From climate change to environmental justice?

About Re-public

Table of contents

Re-Public is an online journal focusing on innovative developments in contemporary political theory and practice.

re-public: re-imagining democracy h t t p : / / w w w . r e - p u b l i c . g r / e n

Our contributors will not attempt to impose their arguments, but to provide original, creative views on issues they have either experienced or researched on. They are academics, journalists, artists, authors, politicians, and active citizens coming from almost the entire political spectrum. Some contributions, like the editorial, will be written collaboratively with the help of wiki software.

Introduction. Is there something "left" to say about climate change?

1.

Peter Barnes

4.

Dan Smith

Editorial board of Re-public:

9.

Bill McKibben

Thodoros Karounos tkarounos@re-public.gr

12.

Philip Sarre

Paulina Lampsa plampsa@re-public.gr

15.

Stephanie Posthumus

18.

Michail Fragkias

Managing editor: Pavlos Hatzopoulos phatzopoulos@re-public.gr Web developer: Giorgos Karamanolis gkaramanolis@re-public.gr Translations:

Towards a fair climate policy Adapting to the threats of climate change Out of the safety zone Environmental justice requires economic reform Framing French eco-difference: A brief overview

Connecting global environmental change to environmental justice:

The critical role of cities and good urban governance

22.

Ed Wall

27.

Carme Melo Escrihuela

31.

Nathan Young

Watershed urbanism Towards an urban ecological citizenship

Karina Lampsa karlam@otenet.gr Sofia Michalaki sofmichal@yahoo.gr Art design: Fotini Kapiri info@fkapiris.com

A return to the commons?

Why the environment (still) matters in democratic theory

34.

Dimitrios Zachariadis

Social media and environmental activism

re-public: re-imagining democracy h t t p : / / w w w . r e - p u b l i c . g r / e n

We aspire to participate in the process of re-imagining democracy, broadly conceived as referring to the multitude of practices that shape everyday life.

introduction Is there something "left" to say about climate change?

re-public: re-imagining democracy h t t p : / / w w w . r e - p u b l i c . g r / e n

A special issue of online journal Re-public

We will refrain, however, from entering the debate on the conclusiveness or the inconclusiveness of the scientific evidence about global warming. We will refrain from entering the debate on the impacts of current climate policies or of the impacts of the lack of action. Instead, the starting point of this special issue is that even is someone simply points to the problem of a potential climate catastrophe s/he needs to raise the question of global justice. What we have tried in this special issue is to pose questions that treat climate change as primarily a social problem; we have sought to explore the interconnections between environmental protection and social justice:

.

All the contents of the From climate change to environmental justice special issue are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Greece License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/gr/; or, (b) send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 2nd Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA.

What are, or might become, the points of convergence between developed and developing countries in the politics of climate change? . How can environmental politics become connected to the fight against global poverty? . Are ecological movements and environmental education currently lacking in dealing with problems of social equality? . Is "green marketing" beneficial to both the environment and to the democratisation of markets? . To what extent, does social justice entail the promotion of new, more decentralised models of energy production and distribution?

The questions are by no means novel, but we think that they should inform any progressive thinking for addressing climate change. Their articulation seems straightforward, but the point is whether 'there is something "left" to say' about them.

re-public: re-imagining democracy h t t p : / / w w w . r e - p u b l i c . g r / e n

From climate change to environmental justice?

When the politics of climate change is brought once again on the table, an understandable reaction would be that this is yet another perhaps the- topical issue where 'too much is said and relatively little done'. It is then admittedly rather difficult to hold that a collection of essays has something to add in the debate. The globalization of environmental issues, including climate change, is today part of the mainstream political agenda. A seeming consensus has been reached by most progressive forces that the environmental crisis is primarily a political problem that requires solutions global in scope and their implementation at transnational, national and local levels. And yet, what seems to be lacking is the effectiveness of these solutions, or at least the fear is that current solutions fall short of the problem, that we are not currently doing anything near enough about global warming.

1

Towards a creative synthesis

The complexity of social/environmental challenges can be seen as an opportunity to move freely between different problems, situations and vested behaviours. This agility creates instances (proposals for solutions) and moves towards their re-shaping and their re-introduction. Let's not dream about new social relationships, let's contribute with a creative, unexpected synthesis of concepts and actions. Let's attempt to incorporate the challenges of the wider commons and open movement(s) in the new socialist agendas.

re-public: re-imagining democracy h t t p : / / w w w . r e - p u b l i c . g r / e n

What is "left" to say about climate change does not then necessarily resemble a roadmap consisting of principles and proposed actions. It might become, instead, a call for experimentation, an experimentation that is critical towards contemporary structures of production and distribution.

Re-public

Peter Barnes - Towards a fair climate policy

Many economists (and others) from a wide range of political viewpoints are coming to support the idea of cap-anddividend or tax-and-rebate as the most sensible way to address climate change. It’s important to note that the two approaches (cap or tax) are functionally equivalent. Both policies are intended (1) to raise the price of the carbon emissions that cause global warming, thereby discouraging those emissions and encouraging alternatives, and (2) to do so in a way that does not place the burden of adjustment disproportionately on the poor.

