The Third World War has already started. And this time the “enemy” is everywhere. It’s the War on Climate: a whole system that has gone mad – based on unsustainable growth, fossil energy, extraction of natural resources and hugely unjust and discriminatory distribution of wealth – creating a distruction that is potentially at the biggest scale that ever occurred. It’s not just devastating to the environment, it is creating huge injustices, climate poor, and no future. We are in a systemic crisis and need systemic alternatives to get out of it.
This year, 2018, ended with some contrasting events. On one side there was the COP24 in Poland, which finished with almost no advancement on the 2015 Paris Agreement for Climate. On the other, more and more organized citizens (as well as many who are not used to be “activist”) have started to “rebel” and “build alternatives” in different ways around the planet.
As summarized by the Guardian, “on current targets, the world is set for 3°C of warming from pre-industrial levels, which scientists say would be disastrous, resulting in droughts, floods, sea level rises and the decline of agricultural productivity”. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), two months ago issued a report warning that allowing warming to reach 1.5°C would already be extremely dangerous.
This is a huge failure of our governments and their market-based economic growth model, which we need to strongly react against. “We are the last generation that can save the planet” was the motto of the Alternatiba campaign this year. It’s time to fight back! We must raise our level of resistance and of concrete proposals for another economic system, a plural and transformative one.
This is what is being proposed by the World Social Forum of Transformative Economies, which is becoming a reality also thanks to RIPESS members. People working on the Commons and peer production / community stewardship, on the EcoFeminist approach, on the Agroecology and food sovereignty re-localized production and consumption and on the Social Solidarity Economy (with all its different practices) and other Transition movements are getting together to work on a common Agenda towards systemic change.
Yet we need to advance and open also to other emerging citizens’ movements, such as the people who have been demonstrating with yellow vests in the streets of France, or the precarious workers, many of which are younger generations, aware of the future they will have to (re)build. Or refugees and migrants, and the whole diaspora economy that they have built to survive.
European Parliamentary elections will be in May next year. We can do our part to say what Europe we want. How Europe can foster a positive economy and society and stop subsidizing and promoting a debt-based, competitive and destructive system. The European Social Pillar approved this year goes in the right direction, but is certainly not enough.
We need to join forces now more than ever to change the imaginary of people and show that there is still hope in our communities, although there are powerful reactionary movements and not so much time left. It’s not at all easy, but as the initiatives illustrated here (which are just a tiny part of many more) show, it is definitely possible.
[Jason Nardi – RIPESS Europe general delegate]
PS: Of course, Best wishes for the Holidays and for the New Year!
