Our environmental crisis requires political solutions, not technical solutions.
Our current innovative policies are designed to protect the way we live now, rather than the way to damage the least
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Whether it is the wildfires on the West Coast that cover the New York City skyline or the historic floods in Germany, signs of a climate crisis are everywhere in 2021. A group of world-leading ecologists have summarized the plight of humanity, who recently argued that our main goal as a species now is to “avoid a terrible future.”
So far, we have primarily dealt with the threat of environmental collapse by trying to modify our technology, whether it is to stay away from internal combustion engines or to make solar energy cheaper and more efficient. Many policy makers, scientists and opinion leaders believe we are moving in the right direction. Their main concern is whether we can act fast enough to avoid the greatest environmental disaster.
These ideas may sound out of touch with reality. This is exactly what I think: we cannot conceptualize bold changes, which marks a crisis of political imagination, the root cause of what political scientist Karen Litfin calls “a growing social ecological multiple crises.”
I specifically mentioned the word "multiple crises" rather than climate change, because we are seeing many interrelated crises. Public conversations revolve around reducing emissions to slow down global warming , but the cruel fact is that even if we have a magic button that can stop all emissions overnight, even if we can stay within the 1.5-degree warming range (the unlikely result now), we still leave many other existential crises behind. We are still obsessed with the ideology that initially caused this chaos, such as extractiveism, belief that the earth is what we exploit, and speciesism, that humans are superior to all other species.
Biodiversity Loss and ecosystem collapse are caused by countless causes beyond climate change, from release to chemical pollutants in the environment to damaging rivers to invasive species transported around the world through global trade and travel. The plight of each threatened species is different, and there is no single technical solution to solve the crisis. In addition, there are phosphate and nitrogen cycle crisis, overdrafting of reservoirs, overfishing, deforestation - this list continues.
Once we have mastered this complexity, it is clear that we need to reimagine our society and our future. Recognizing that climate change is just one aspect of a larger multiple crises can make people feel paralyzed or even desperate; but in fact, it is free. It helps us realize that some of our current paradigms are simply not suitable for sustainability and it is time to really get creative.
political imagination is powerful because it can transform seemingly radical ideas into achievable goals. We have seen this repeatedly in history: grassroots resistance from political activists helped undermine the apartheid regime in South Africa. In the 1960s and 1970s, dissidents during the Cold War first imagined democracy in Eastern Europe in secret works, called samizdats, and then their society began to see it as a realistic possibility. History tells us that the path to profound change is paved by radical imagination. It also tells us that while the change happens faster than we expected, it rarely happens overnight, which is why we need to start now.
What different things might political imagination make us do today? Rather than letting the economy be driven by unlimited growth, it is better to lead our trajectory toward a stable economy, even if we retain healthy competition between the market and enterprises. We may pass legislation that recognizes the rights of future generations and the autonomy of other species, allowing the judiciary to adhere to higher standards of environmental protection than is under the current framework.
Last summer, a landmark study showed that we might see early signs of the Gulf Stream crash, which released its sharpest warning to date about the severity of climate change. This urgency cannot be more great. Embracing radical political imagination as a path forward will have a huge impact on the relationship between our civilization and nature and the future, which in turn will bring us closer to solving multiple crises.
So, how do we promote a new way of thinking? Diversify media conversations and provide space for environmental crises beyond climate change that are unlikely to benefit from linear technological solutions that fit our current economic framework. It is equally important to seriously discuss intergenerational justice and marginal solutions such as growth degrowth. In our education system, we can shift our focus from “developing human capital” to “cultivating the potential of imagination.” We can fight for voting rights, and even try to bring proportional representation into our politics, allowing the imagination of alternative futures to enter the political mainstream.