If we don’t understand a problem, it’s unlikely we’ll be able to fix it. So let s begin by asking, with regard to the climate crisis, what is the problem we need to fix?

Often in public policy, the problem we need to fix isn’t immediately obvious.

Sometimes we see symptoms without seeing the underlying problem. Other times we see part of the problem but not the whole. On the surface, climate change appears to be an environmental problem, or perhaps a technological one. But deeper down, it’s a result of two economic and political failures.

The first of these is a market failure. Humans are dumping ever-rising quantities of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere because there are no limits or prices for doing so. There are, however, huge costs - costs that are shifted to future generations. When people don’t pay the full cost of what they’re doing, but instead transfer costs to others, economists call this “a market failure.” Nicholas Stern, former chief economist at the World Bank, has said that climate change is the “biggest market failure the world has ever seen.”

The second cause of global warming is misplaced government priorities. Because polluting corporations are powerful and future generations don’t vote, our governments not only allows carbon emissions to grow, but subsidizes them in numerous ways. Thus, despite all we know today about climate change, about two-thirds of US federal energy subsidies currently go, for example, to fossil fuels.

It’s important to recognize that these twin failures permeate our entire economy. They’re not problems of the electricity sector, the automobile sector or the building sector; they’re problems of all sectors and must be treated at that level. They distort the behavior of all individuals and businesses. No matter how ‘responsible’ any of us may be, our separate actions can’t overcome what these twin failures make most of us do most of the time. What’s required are fixes for both system failures. We need to limit and pay for atmospheric pollution, and we need to shift government’s attention from dirty fuels to clean alternatives. If we don’t do both of those things, we won’t stop climate change.

re-public: re-imagining democracy h t t p : / / w w w . r e - p u b l i c . g r / e n

The obvious ambiguity of the question comes out stronger after our initial call for papers.

Although most of the initial questions that we have posed remain open, what has emerged is the need to connect approaches, ideas, and actions. What has emerged is a common understanding that we connect to our world in dynamic and unpredictable ways. In order to address climate change, we, not only need to be methodical and pragmatic, we should open our minds to comprehend new patterns and pursuit novel proposals.

Policies are attempts by government to solve problems. They can be evaluated on three grounds: 1. How effectively do they solve the problem?

2. Whose interests do they serve?

3. What principles do they advance?

Some policies are little more than hot air. They are efforts by politicians to look good without offending their backers. Many tackle only part of a problem. They may achieve small gains, but they don’t address the core problem, which continues to get worse.

Other policies are giveaways to private interests. Typically, they’re cloaked in public interest language, but their effect is to enrich a few corporations. Lobbyists work hard to get policies like these. A few policies genuinely solve big problems, serve the interests of ordinary people, and advance important principles such as fairness. These are the policies citizens should actively support. Social Security, for example, solves the problem of old age poverty in a way that’s fair to all. That same standard should apply to climate policy.

What’s fair?

re-public: re-imagining democracy h t t p : / / w w w . r e - p u b l i c . g r / e n

Fairness is one of the most important principles a climate solution should embody. But what exactly is it? There are many dimensions to fairness. For example, there’s interspecies fairness: are we humans being fair to other species? There’s international fairness: are we in America, who have emitted more greenhouse gases than any other country, being fair to the rest of the world? There’s inter-generational fairness: are those living today being fair to their children and grandchildren? And there’s intra-generational fairness: if a policy enriches a small minority, while placing burdens on everyone else, is such a policy fair to our fellow citizens?

The key test for interspecies, international and intergenerational fairness is: will this policy reduce emissions fast enough to prevent planetary catastrophe? If not, we have to try harder. The key test for intra-generational fairness is: does this policy equitably share the burdens and gains of curbing climate change? During World War II, the draft applied equally to all males, and rationing meant the same shares for everyone. Fairness wasn’t an afterthought; it was built into our policies from the outset.

Who will pay for climate stability?

Every public policy has winners and losers. Sometimes it’s obvious who those are, but more often, it takes some digging to understand how the money flows. The typical way special interests get money from government is through subsidies and tax breaks. In those cases, all taxpayers pay, and favored companies gain. Subsidies and tax breaks are very much on the table in climate policy debates. But the climate crisis presents several other ways for businesses to enrich themselves at public expense, and citizens must watch carefully.

For example, one proposal to cap carbon emissions would give polluting companies free emission permits worth billions of dollars. Other proposals would create a loosely regulated system of carbon offsets that would help traders profit, but add little public benefit.

The big economic question in climate policy is whether polluters should pay or be paid. If carbon permits are given free to historical polluters, energy prices will rise and we’ll all pay more to whoever gets the permits. That wealth transfer - which over time could exceed a

3

trillion dollars - will flow straight from our pockets to the shareholders of polluting companies.

If rewarding polluters is the wrong way to go, the right way is to make them pay. That requires a well-designed system.

Taxes vs. caps Economists agree that, one way or another, we must raise the price of dumping carbon into the atmosphere. The debate is about how to do that. A carbon tax is one way. Initially, fuel companies would pay the tax and government would get the revenue. But fuel companies would pass the tax on to consumers, so in the end, a carbon tax is like a sales tax on necessities.

