Words by Ivana Isailovic, Usha Natarajan, Margarita Teresa Nieves Zárate & Pippi van Ommen
Drawings by Kyra Sacks
Introduction, by Ivana Isailovic
What are the features, knowledges, values, representations, practices, infrastructures, institutions, and governance modes of a just world that fits within planetary boundaries? How can we imagine them in a way that acknowledges the deep entanglements between human and non-human worlds while addressing the ubiquity of entrenched asymmetrical power relations that structure global societies?
In early 2022, my colleague Laura Burgers (University of Amsterdam) and I started organizing an event that we hoped could provide a space for starting to address some of these complex questions and reflect on what just futures after the ‘green transition’ would look like by bringing together scholars, thinkers, and artists.
We wanted to hold a space for uneasy conversations, intellectual co-creations, and radical re-imagining of what ‘green just futures’ could look like. We partnered with Mediamatic, an art center situated in Amsterdam pushing the intellectual and artistic boundaries at the intersection of art, non-human worlds and biotechnology, who helped us with making the project possible.
It is by now uncontroversial that the current fossil fuel economy is inextricably tied to exploitation and extraction of natural resources, degradation of land, air and water, and violence towards the non-human world intertwined with deep social inequalities and colonial legacies that continue in the present. Yet environmental and animal rights activists are labelled eco-terrorists with military and police forces deployed to tame their protests.
Against this bleak reality, which many in the Global North are only starting to experience when it has been the longstanding reality for many in the Global South, political initiatives such as the European Union Green Deal promise a ‘just and green transition’ of the economy toward tackling global warming in a ‘fair, just and inclusive’ manner. Within this context of many simultaneous and accelerating crises and unfulfilled political promises, on 20 July 2022 at Mediamatic we asked our speakers to reflect on what ‘just green futures’ mean to them, and what are the practices, knowledges, and laws that they think should be nurtured and adopted to make just green futures possible. We then asked the audience in small groups to design posters together with slogans and drawings that reflect their visions for ‘just green futures.’ The progression of this event was beautifully captured by Kyra Sacks, a visual artist working to integrate art with the social sciences.
Usha Natarajan, one of the leading voices of the Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) movement working on international environmental law, started the conversation, She drew attention to the dominant pattern of knowledge production: there are so many things that we don’t know, and so far our knowledge has been dominated by European thought based on control over nature, which prevents us from listening to and learning from cultures that live sustainably with the natural world.
Margarita Nieves, a Columbian lawyer working on environmental governance and energy transition, talked about her experience of being raised in a region that economically depended on resource extraction and the cognitive dissonance that that provoked in her and the communities she grew up in. For her, a green transition implies a change in mentality and a serious turn to sustainable consumption.
In a moving talk, Pippi van Ommen, an environmental activist that used to be part of Extinction Rebellion, spoke about the difficulty in finding hope in a world where the political elites have ‘sacrificed people to profit’. To make green just futures possible, she argued, we collectively need to reckon with hundreds of years of colonialism, capitalism, and patriarchy.
In my own intervention, I argued that veganism, which is deeply entangled with feminist ideals, is a small daily act of resistance to the violence that structures our food systems. It is a simple way to show humility and start building solidarities with non-human worlds.
Additionally, Anne Hofstra, at that time a programmer at Mediamatic filled in for the fashion designer Annouk Bekers, and presented a project entitled ‘Inhuman Carnival’ that Annouk developed at Mediamatic. The project interrogates the current fashion system by asking whether dressing as non-humans can allow us center non-humans and break out of our anthropocentric views.
Below are short essays based on talks given by Usha, Margarita, Pippi and myself, accompanied by Kyra’s thought-provoking images
The event was part of the Sustainable Global Economic Law summer school based at the University of Amsterdam, which every year since 2021 brings together scholars from across the world to reflect on issues at the intersection of global economic law and ecological and social justice. It is part of a broader project on law and sustainable globalization financed by the Dutch Ministry of Education and Science and gathering four law schools: University of Amsterdam, Tilburg University, Maastricht University, and Open University.
Accepting the Unknown, by Usha Natarajan
What does a just and green future look like? My answer in a nutshell is that I don’t know. If ever there was a question that demanded the utter relinquishment of the safety of our comfortable truths, the relentless reaffirmation of our areas of expertise, and the reassurances of familiar discourse, it is this one. But it may be difficult for those bred in the certainty of always having all the answers to accept that they don’t know the answer to this excellent question.
