We are living through an epoch in world history

us with a role to play in creating a happy society on a healthy planet. In order to deal with this responsibility, the first step is to understand how the current human and environmental crises have been allowed to develop, escalating in such a short space of time, unconstrained.

We are living through an epoch in world history

We are at a pivotal point in the history of the world. A world in crisis brings an opportunity for change. This bigger picture shapes our place in the ecosystem and shines a light on the reality of local lives at the sharp end, a world in which people have been dehumanised, swept to the brink of survival into wastelands of poverty and destitution, on an angry planet that is not just murmuring its displeasure but screaming as it spirals out of kilter. Despite the warnings, we continue to suffer from a total breakdown of imagination, an inability to focus on the evidence before our eyes. What comes to mind as I say this is not only the images of the planet on fire in 2019 – Australia, the Amazon, Indonesia, Russia, Sub-Saharan Africa, Canada, Greenland, Spain and India burning out of control (Vasilieva, 2019) – but also the normalisation of foodbanks, child poverty, homelessness, depression, suicide and other symptoms of unwell, unsustainable, unequal societies that face us in our everyday lives. Across the planet, in countries rich and poor, shop doorways are turned into homes for the homeless, tents appear for shelter in the most unlikely places, donations for foodbanks are parked in supermarkets, refugees are cast adrift on dangerous seas … and we walk on by, failing to focus and failing to question why we have allowed ourselves to be persuaded that this is normal, that there is no alternative, or TINA as it has come to be known.

As if that wasn’t enough to deal with, in April 2021, as I write this, I sit here in my 14th month of social isolation, at the height of a coronavirus pandemic, a virus previously unknown to humanity, sinister, unseen, capable of killing swathes of the world’s population. This has done more than anything else to expose the grim reality of neoliberal politics, illuminating the full consequences of its greed and ruthlessness. I live in the North West region of England, an area systematically drained of its assets by the power base in the South East, creating enormous inequalities and rendering it vulnerable to the highest COVID-19 death toll in the country. I have witnessed my homeland, not only stripped of the quality of its infrastructure, but stripped of hope and dignity as wind-blown plastic waves alarmingly from the branches of trees and people walk by with heads bowed, surviving. This is the story of the short life of neoliberal politics from my experience, but it is the same story, to a greater or lesser degree, in most countries of the world.

In the UK, neoliberal ‘austerity’ politics has plundered the public sector infrastructure of its support for a common good, systematically privatising its resources into the pockets of the rich. One of the greatest contradictions of this global pandemic is that it exposes the reliance of a population on the National

Health Service (NHS), as all the doctors, nurses and ancillary workers, many of them immigrants or Black, are called on to put themselves on the frontline of risk at a time when the NHS has been stripped of its capacity by unjustifiable ‘austerity’ measures.

Let me tell you a well-kept secret …

Not many people realise that, in 2016, a government war game called Exercise Cygnus, the sort often carried out to assess how prepared we are in the event of risk, revealed that more personal protective equipment (PPE) was urgently needed for those working on the front line – and that includes those who keep the country going, like delivery drivers, taxi drivers, bus drivers and shopkeepers, as well as hospital workers. In hospitals, much greater capacity for intensive care was needed to save lives, and in the country overall much more capacity was needed in the care system. This was known by the UK government, but they still continued with their punitive, unnecessary ‘austerity’ measures… As a consequence, one of the highest death rates in the world has been experienced by the UK.

Source: Booth and Sample (2021)

The struggle to get through this crisis is proportionate to the stripping of public assets, and this must be called out. As Mazzucato (2019) says, it is impossible to strip back the assets of public institutions and expect that a sudden injection of cash will restore their capacity. In relation to the NHS in crisis, the loss of years of investment in medical science, the depletion of nurses and doctors compounded by anti-immigrant, radical-right populism, the lack of life-saving ventilators, of PPE … all of this illuminates in sharp relief the social evils of a politics of greed. Within this perspective comes the awareness that the rich are the source of the problem (Sayer, 2016). It is the workers at ground level who keep us going, health workers, care workers, bus drivers, shop workers, delivery drivers, refuse collectors … those who have been kept poor in a precariat economy while the rich have increased their riches opportunistically.

These introductory thoughts pave the way for my unequivocal challenge: social and environmental justice are intertwined, all part of the same problem, and we simply cannot claim to practise either without a critique of the political times that construct personal lives and frame local, grassroots participatory practice.