As such, it’s a regressive tax that is, the lower your income, the bigger the bite a carbon tax takes.

A carbon cap is an indirect way to charge for dumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

It puts a physical limit - a cap - on the supply of fossil fuels or the quantity of carbon dioxide emissions. To implement the cap, the government issues a gradually declining number of permits. As the supply of permits declines, the price of carbon rises. Since this price is ultimately paid by consumers, a carbon cap is as regressive as a carbon tax.

How much will a carbon tax or cap cost the average household? According to the Congressional Budget Office, when the cap is 15 percent below the current level of emissions, the average U.S. household will pay $1,160 a year in higher energy prices. As the cap goes down from there, the cost to households goes up. A tax that achieves the same reductions would cost as much. That’s no small burden to be adding to the already tight budgets of American families it will pinch not just the poor, but the entire middle class. And it could dampen consumer buying power just when the U.S. economy needs a boost.

Fortunately, there’s a way to offset this hit on household incomes - it’s what economists call “revenue recycling.” The idea is to return to house-holds, in aggregate, the extra money they’ll pay when carbon prices go up. Some households will pay more in higher prices than they get back, while others will pay less, but overall, house-hold incomes will be maintained. Most economists agree that revenue recycling in some form is a good idea. Among political figures, Al Gore has come out squarely for it. ”We need to put a price on carbon,” Gore said in his Nobel acceptance speech, with a tax that is rebated back to the people progressively. His preferred recycling method is to refund a portion of workers’ payroll taxes.1 A better way to recycle carbon revenue is to do what Alaska does with proceeds from its oil leases - pay equal dividends to all residents.2 This would cover everyone who pays higher energy prices, not just wage earners who pay payroll taxes. Refunding only to those who pay payroll taxes would leave out retired people, young people, stay-at-home parents, workers in the informal economy, and half the poorest people in America. By returning higher carbon prices to all Americans equally, we’d have a system in which everyone pays to pollute, but conservers come out ahead. People who drive big cars and heat large homes would pay more in higher energy prices than people who ride buses and live in small apartments.

Since all would get the same amount back, conservers would gain and guzzlers would lose.

Green behavior would be rewarded while polluting behavior is penalized.

In short, a cap-and-dividend system would be the simplest, fairest and most effective way to solve the climate crisis - and the most politically popular way as well.

[1] Al Gore, “Nobel Lecture”, delivered in Oslo on 10 December 2007.

[2] See Peter Barnes, Capitalism 3.0: A Guide to Reclaiming the Commons (San Fransisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2006) chap. 5.

re-public: re-imagining democracy h t t p : / / w w w . r e - p u b l i c . g r / e n

What makes good climate policy?

2

Dan Smith - Adapting to the threats of climate change

Climate change is upon us and its physical effects have started to unfold. In this interview, Dan Smith talks about the social and human consequences that are likely to ensue - particularly the risks of conflict and instability. He argues that adaptation to climate change is only going to work if it is closely related to development and also becomes an integral part of any peace process.

Maria Kampouri: Considering that the occurrence of sudden and often violent climate change through geological time has been well documented, why are we so concerned about the changes we see today?

re-public: re-imagining democracy h t t p : / / w w w . r e - p u b l i c . g r / e n

Dan Smith: Well, the way that we live, whether we realise it or not in our highly urbanised societies, is very dependent on the climate and the natural environment. Even minor changes, like increases of gas emissions or of average temperatures can have a really big effect on our lives.

In Australia, for example, there have been droughts for several years coupled with the recent frightening forest fires, of which of course Greece has also got experience. But maybe the more serious problem in Australia is that rice growing has been reduced by 98%. Now if we’re wondering why there is a food crisis going on at the moment and prices are rising and there are starting to be riots where people are unable to afford their food, drought is one of the reasons. There is every reason, in other words, to be concerned today about climate change.

Maria Kampouri: How do the processes of overpopulation and urbanisation compromise our ability to adapt to these climatic changes that we face today?

Dan Smith: The world s population has been increasing in dramatic speed as I think everybody knows. In the 1820s the world population was about 1 billion and it reached three billion in 1960. Today, it has surpassed the 6 billion mark and it may go on to reach 9 billion by the middle of the 21st century. In historical perspective this is just a staggering increase. At the same time, we have obviously cultivated more land, we have improved our farming techniques, we have much better food storage and distribution than we ever did and, yet, there is still the question as to whether we can really be so efficient and so creative that the planet can bear the burden of all of these people.

On the one hand, I don t think that the case is proven that the planet is overpopulated. On the other hand, it is clear that, for example, problems in relation to the production and consumption of food and energy are made more intense because of the increase of the global world population.

You have also mentioned urbanisation. About 50% of the world population lives in cities at the moment and on current projections this number will perhaps reach somewhere in the vicinity of

5

70% by 2030. The increase of urban population is partly caused by reproduction in the cities, but also by rural depopulation. One third of the world s urban population currently lives in slums, and in those slums, they very often have very little or no access to clean water and sanitation, let alone things like education and healthcare, law and order, and personal security and safety.

