class interests. Prior to the 2010 climate camp at the RBS headquarters in

Edinburgh, a preliminary meeting took place between a small group of DA activists

and trades union representatives including the shop stewards convenor at the nearby

Grangemouth oil refinery, who represents over 50,000 oil industry workers. This is

able to build on the UK trade union initiative for a million climate jobs, based onsocial democratic-socialist narratives of major state investment for a national climate

service (Campaign against Climate Change 2009). There are also plans for a toxic

tour, organised by DA activists and other environmentalists, using popular education

methods, to link together communities in central Scotland negatively affected by

different stages of the fossil fuel and other climate affecting industries: opencast

mines, power stations, oil refinery, landfills, incinerators, airports, roads and flood

risk.

Conclusion

It is no use simply saying to South Wales miners that all around themis an ecological disaster. They already know. They live in it. They have


19/23

lived in it for generations. They carry it with them in their lungs But

you cannot just say to people who have committed their lives and their

communities to certain kinds of production that this has all got to be

changed. You cant just say: come out of the harmful industries, come

out of the dangerous industries, let us do something better. if

[environmentalists and the working class do] not really listen to whatthe other is saying, there will be a sterile conflict which will postpone

any real solutions, at a time when it is already a matter for argument

whether there is still time for the solutions. Williams 1989 p. 220

As Raymond Williams points out, dialogue between environmental and class based

struggles is essential to the search for just solutions to ecological problems. There

remains the possibility of constructing new hegemonic blocs of class interests,

incorporating fragmented groups which share the experience of exploitation by the

fossil fuel industry, in dialogue with the science-based discourses of climate change

used by scientists, environmental campaigners and policy makers of the professional

class. Through such processes, the connection between fragmented forms ofoppression and climate change can be made and there is a capacity for generating an

alternative, dissenting, climate change discourseor at least a discourse incorporating

the insights of climate change. This project requires an understanding of the

relationship between discourses and the alliances of class interests which make up

hegemonic blocs at any particular stage in the process of social change.

As a product of capital accumulation (via crisis in the conditions of production, and

accumulation by dispossession) climate change cannot adequately be addressed

without systemic transformation in how we produce goods and services. This

transformation must occur across the various moments of the social process, including

the production of discourse which itself reflects struggles amongst the material

interests of classes. The contribution to climate change discourse from subaltern

classesthose who are dispossessed or rely on threatened productive conditions, the

victims of climate change and those otherwise exploited by capitalist relationsis a

necessary, but not sufficient, component of this transformatory social process. This

discourse construction requires dialogue between the subaltern and dissenting

cultures, and the discourses of climate change which originate in the scientific,

environmentalist and policy communities.

It is in the interfaces between the professional class and the subaltern classes that the

methods and methodologies of popular education can have a contribution. Examplesof dialogue between environmental discourses of climate change and working class

communities are small but significant. Case studies from environmental NGOs,

community development and direct action environmentalism illustrate both the

potential and the difficulties of constructing such a dialogue, although they provide

evidence that the methods and methodologies of popular education provide the most

important tools for constructing these dialogues.

Climate change is a product of capitalist industrialisation and its discourses reflect the

assemblage of class interests and their respective power struggles in the decades either

side of the turn of the millennium. A discourse capable of contributing to the

transformation of capitalist growth can only be constructed in the context oftransformatory praxis in the political economy, institution building, creative


20/23

expression and social relations. Current dialogues are small and fragile and swimming

against a powerful tide. However, history has shown that the momentum for change

can build suddenly and quickly. We can only advocate continuing work in this area of

dialogue allied to struggle, in the hope that transformation occurs before human

societies and the ecosystems of which they are part are damaged irreversibly.

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