In my research so far, I have learned that the way humans treat each other and the way we treat the environment is inextricable, with each relationship producing and reproducing the other. If our primary reaction to the non-human world is fear driven, then from this comes the need to control our environment, and that inevitably includes the need to control other people. Our reaction to difference in the non-human world is not unrelated to our reaction to difference among humans.
it is not a coincidence that the legacy of five hundred years of settler colonialism, genocide, slavery, apartheid, and systemic racial discrimination is climate change, mass extinction, desertification, deforestation, and the increasing toxicity of the air, water, and land.
Usha Natarajan
In terms of whose reactions have dominated and shaped our world, our reality today is shaped by centuries of the hegemony of European thought, including its settler colonies in the Americas and Australasia. In this context, we can understand that it is not a coincidence that corporations came at the vanguard of European empire, as did the industrial revolution and capitalism follow in its wake. And it is not a coincidence that the legacy of five hundred years of settler colonialism, genocide, slavery, apartheid, and systemic racial discrimination is climate change, mass extinction, desertification, deforestation, and the increasing toxicity of the air, water, and land. They demonstrate a shared desire to control and eliminate that which is feared in the human and non-human world – the unknown and the unknowable – through either assimilation or extermination.
As people are inseparable from the world that gives us life, the way we treat other people is inextricably intertwined with the way we treat nature. Either both relationships are healthy, or neither is. Thus, a first step towards achieving a just and green transition is listening to cultures that live sustainably with each other and the world. A type of listening that does not endeavor to appropriate and assimilate the wisdom of others, but that instead allows those who may have some answers to be heard on their own terms and in their own languages through the ceding of knowledge-making and decision-making power and space. The recovery of subaltern knowledges is no small task because it threatens the dissolution of dominant disciplines and categories. Moreover, such endeavors carry with them the ubiquitous risk of methodological whiteness, where subaltern knowledges are appropriated in the name of a just and green transition in a manner that merely further enhances existing white privilege whilst assuaging white guilt.
people are inseparable from the world that gives us life, the way we treat other people is inextricably intertwined with the way we treat nature.
Usha Natarajan
The limitless extension of the epistemological monoculture of western rationality cannot produce a just and green transition. Indeed, so far it has produced only the opposite. Addressing complex ecological and social crises requires an ecology of knowledges. Non-western intellectual traditions contain diverse understandings of justice and ecology, including understandings of a good life that is lived well in itself, rather than a life that is better in comparison with others. Where individual human identity is not a static entitlement but rather flows through connection and interaction, and thus individual well-being is inextricable from the well-being of others and the world. Where encounters in the world with the different, the hybrid, the mysterious, and the unknown are treated as portals to knowledge and inspiration: opportunities for the sublimation of fear and the affirmation of life. Such approaches would help to undo the separation and hierarchy between the subjects and objects of knowledge in relationships of mastery, ownership, and violence.
Visionary thinking: The world after a green and just transition, by Margarita Teresa Nieves Zárate
Good afternoon, I am glad to be here with you today. When Laura Burgers contacted me to share my ideas about the future of the world after the energy transition, I thought how interesting and provoking this question is. But, before talking about the future, first, I need to give a few steps back and travel to the past to share with you my journey. I was born in the north of Colombia, in a unique region of the world where the desert meets the sea. This is a province rich in natural resources: forests, rivers, mountains, and also coal and natural gas. Right in the middle of my province is the largest open-pit coal mine in South America.
During my childhood, I used to listen stories about the multiple tensions that the exploitation of coal created in my province: negative impacts such as the displacement of people from their lands, human rights violations, respiratory diseases, the deviation of rivers … But also the economic benefits that this activity brought to my province and the whole country: economic dynamism, exports, government revenues, and employment. These contradictions create in the population of the region what I call a social cognitive dissonance: the discomfort that we experience when we live in environments of unsustainable growth.
More than thirty years after realizing the tensions created by coal exploitation in my province, almost nothing has changed there. The coal mine continues to be one of the main sources of revenue for my region. However, now the discussion has turned into something different. In the past, when people talked about the possible closure of the coal mine, it was not due to the negative impacts on the environment and the population, but due to the depletion of coal resources. Now, the discussions are around when the coal mine will stop its activities due to its contribution to climate change on a global scale.