These slums covering large areas of some of the mega cities in the world are becoming no-go areas as far as law and order are concerned and are turning into self-ruled little enclaves, ruled by gangs. Obviously it’s very hard, almost impossible, to involve those areas and the people who live in them in programmes of adaptation to the threats of climate change. If you look at cities like Karachi or Mumbai, although these places are facing environmental risks, it is very hard to educate and engage local populations so that they respond to those risks.

Maria Kampouri: In many cases, western civil society organisations operating in developing countries are often perceived by local populations as remnants of the colonial period. Do you agree with this assessment and do you consider it as an important problem in relation to climate change policy in developing countries?

Dan Smith: I would like to distinguish various different components of this set of problems and issues, which you are raising. One of them is the potentially constructive role of civil society.

I think it is true that if countries can develop a strong civil society then their capacity for development, for good governance, for freedom and liberties and also amongst other things for adaptation to climate change all increase and I think there are good empirical reasons for saying so. The second point concerns homogenisation. It is wrong and even destructive to think that civil society should look the same in every country and I think there are cases where the projection of the European or of the slightly different North American model of civil society onto developing countries has been inappropriate and unhelpful. Third, I think that civil society should already get credit for putting the issue of climate change on the global agenda. Politicians were not prepared to address these issues if civil society had not pushed forward the argument that it was urgent to designi a sound climate policy.

Climate change and global warming are issues that outlast the life of a government. These are problems that will continue to haunt us for another century - what is achieved during the life of a US administration or of an EU presidency is relatively limited. This is not the kind of issue that fits the shape of contemporary western political thinking. But scientists, some journalists and non-governmental organizations have really pushed the awareness of this issue forward and have said no, this is something that has got to be dealt with. Nonetheless, when the governments take it on and start to deal with it, the various ways they come up with for approaching the issue are top-down and involve as little change as possible.

Maria Kampouri: The reason why I’m asking is that I know people working for environmental NGOs in Africa, for example, claiming that civil society should emerge from a country itself and it is very difficult for foreigners often to understand the way local societies work. Carbon trading, the way it is practiced in Africa is a good example.

Dan Smith: This type of criticism is absolutely correct. There are some international NGOs, which operate as if they were part of the civil society of the Democratic Republic of Congo, or Liberia, or Tanzania and that’s artificial and it s fake, but that does not mean to say that international NGOs are incapable of doing anything good. They can be of great help. But you have to understand that when you’re involved in this kind of activity that everything depends

re-public: re-imagining democracy h t t p : / / w w w . r e - p u b l i c . g r / e n

4

on the organizations with which you re partner and that you are there in a role to support and help them and not to lead them.

To go back to the question of carbon trading now: carbon trading has been proposed as a sort of painless and profitable technical solution to the problem of climate change and the evidence at the moment is that it is not working. There’s evidence that actually, the clean development mechanism (CDM), which is the main carbon trading instrument worldwide is functioning effectively but dishonestly, according to some recent reports. But even if it were to be functioning in an honest way it is still really hard to see how this could make a fundamental difference. What carbon trading is about is relocating where the carbon emissions are made.

What we need are some of the dramatic reductions that some of the environmental NGOs have talked about; reducing carbon emissions by more than 50% within the next 30 years. In order to achieve such a goal you would have to move on very quickly and the sad thing is that no government is doing so.

Maria Kampouri: The road from Kyoto to Bali shows a trend toward more conservative policy measures. Do you agree with this and why do you think this is so?

re-public: re-imagining democracy h t t p : / / w w w . r e - p u b l i c . g r / e n

Dan Smith: I think it s a little bit mixed at the moment. One of the significant reasons for these developments is the desperate attempt to get the US engaged. It is really hard to exaggerate, but I think that the current US administration has been a disaster for international efforts to address climate change. If Al Gore had been elected in 2000, I think we would have had a better implementation of the Kyoto levels and a more thorough and concise debate about post-Kyoto, which would have set more ambitious targets. I’m not saying that everything would have been paradise.

At the same time, it has to be said, that if you look at the political discourse in Europe and in several other countries, you start seeing governments and policy-makers beginning to take seriously the degree to which things should change. What they haven’t figured out is how to actually implement that change. That’s very difficult and I think that it’s wrong to just sit on the sidelines and just say oh the government is getting it wrong, because this is actually also about people. Climate change and environmental issues pose a thread that connects all the way from the very highest international level to the individual going and shopping in the super market.

What choices are you making? Are you using plastic bags? Do you think about carbon emissions in your everyday life? Do you drive cars when it is unnecessary? We are all going to have to accept and welcome, embrace, and enjoy changes in our patterns of behaviour, because if we carry on with the kind of wild consumerism that we ve had for the past 30 years, then we re not going to reduce carbon emissions and all of the nightmare scenarios of climate change scientists will come true.

Maria Kampouri: When it comes to carbon trading, how can we still talk about it when there is still the third world debt holding those countries under the power of developed nations?

Can the abolition of the third world debt be really the brake to independent development of these countries?

Dan Smith: Yes I think it still can. I mean there have been huge steps forward.

