I liked your article, especially the section about empowering indigenous groups (and are we prepared to even if they don’t ascribe to our western democratic ideals?!). It is really key to recognise most interventions appear to be ‘damage limiting’ or treating symptoms rather than the actual cause - OVERCONSUMPTION and EVADING RESPONSIBLITY.
I listened to an amazing podcast by Jonathan Sacks who quoted an Italian Scholar Gionbattiusta Vico in a book “The New Science” apparently coined 5 levels of idiocy in a decadent society of plenty:
1. People worry about what’s necessary
2. People worry about what’s useful
3. People worry about what gives them comfort
4. People start delighting in pleasures
5. People start concentrating on luxuries.
He also quoted an Islamic teacher In Khaldun - civilisations lose “asabiyah” - we are only interested in ourselves and forget about the poor.
The real collapse of civilisations (and what appears to be humanity and the environment!) isn’t 40 years in the wilderness, or indeed poverty, it is in fact affluence (and philanthropy falls into this same trap!).
“I won’t stop consuming - I’ll just make myself better by purchasing highly greenwashed products and then send them to a charity shop” (for which a considerable amount of clothes still go to landfill, or countries where they cause plastic pollution as they don’t need that many clothes). “I will still eat luxury out-of-season foods with enormous fuel miles, as long as there isn’t much packaging or its organic”; “I will still berate my friends for not recycling and go on trans-Atlantic flights ‘for my mental health’”. (I write this as I listen to music on an iPhone, while typing on an ipad using a lamp in my nice clothes and warm house - hypocritical I know).
Making the poor pay to subsidise the luxuries of the rich (as in the UK green subsidies making heating bills unaffordable), making future generations pay (massive national debt) for investing in green infrastructure, and making poor countries (as you say, mostly in the southern hemisphere) make emissions on our behalf (lets out-source our coal-mine made electricity and slaves mining our lithium for our electric cars), which all allows us to off-set our guilt and kick our cans of responsibility down the road. We (and all climate philanthropists) are not being stupid, or unkind, we are just in self-denial and happy to be the monkey who can’t hear/see/speak no evil - and it is actually easier to pretend and seek complex solutions exist to this ‘problem’ rather than do the obvious and take responsibility.
Many thanks. I agree. And I too am a pretty big hypocrite in this too. I think the change has to be systemic: only that way do individual behaviours adapt.
I completely agree that philanthropy has to come to better terms with what systems change actually means and how to realise it. And that there is more lip service paid to shifting power than has genuinely happened to date. However, in my experience, the call for 'hard evidence' can backfire and perpetuate the problem. When funders become too focused on measuring impact, they naturally gravitate towards things that are easy to measure, leading, in the climate space, to more technical solutions. Social change and the impact of advocacy is notoriously difficult to measure, but we might be sorry if those groups were not supported to keep pressure on governments. If we want to genuinely shift power and see a fundamental shift in our economic system, then philanthropy needs to be willing to take risks and experiment to find out what strategies might work, even in the absence of existing hard evidence.
Thanks for the comment Julie. I entirely accept your point. I have been the victim of foundations demanding hard data on impact when it's basically impossible, or irrelevant. At the same time, from our research it was very difficult to find any real assessment of impact, at least externally. I know that foundations do conduct such assessment internally (someone at IKEA told me recently that their assessment was that their philanthropy had had basically NO impact!). But clearly it needs to be more transparent and there be a real debate. Thanks again for reading and commenting.
I liked your article, especially the section about empowering indigenous groups (and are we prepared to even if they don’t ascribe to our western democratic ideals?!). It is really key to recognise most interventions appear to be ‘damage limiting’ or treating symptoms rather than the actual cause - OVERCONSUMPTION and EVADING RESPONSIBLITY.
I listened to an amazing podcast by Jonathan Sacks who quoted an Italian Scholar Gionbattiusta Vico in a book “The New Science” apparently coined 5 levels of idiocy in a decadent society of plenty:
1. People worry about what’s necessary
2. People worry about what’s useful
3. People worry about what gives them comfort
4. People start delighting in pleasures
5. People start concentrating on luxuries.
He also quoted an Islamic teacher In Khaldun - civilisations lose “asabiyah” - we are only interested in ourselves and forget about the poor.
The real collapse of civilisations (and what appears to be humanity and the environment!) isn’t 40 years in the wilderness, or indeed poverty, it is in fact affluence (and philanthropy falls into this same trap!).
“I won’t stop consuming - I’ll just make myself better by purchasing highly greenwashed products and then send them to a charity shop” (for which a considerable amount of clothes still go to landfill, or countries where they cause plastic pollution as they don’t need that many clothes). “I will still eat luxury out-of-season foods with enormous fuel miles, as long as there isn’t much packaging or its organic”; “I will still berate my friends for not recycling and go on trans-Atlantic flights ‘for my mental health’”. (I write this as I listen to music on an iPhone, while typing on an ipad using a lamp in my nice clothes and warm house - hypocritical I know).
Making the poor pay to subsidise the luxuries of the rich (as in the UK green subsidies making heating bills unaffordable), making future generations pay (massive national debt) for investing in green infrastructure, and making poor countries (as you say, mostly in the southern hemisphere) make emissions on our behalf (lets out-source our coal-mine made electricity and slaves mining our lithium for our electric cars), which all allows us to off-set our guilt and kick our cans of responsibility down the road. We (and all climate philanthropists) are not being stupid, or unkind, we are just in self-denial and happy to be the monkey who can’t hear/see/speak no evil - and it is actually easier to pretend and seek complex solutions exist to this ‘problem’ rather than do the obvious and take responsibility.
Many thanks for a great article.
Many thanks. I agree. And I too am a pretty big hypocrite in this too. I think the change has to be systemic: only that way do individual behaviours adapt.
Excellent as always Carne. Looking forward to you speaking at the New School of the Anthropocene again this term!
Thanks Paul
I completely agree that philanthropy has to come to better terms with what systems change actually means and how to realise it. And that there is more lip service paid to shifting power than has genuinely happened to date. However, in my experience, the call for 'hard evidence' can backfire and perpetuate the problem. When funders become too focused on measuring impact, they naturally gravitate towards things that are easy to measure, leading, in the climate space, to more technical solutions. Social change and the impact of advocacy is notoriously difficult to measure, but we might be sorry if those groups were not supported to keep pressure on governments. If we want to genuinely shift power and see a fundamental shift in our economic system, then philanthropy needs to be willing to take risks and experiment to find out what strategies might work, even in the absence of existing hard evidence.
Thanks for the comment Julie. I entirely accept your point. I have been the victim of foundations demanding hard data on impact when it's basically impossible, or irrelevant. At the same time, from our research it was very difficult to find any real assessment of impact, at least externally. I know that foundations do conduct such assessment internally (someone at IKEA told me recently that their assessment was that their philanthropy had had basically NO impact!). But clearly it needs to be more transparent and there be a real debate. Thanks again for reading and commenting.