It was my curiosity around the tensions created by the exploitation of energy resources in my province that motivated me to become a lawyer and focus on energy law to understand how the authorities, corporations and the law deal with the multiple impacts – positive and negative – created by the energy sector. On this long journey, in 2017, I decided to do my PhD in energy law at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. At that point, I found an interesting connection between the Netherlands and Colombia: the Netherlands was one of the main importers of the coal produced in my region. This finding allowed me to realize the global dimension of this issue.
Being in Groningen, I also found another tension created by the energy sector: Groningen is the heart of the largest natural gas field in Europe and this activity creates other type of impact: earthquakes that deteriorate the households of thousands of families and affect their perception of safety. But the exploitation of natural gas also creates important revenues for the Netherlands and its energy security. Once more, I was trapped in another social cognitive dissonance created by the energy sector.
These tensions are part of reality today where more than 80% of global energy needs are met with fossil fuel resources: coal, oil and natural gas. This is a reality that we want to change through a green and just energy transition. Now that you know what moves me, I want to take you to the future. If I am lucky – and I say this because Colombian people do not take life for granted – by 2050 I will be 65 years old.
To me, a successful green transition will be a transition that not only abates the excess of greenhouse gases in our planet, but a transition based on sustainable practices. This transformation will start with a change of mentality and systemic thinking on consumption patterns and behaviors. We need to understand that climate change requires a systemic transformation, not only from the energy sector but also from the agricultural sector and to change behavioral patterns. To make it clear, it is not enough to just start driving an electric car or using public transport: we will also need to reduce electricity and meat consumption. Systemic thinking also means that we need to make unusual connections such as on the relationship between drug consumption, deforestation and climate change, where people also realize the impact of drug consumption on greenhouse gas emissions.
In this regard, climate change must be a driver to transform the economic model from wild capitalism to responsible consumption. The energy transition is also paradoxical: it demands different actions from diverse actors. Let’s think of technology: the energy transition asks for a speed up of technologies with net zero carbon emissions. At the same time, it demands consumers to slow down the consumption of resources.
We need to understand that climate change requires a systemic transformation, not only from the energy sector but also from the agricultural sector and to change behavioral patterns.
Margarita Teresa Nieves Zárate
In the energy sector I want to see several transformations, not only technological, but also in societal values. I will mention some of them. I want to start with energy efficiency solutions: the most sustainable energy is the one that we do not use. We need energy efficiency solutions to control light, heat and cooling in buildings. Some solutions are simple, such as the design of buildings with sufficient natural light, that substantially reduce the use of electricity during the day. Other energy efficiency solutions are more complex, where digitalization has an important role to play. Or they require large investments, for instance in infrastructure for transportation. There are many regions in the world without efficient public transport services, where having trains or metro is not even part of the imaginary. Regions that would also benefit from good infrastructure to use bicycles, not only as a sport and recreational activity but as a means of transport.
Energy efficiency can also be fostered through energy integration by the development of collective energy projects between countries, and for this we will need not only technology but also values such as peace, trust and cooperation:
- Today, around 2.8 billion people in the world rely on precarious sources of energy such as firewood. By 2050 I want to see a significant improvement of energy access with renewable energy solutions.
- I envision an energy matrix dominated by renewable energy sources. What technologies will provide for net zero carbon emissions? It will not be a single one but multiple sources: bioenergy, geothermal, hydropower, ocean, solar and wind energy. These renewable energy sources will need batteries to store electricity or green hydrogen as an energy carrier. On the large spectrum of renewable energy sources there are circular ones such as biomass, and solutions that enable decentralized ways to produce energy through energy communities such as solar panels. The development of fusion nuclear reactors is also a possibility as illustrated by the ITER experiments in Italy.
- I would also like to see the implementation of more technologies where people, cars and trains can produce electricity while conducting normal activities. Let’s think of highways producing electricity through friction or people producing electricity by riding their bikes.
- We need to be aware of the important role of geopolitics and the relations between the Global North and the Global South. Many of the critical minerals to produce solar panels and wind turbines are produced in developing countries with very poor regulations and working conditions. To have a just transition we will need to bridge the regulatory and governance gaps in those regions in terms of occupational health, safety and environmental regulations and standards.