But nonetheless, for some countries in particular, the debt repayments are still higher than they can manage. There is another issue, here, that needs to be highlighted, which is that carbon trading, if it works, will do what s called mitigation of carbon emissions. The fact is, however, that the environmental system moves very slowly, so effects of climate change, which are unfolding now and will keep on unfolding in the next three decades are determined by

7

carbon emissions made over the previous century. If we reduce carbon emissions now and do it seriously, then in about 3 or 4 decades time we should start to see the benefits of our actions.

For developing countries in particular, we ve got to be concerned about what happens in the intervening 35 to 40 years between now and when reduced carbon emissions are to be felt.

During that time developing countries will be facing (according to what projections suggest) more droughts in dryer places, more flooding in others, shifts in disease patterns, food shortages, possibly mass migrations, and increased risk of conflict. Simply relying on carbon trading to resolve this complex set of issues is completely off the mark, completely off target. What’s needed is to work with developing countries to help them to adapt so that they can face the consequences of climate change, so that if floods happen, they would be more prepared to address their consequences, for example. Obviously, their ability to face these challenges will be increased if they have more economic capacity and so the reform of the world trading system is actually a part of a fair and a just response to climate change.

Maria Kampouri: So in cases where states are extremely vulnerable to conflict, how can they participate in the global climate change agenda?

Dan Smith: In our “A Climate of Conflict“ report we have shown that climate change, interacting with weaknesses in the political, economical and social infrastructures of countries creates a serious risk of armed conflict in about 46 countries and a risk for serious political instability in other 56 countries. This assessment is based on a projection spanning the next 10 to 15 years. We believe that food insecurity will be a major trigger for these developments; where food insecurity arises, then mass migration is likely to follow, that being another potential trigger for conflict. Most of the migration movements we are looking at concern poor countries.1 They consist of either internal migration flows or of movements of people from a poor state to its neighbouring countries, rather than movements from the poor to the rich world.

I think that what can be done starts with the recognition of the issue and of the different shape that the issue takes in different parts of the world. Mitigating the output of greenhouse gases is absolutely essential, but what we have to recognise is that it s not enough and that until the good effects of that are felt we need adaptation. Rich countries, like Britain and the Netherlands, for example, are already busy adapting to the effects of climate change and they are able to do so because they are well organised, well governed and rich. But countries like Bangladesh are unable to so, or are able to do so to a much lesser extent. And they need to be brought into an international system of assistance to develop the knowledge and the understanding in identifying exactly what threats they face. For example, in Bangladesh, the increased risk clearly has to do both with the cyclones and with the Ganges-Brahmaputra river system. In the Philippines, one issue is that the pattern of typhoons is changing. They are particularly vulnerable to the weather coming from the sea, because of the approximately 7,000 islands that the Philippine comprises. In other parts of the world it has more to do with drought, or it may have to do with shifting disease patterns.. We ought to be systematically studying what the particular needs of each country are, identifying them and responding to them. But that can’t be done on a centralised basis, by university researchers in North America and Europe. It s got to be done on the basis of building up the capacity in developing countries to be studying, analysing, understanding and responding to these issues. It’s a really big task.

No one who talks about this pretends that it’s either easy to achieve, quick or cheap. We have to take the first step on this road and we have to take it very soon.

[1] Dan Smith and Janani Vivekananda, A Climate of Conflict: The Links Between Climate Change, Peace and War (London: International Alert, 2006).

re-public: re-imagining democracy h t t p : / / w w w . r e - p u b l i c . g r / e n

6

8

Maria Kampouri: Could you give us an example showing how climate change has been a contributing factor to peacebuilding, let’s say a case study, you might be familiar with. Or is that something we can expect to see in the future?

Dan Smith: There is no case of that. Our argument in the ‘A Climate of Conflict’ report is that what is needed for societies, as they come out of conflict is very closely related to what is needed for societies to adapt to the threats of climate change. Technically, they may look different, but the social processes that underlie them and the basic idea of getting people to participate whether in a peacebuilding process or in a process of adapting to climate are very similar. We, therefore, argue that peace-building and adaptation to climate change could go hand in hand. A society which would be able to respond to the threat of climate change would be a society much more able to build a much more resilient peace for itself. So it is a vision rather than something I can give you a concrete example of.

We have to understand that our approach towards development and indeed towards peacebuilding needs to change and to take adaptation to climate change on board. At the same time, adaptation to climate change is only going to work if it is closely related to development and also becomes an integral part of any peace process. These things go hand in hand, they are single threads woven into the same fabric.

9 Bill McKibben - Out of the safety zone

As the Bush administration starts to pass from the scene and the contenders to succeed him speak with reasonable seriousness about carbon, the question for environmentalists is going to change from: "Are we doing anything about global warming?" to "Are we doing anything near enough about global warming?" Both of those are political questions but the second one is also a scientific query, for the answer to it depends on knowing how much we need to do.

The shorthand answer to that (and the one number you need to know to understand the 21st century) is: 350, as in 350 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. We've just launched an international campaign, 350.org, that badly needs everyone’s help to make that case.1

Early on, scientists contented themselves with calculating what would happen if carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere doubled from their pre-industrial levels of 275 parts per million. It was a large enough increment to model with the computers then at hand. And so we all talked about what bad things would happen at 550 parts per million until it became, by default, the kind of psychological red line - a red line that soon showed up on various government charts.

