On 24 September — Heritage Day — Extinction Rebellion (XR) Cape Town is joining the African Climate Alliance, along with several other environmental and youth activist groups, for a march to Parliament in the name of system change.
But what does “system change” mean? How do the systems we inhabit relate to the ecological crisis? What role does reforming these systems play in saving our degrading environment and ourselves?
Greenwashing campaigns frequently try to make the climate crisis seem like a personal issue, claiming reusable straws and coffee cups will reduce the consequences of global warming. However, this distracts from the reality that ecological destruction is a result of the way that we politically, socially and economically organise our world. This is what is meant by “system” — the structures that govern our lives.
It is certainly necessary to pay attention to what, how and how much we consume, as our consumption habits have a direct impact on what is available to be consumed and how it is produced. However, almost no single human can take sole responsibility for the already-present climate crisis through which we are living. Only radical change within our systems can help us to prevent or alleviate further environmental breakdown.
So “system” refers to the overarching ways we organise our world. But how are systems failing humans and non-humans alike? We currently live in a method of economic organisation that prioritises the needs of businesses and profits over all life, lining the pockets of the very few humans who control these businesses (literally — the richest 1% currently control half the world’s wealth) even as the world burns.
And we can look to history for readily available examples of this, such as the fraught history of tobacco. Tobacco companies actively campaigned for decades to obscure the link between lung cancer and cigarette smoke, refusing to apply warning labels to their products that would endanger their profit margins.
When it comes to emissions and climate change, fossil fuel companies have been just as duplicitous, recruiting PR specialists to dismiss the claims that excessive fossil fuel use causes climate change which ultimately prolonged the dominance of fossil fuel companies as a source of energy.
Economics are also not separate from politics. Economic markets are government controlled, it’s just that they are regulated in favour of businesses rather than life, with profits protected by law and government policy. Politicians reap considerable benefits from protecting corporations and profit accumulation at the expense of life, and the fossil fuel industry has been rewarded through the close ties of government and business. In fact, the IMF has found that the fossil fuel industry received a subsidy of $5.9-trillion in 2020.
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And this protection of fossil fuel profits applies in our own country, observable in the financial ties between Shell and the ANC. All the while the ANC has pushed a fossil fuel agenda, we know that they have simultaneously received substantial donations from Shell-affiliated companies (R15-million in fact).
Although this year’s IPCC report has categorically stated that we must escape fossil fuel dependence if we are to stand a chance of limiting global warming, Shell and the Department of Mineral Resources and Energy (DMRE) of the South African government continued to push for seismic testing in the waters off the coast of South Africa because it was personally profitable for them to do so.
It is only thanks to the consistent pressure and action of civil society, specifically that of especially vulnerable, impoverished South Africans and subsistence fishers whose livelihood depends on the health of the oceans that these efforts have been thankfully thwarted.
In this case, the South African government and Shell collaborated to protect the interests of a corporation and their immediate profits at the expense of environmental stability and precarious human and non-human life.
But why are these methods of organising politics and economics so unsustainable? Any system that prioritises infinite profit accumulation is inherently unsustainable. If we think in ecological terms, anything that grows infinitely damages the functioning of the system to which it belongs — if it does not outright destroy it — parasitising and sucking the life out of those around it until the biome inevitably collapses (read, for example, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World).
For this reason, we are calling for a complete overhaul of the way that we do life as human beings and the way we organise our society and regulate our behaviour. The word “economy” actually derives from the Greek “oikonomia” which means “household management”. In essence, we need to drastically rethink the way we manage our home and push for policies and laws that enforce such changes.
Systems can seem too big to change in any concrete way. It is easy to feel disheartened and disillusioned at the prospect of trying to enact system change. But what is important to remember is that, although these systems seem fixed and unchangeable, they are human constructs. This is not to dismiss their power, as social constructs have social significance. Rather, it’s important to recognise that the economic and political rules we accept as natural are actually human constructs and can be made and unmade by human collective action.
This is where protest for system change comes in. Collective mass action is one concrete way to signal that we want to do things differently, that we are tired of existing under this anti-human, ecocidal method of organisation, and that we are willing to put aside the festivities of “braai day” to show up together and make this demand impossible to ignore for the powers that be in our country.
With thousands of humans in KZN still displaced by the April floods, others becoming sick and dying from polluted tap water, scores of fish washing up dead in our rivers and lagoons, several humans in the Free State injured and one killed by the toxic sludge from a collapsed mine dam that was known to be dangerous, and Nelson Mandela Bay still in the throes of drought, the need for drastic system change that addresses such widespread suffering could not be more desperate.
XR Cape Town will be marching on Heritage Day for the wellbeing and preservation of life for all species. Why not join us? DM
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Always funny to see that one of the main causes of our climate issues is simply ignored because it’s politically inconvenient to discuss, yet would have the biggest impact on helping our poor planet: overpopulation. Have just one child less, and protect the earth more than anything else you can do as an individual in sum for your entire life. But because it’s a political hot potatoes, often accompanied with accusations of racism by overpopulation deniers, we keep on lying to ourselves that this planet can sustain such numbers. Only combined efforts of lowering consumption (especially in the western world) AND reducing population growth (primarily developing countries) can save this planet.
Agreed. I read “Only radical change … can help us” and ignored the rest. The commentators on DM generally seem to be a more grounded lot than its ‘journalists’, if not occasionally more entertaining too.
Further to your comment I would add the idea that I first heard mentioned by Jordan Peterson a few months ago, that the most sustainable way to combat climate change is to genuinely go about alleviating poverty. It’s not the poor who are concerned with climate change – they have more urgent priorities, like survival. It’s only the wealthy that can afford to be concerned with such matters and are actually in a position to alter their behaviour, given the right motivation. And the best way to alleviate poverty? Free market capitalism (as distinct from unchecked capitalism) because it tends to provide more opportunities for the poor to lift themselves out of their own poverty and is thus a far more sustainable solution.
Population control and that kind of infringement on personal choice, as per China, leads to disproportionate gender ratios that cause massive social problems. People naturally have fewer children when they’re well educated and have decent jobs, that’s where the focus should lie.
There are many things that can be done to discourage having many children, including making contraception available for free, reducing child benefits once you have more than 3 children, and yes, education and jobs. But it needs to begin with the acknowledgment that overpopulation is a problem and it needs urgent attention, even if its politically incorrect to even talk about it.