- Systemic thinking means that we have to analyze many of our behavioral patterns and move towards a conscious consumption by understanding that demand response and consumers are an important element to reduce energy consumption. We need more real connection among people. Modern electric devices such as cellphones and computers not only consume our lives but also electricity. Instead of playing in real life, we are playing online. As long as we continue using electric devices in an irresponsible way, energy consumption will continue rising.
I want to conclude by sharing with you that last week I attended the 2022 Euro Science Open Conference in Leiden. In one of the sessions, the European Space Agency shared the plans of putting men on Mars in the coming decades. I do understand the importance of reaching Mars from so many viewpoints, including to learn more about the history of our universe, but it seems contradictory to desperately look for life on Mars when the Earth is full of life and we do not appreciate it.
From my perspective, the images that we receive from Mars are devastating: images from a vast desert very similar to the landscapes that open coal mining is leaving in my region in Colombia, and in many other regions of the world. There is nothing even close to the multiple forms of life and colors that abound on Earth. I am convinced that we can save our beautiful planet if we change governmental, corporate and individual mentalities and actions. There is no planet B.
Envisioning a green, just future while witnessing a devastated world, by Pippi van Ommen
Global economic systems are unravelling the world’s ecosystems and we get to witness the sixth mass extinction, climate breakdown and ecological collapse. Only in the past month, thirty-three million people were affected by flooding in Pakistan as extreme droughts in China and Europe caused rivers to run dry. There is nothing natural about all these ‘natural disasters’. Xiye Bastida, an activist from the Otomi-Toltec community in Mexico, has poignantly said we had better call these dramatic events ‘fossil fuel disasters’.
And yet Dutch politicians just OK-ed drilling for gas in the Wadden Sea (which also happens to be a UNESCO World Heritage Site). The people who run the world don’t give a damn – as they keep sacrificing people for profit. The imperial hunger for exploitation and extraction of wealthy, Western elites has driven all of humanity to the brink of extinction.
If I force myself to look ahead, I find I do know some things about a better future. For example, there wouldn’t be capitalism, on its never-ending rampage of commodification. There wouldn’t be imperialism, exerting control through force. There wouldn’t be patriarchy, with its unimaginative ensnaring of ideas of gender. We would value people over profit.
Pippi von Ommen
This summer, while the unprecedented heat was pressing down on me, I found myself scrolling on my phone past disaster after disaster. I felt stuck, as a pendulum between panic and paralysis. My stomach turned and my heartbeat went up, I honestly just wanted to be in bed. People ask me where I find hope when I’m staging another protest and sometimes I come up with a corny answer. Other times, I can’t bring myself to answer anything, finding it impossible to be hopeful for the future if today already looks so bleak.
Gloom weighs heavy. What happens when I cannot fathom a better ending? Right now, it is easier for me – and most people I know – to picture the end of the world than a better one. Partially because Hollywood has spoon fed us apocalyptic films, and partially because we know the script: 500 years of colonialism has led us here. How to change course now? Interestingly, failure to imagine a future for oneself is often an effect of trauma. Doom sets in. As the natural world despairs, so do we.
If I force myself to look ahead, I find I do know some things about a better future. For example, there wouldn’t be capitalism, on its never-ending rampage of commodification. There wouldn’t be imperialism, exerting control through force. There wouldn’t be patriarchy, with its unimaginative ensnaring of ideas of gender. We would value people over profit. We would be able to breathe clean air. We would feel like we belong. We would have justice.
Even as I despair I am reminded by the title of the anthology by 60 women at the forefront of the climate movement: ‘All we can save’. If I get out of bed, I indeed see there is still so much to save. I can’t figure out more specifically what the future should look like, the concrete bits we must envision together. That is the sort of world I am fighting for: where we as people get to decide together on our future. A world where we have changed our diet for the climate: we ate the rich and distributed their decision-making power.
Let us remember that, in the words of Margaret Mead, we should ‘never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has’. Some may call these words corny but I find them to be very clear instructions.
What does a green just future after the transition look like? by Ivana Isailovic
In a complex and unequal world, there are a lot of things that we simply don’t know. And yet, in the Global North, the vast majority has internalized a sense of arrogance and superiority vis-à-vis the nonhuman world. In the Global North, we tend to fetichize ready-made-one-size-fits all fixes and answers which prevents us from nurturing the humility and care needed to tackle dramatic life-threatening phenomena like climate change.