I can remember writing an outraged op-ed piece for The New York Times in the mid-1990s when some Clinton administration plan foresaw overshooting 550 - it had for no especially good reason become the target.

But in the last few years it became apparent that the earth was more finely balanced than we'd imagined. So far we've increased the planet's temperature barely a degree Fahrenheit, which 20 years ago we would have said would have just gotten us to the threshold of noticeable global warming - everyone then guessed that the big effects would still be a few decades down the road. But what do you know? One degree was enough to yield major effects in hydrological cycles, in the progress of the seasons, in the spread of mosquitoes, in the rapid melt of glaciers. Which is why, over the last few years, some of the big environmental groups and some European governments began talking about a new, lower target of atmospheric CO2: 450 parts per million, which scientists guessed roughly equated to a global temperature increase of two degrees Celsius, or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit.

But again, the data for this threshold was scant - it was also psychological, a way of saying,

[1] See http://350.org/.

re-public: re-imagining democracy h t t p : / / w w w . r e - p u b l i c . g r / e n

re-public: re-imagining democracy h t t p : / / w w w . r e - p u b l i c . g r / e n

The longer answer goes like this. Twenty years ago, when we started worrying about what we then called the greenhouse effect, we had only the crudest notion of how much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was too much. The biggest debates were about whether global warming was real, and whether or not it had already begun. It didn't take too long - half a decade for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to say yes to both. But the subtler questions. How immediate a problem is this? Where do the thresholds lie? - were much harder.

"We need to do more, and quicker." And it remained, just, within the realm of the possible: at the moment, the planet's atmosphere contains 385 parts per million CO2, and if you run the numbers just right you can imagine stepping on the brakes hard enough that you just graze 450.

But here's the problem. Last fall, the Arctic melted. Not a little, like 1970s. But a measured-in-areas-the-size-of-Texas lot, way more than scared scientists, who were increasingly wary anyway, because the understand about the paleoclimatic record, the more it seems that forcings have been enough to trigger awful changes in the past.

it's been melting since the we'd ever seen before. It more they come to small changes in radiative

If we are at 385 parts per million, and everything is melting, what does that tell you? What it tells you is: This is not a future problem. We're already past the line, out of the safe zone.

We need to be scrambling like offside linemen to get back where we belong before the whistle blows. And the line we need to return to, if we hope to avoid wrenching disruptions from global warming, is 350 parts per million.

re-public: re-imagining democracy h t t p : / / w w w . r e - p u b l i c . g r / e n

It took, as it has so often in the greenhouse story, the leadership of NASA's James Hansen to really set the stakes in perspective. Speaking last December to the American Geophysical Union, Hansen, head of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, outlined several areas where we ran the risk of crossing horrible tipping points, a risk that increased each year we stayed above 350.2 They included the melt of Arctic sea ice, the melt of the great ice sheets over Greenland and the west Antarctic, the shift in climate zones wrecking prime agricultural areas, the dryingup of crucial water supplies as alpine glaciers melt in the tropics, and the acidification of the oceans as CO2 accumulates there.

Perhaps the most important, in the short run (though it's like picking which terminal illness you'd most want to contract) is the prospect of rapid melt on the ice sheets of Greenland and the West Antarctic. We used to think these ice sheets were stable on a time-scale of centuries, because how do you even start to melt a mile and a half of ice? I mean, it's inertia defined.

But it turns out that nature may have a method. As temperatures warm, snow at the very top of that ice sheet is turning to water, and that water in turn is finding its way through cracks and fissures to the base of the ice sheets where it can grease the skids for their slide into the ocean.

Meanwhile, rising and warming seas can eat away at the glaciers along the sea's edge, which serve as corks in the bottle for the inland ice sheets. Add it all up badly enough, and there's at least the possibility - or so Hansen testified recently in federal court under oath - for five meters of sea level rise this century. Which is another way of saying the end of civilization as we know it, since there's not enough money on earth to defend our coastal cities or the fertile plains near the sea - the places where the world mostly, you know, lives - from that kind of rise.

11

burn our planet's coal, and whether we're going to develop the exotic sources of petroleum, like tar sands and oil shale. If we do, then we'll never get back to 350. If we don't - if we stop building new coal-fired plants now and begin closing the ones we have - then the planet may retain enough carbon-cycling ability to pull us back below the line. It's like having high cholesterol - if you radically change your diet, it will fall. But you've got to do it before you, um, die.

There's only one possible way to make change on that scale: an all-out World War II style effort to convert our economy away from carbon and towards well, towards conservation, towards buses and bikes, towards wind and sun. We might even have to consider currently far-fetched schemes to pull CO2 out of the atmosphere (at the very least, we'd need to spend big to see if they're a real possibility). We'd need to do it with a truly aggressive price on carbon (which, to keep from impoverishing everyone, you'd need to rebate back to individuals through some scheme like the increasingly crucial Sky Trust proposed by Peter Barnes).3 We couldn't have a nice, seamless transition; we'd need a Saul-on-the-Damascus-road conversion, where the scales fell from our eyes and we set to work.

And that would be the easy part. We'd then need to figure out how to finance the same transition in the developing world. The Chinese still have a low standard of living, most of them. They're not going to forego heat and light; they're going to need something like a global Marshall Plan-equivalent to help them develop without burning their coal. Massive transfer of technology would be required which means, in truth, pretty massive transfer of resources. Which just maybe is not what the American voter is ready for right now.

Is any of this realistic? That's the right question, because it forces us to think about the meaning of reality.

So far, the method has been to ask what's going to work economically and politically and then work from there - that is to say, the "reality" of what you can persuade senators, or Fortune 500 companies, or taxpayers to support has set the tempo. And that is one important definition of reality - in a democracy, in fact, it's usually the most crucial one.

But in this case physics and chemistry increasingly impose a reality of their own. We find ourselves out of the safety zone in which human civilization has developed and flourished, a safety zone limited by the automatic reaction of the planet's climate system to an increase in the amount of solar radiation trapped in our atmosphere. That is, almost literally, a higher reality. If we've got a chance, the science now has to drive the politics - not the other way round.

In a very real sense, it's a contest between human nature and nature to see which will blink first. Physics and chemistry don't bluff and they don't bargain - they just are. If there's a way out of this box, therefore, it's up to us.

So that's the science. And from it must now flow the politics. Forget the plans we've laid so far, which see us slowly easing up on the use of coal, and ratcheting up the use of renewables, mostly by gradual shifts in the price of carbon. That might get us to 550, and it might possibly even get us somewhere near 450. But 350 - well, that means in essence that we have to leave most of the carbon underground that's now there.

The price of oil is so high - and the dependence so deep - that it's likely going to mostly get pumped; the real question, according to Hansen's calculations, is whether we're also going to

[2] James E. Hansen, “Communicating Dangers and Opportunities in Global Warming�, speech American Geophysical Union, San Francisco, December 2006.

[3] See Peter Barnes, Who Owns the Sky? Our Common Assets and the Future of Capitalism (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2003)

re-public: re-imagining democracy h t t p : / / w w w . r e - p u b l i c . g r / e n

10

Philip Sarre - Environmental justice requires economic reform

Environmental change and global poverty are caused by the way the world economy works, which depends on the way it is governed. The limited success of international policy initiatives in pursuit of environmental protection and/or social justice results from the prioritisation of economic objectives, increasingly seen within a free market framework.

re-public: re-imagining democracy h t t p : / / w w w . r e - p u b l i c . g r / e n

Whatever the consensus among progressives, little headway will be made towards social or environmental justice unless we can restore democratic regulation of markets. This will require reversing thirty years of political and economic change and will face implacable hostility from those who believe in, or have gained from, the current form of economic governance. To begin to do so, we need to understand how today’s orthodoxy was able to defeat its predecessor; how it overcame the most significant international effort to tackle environmental and development problems and how it has itself become vulnerable.

From 1944 to 1971, the Bretton Woods regime combined promotion of free trade with maintenance of stable exchange rates through controls on capital movement. The period saw the fastest economic growth in history, experienced in second and third world countries as well as in the first. In developed countries, democratic pressure prompted governments to intervene in the economy to foster full employment and social welfare, delivering high living standards and reducing inequality. However, in the 1970s, rising oil prices and high government spending triggered inflation and economic crises. An early casualty was the Bretton Woods regime itself, since in 1971 the US broke the link of the dollar to gold and ended the period of fixed exchange rates.

The nature of the new orthodoxy became clear in the 1980s, when the Thatcher and Reagan governments led the implementation of what are now called neoliberal policies.1 They attributed the problems of the 1970s to state intervention and claimed that the solution lay in free market policy. They cut budgets and taxes, restricted union activity, deregulated markets, crucially including capital markets, and privatised state and municipal enterprises, including utilities. Their lead was followed by many governments, some through choice, others because the IMF and World Bank required these kinds of change by countries seeking their assistance.

This new regime had direct effects on both environment and inequality, since the increased emphasis on competition and profit made management increasingly reluctant to pay more than the minimum for raw materials, labour, pollution control and tax.

A crucial challenge came after 1983, when the UN set up the World Commission on Environment and Development, chaired by the former prime minister of Norway, Gro Brundtland. Its report diagnosed a series of interlocking crises of environment and development and stated that ”inequality is the planet’s main environmental problem; it is also its main development problem”.2 It was critical of the effects of the international economy: ”to require relatively poor countries to simultaneously curb their living standards, accept growing poverty, and export

[1] See David Harvey, A brief history of neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

[2] SSee World Commission on Environment and Development, Report of the World Commission on Environment and Development: Our Common Future (Oxford: Oxford Universaity Press, 1987), p. 6.

13

growing amounts of scarce resources to maintain external creditworthiness reflects priorities few democratically elected governments are likely to be able to tolerate for long”.3 It also noted that development in rich countries had used too many resources and created many environmental problems.