But here is one simple thought to answer the ambitious questions asked: the just sustainable future is, has to be, vegan.
This doesn’t sound very provocative here at Mediamatic and in Amsterdam, but outside in many places in the Global North veganism is still seen as a ‘trend’, as a practice for rich white, urban, elites, as a classist and racialized practice, as going against the culture that gives meaning to food that we are eating. It is associated with being ‘weak’ and ‘soft’ in contrast to the ‘strength’ and ‘energy’ of the meat eater. For me, veganism is an everyday small act of resistance and protest against the violence towards, and exploitation of, human and other animals that is deeply ingrained in our food systems.
According to some estimates, 72 billion animals are slaughtered every year, that is 200 million per day. And the dreadful working conditions in the meat industry are well known. In Europe, this a multibillion euro business relying on thousands of precarious and often migrant and racialized workers, facing exploitation and rights abuses. These precarious others are doing the dirty and painful work of slaughtering, dismembering, and cutting animals so that others who never need to witness this violence will consume and ‘enjoy’ them. What does it say about a culture and about us when our food systems are organized around the consumption and enjoyment of pain and fear? Being vegan is a refusal to contribute and participate in large scale violence, which is very easy to forget, and erase, and which gets legitimized everyday.
As a feminist scholar, different strands within feminism have helped me understand the connections between the violence towards the non-human world and the violence towards racialized individuals and communities, women, and those non binary, trans, queer communities disciplined to fit rigid gender binaries.
These connections are hard to see and I’ve learned so much from many authors and activists from the global North and South such as Yoriko Otomo as well as Carole J. Adams, a US feminist who wrote the groundbreaking book The Sexual Politics of Meat in the 1990s. It took me some time to understand how my veganism and my feminism were related. For many feminists, engaging with the non-human world, other animals, or ‘nature’ is seen as dangerous. This is because it risks legitimizing traditional gender norms, entrenching the association between ‘real womanhood’ and ‘motherhood’, reducing women to the ‘body’ to ‘nature’ and the ‘irrational’. It risks limiting individuals’ life choices and their representations, it risks entrenching violence on those who do not fit gendered scripts.
But actually, many different strands of feminism, together with others, have always fought against the masculinist and Eurocentric understanding of the ‘human,’ and have fought for the emancipation of those considered as non-humans, the racialized, and sexualized others within an emancipatory political project of radically transforming societies. Feminists have also written about the parallels and intersections between gender violence/ and violence towards other animals. They argued that, like non-human animals, women have been and are treated as ‘objects’ as not having a voice.
According to some estimates, 72 billion animals are slaughtered every year, that is 200 million per day. And the dreadful working conditions in the meat industry are well known. In Europe, this a multibillion euro business relying on thousands of precarious and often migrant and racialized workers, facing exploitation and rights abuses.
Ivana Isailovic
One strength of feminism is that it keeps interrogating the meaning of familiar words and come up with new concepts and ideas to describe more accurately the reality of our lived lives. For instance, ‘marital rape’ or ‘sexual harassment’ were coined to name the violence women are experiencing within the intimate spaces, and that couldn’t be named. Similarly, feminists helped us question the names that we have given to food that we eat to erase the violence in which it is embedded: rather than saying ‘hamburgers’, ‘chicken breast’, and ‘steak’ we should say ‘slaughtered’, ‘dismembered’ animals, and ‘rotting’ meat.
Finally, feminists have showed how the tendency to separate the non-human from human animals is a recent phenomenon which needs to be (re)placed within the broader context of colonialism and industrialization. In her work, Yoriko Otomo, shows that the global regulation of human and non-human milk reconfigures the relations between human/non-humans. Wet nursing of people by animals, and by people who did not give birth to the human child was authorized until the state stepped in to regulate milk consumption. She shows that this kind of state action can’t be separated from the emergence of the corporation as the main political and economic power and the Empire.
Veganism is not a panacea and it raises all sorts of questions about the distribution of power. It is however also a small, everyday practice of reclaiming the ethics of care and respect. Especially for those of us who live in the Global North, it is a way to show more humility, and to start building solidarities across the human and non-human world.