The Commission contrasted two approaches to environmental policy, with the ’standard agenda’ dealing with effects and symptoms, but their approach concentrating on the sources of problems.4 Their prescription was radical, since it prioritised the poor through the focus on needs in their definition of sustainable development as “development which meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”5 Their final chapter on implementation emphasised national policies and institutions, regional and global organisations, especially in the UN system, and included scientific communities and ngos.

There was little emphasis on the private sector, though increased cooperation with industry and the need to stimulate private investment were included. Had these proposals been made in 1972, most would have seemed perfectly reasonable, and might well have been adopted, but by the late 1980s they were at odds with neoliberal orthodoxy.

Consequently, as Bernstein has shown in a meticulously evidenced and argued book, the Brundtland analysis was subverted by a different way of resolving contradictions between environment and economic development.6 Work done by bodies like OECD’s Environment Directorate, the US Project 88 and even UNCTAD suggested that free markets could deal with environment and development problems if market failure were remedied. To do this, all resources needed to be privately owned so that polluters would be responsible for the externalities they produce. States would have to ensure removal of market distorting subsidies and tariffs. By the time the UN Conference on Environment and Development met at Rio in 1992, free markets were widely seen as compatible with, even necessary to, environmental protection, as indicated in para 8.31(c) of Agenda 21- “To include, wherever appropriate, the use of market principles in the framing of economic instruments and policies to pursue sustainable development”. In this way, the Rio conference not only stripped sustainable development of its radicalism, but produced even more pressure for privatisation and marketisation, though in practice it proved impossible to privatise all resources or require all polluters to pay.

Over the next 16 years, the results of using neoliberal principles to run the global economy became clearly visible. Freer trade has benefited the wealthy, transnational corporations and high income country consumers, about 10 ’emerging markets’, mostly Asian countries with high rates of saving and ‘developmental states’, and oil exporters, though not other mineral exporters, who suffer from the ’resource curse’.

The global financial system concentrates capital into offshore financial centres and high income countries and drains it from low income countries, through capital flight and via transfer price manipulation, starving them of capital for investment and slowing their development.7 Net flows of finance have been volatile, contributing to more frequent and larger financial crises, with catastrophic effects on Russia and Argentina, and serious setbacks in some of the fast growing Asian economies in the 1990’s. Open capital markets undermine democracy, as governments become reluctant to intervene in markets for social or environmental purposes, and any that consider doing so are pressured by the IMF and financial markets.

[3] Ibid., p. 75.

[4] Ibid., p. 310.

[5] Ibid., p. 43.

[6] See Steven Bernstein, The compromise of liberal environmentalism (New York: Columbia UP, 2001).

[7] See Philip Sarre, ”Understanding the geography of international finance” Geography Compass 1 no. 5 (2007): 1076-1096.

re-public: re-imagining democracy h t t p : / / w w w . r e - p u b l i c . g r / e n

12

Since the late 1990s, government commitment to neoliberal economic governance has blocked a number of progressive initiatives. Progress in meeting the Millennium Development Goals has been slow. The Johannesburg Conference confirmed that environmental aspirations set at Stockholm and Rio have progressed slowly. In spite of increasing realisation that the consequences of climate change could be severe, progress since Kyoto has been slow, even negative.

It has also become clear that neoliberalism is not even an effective way to run the economy.

Global economic growth has been slower 1973-2003 than under Bretton Woods 1950-73 (3.17% pa vs 4.9%) and much more uneven between countries and continents8, as well as within countries.9 IMF researchers have concluded that capital market liberalization is neither necessary nor sufficient to generate rapid economic growth.10 UNDP offer training packs in national financial management which argue that neoliberalism has definitively failed to promote development, and recommend economic policies which intervene to promote institutional development and investment in people.11 Even the IMF and World Bank have amended policy to accept that there are multiple routes to development, target poverty and encourage ‘country ownership’ of economic policy, in which the building of institutions and good governance are now identified as positive, though it s not clear how much their behaviour has changed.

re-public: re-imagining democracy h t t p : / / w w w . r e - p u b l i c . g r / e n

The latest failure of neoliberalism provides an opportunity to challenge it in its Anglo-American heartland, since the most recent instability is at the heart of the system rather than in distant countries. The sub-prime crisis, caused by imprudent, perhaps fraudulent, lending and securitisation by financial institutions, has triggered the credit crunch, bank losses and failures requiring rescues by both central banks and sovereign wealth funds. To make matters worse, with other investments unattractive, speculative investors have moved into natural resource futures, helping to drive up oil and food prices and hurting people everywhere.

The opportunity and justification now exist for people and politicians to demand an end to neoliberal policies at national and international levels and to restore to states and international organisations the freedom to develop policies to promote social and environmental justice. It will not be easy, since powerful interests gain from neoliberalism and some of its maxims are entrenched in constitutions and treaties. But unless we do it, climate change, inequality and injustice will accelerate.

15 Stephanie Posthumus - Framing French eco-difference: A brief overview

In Le Retour au contrat naturel (2000), French philosopher Michel Serres asserts that the Earth, a global object since we have been able to observe it remotely from space, has progressively become a global political subject, entering into international discussions because of such phenomena as climate change and ozone holes that demand action on an international scale.1 Without denying the significance of Serres's interpretation of the Earth as global subject nor the relevance of his concept of the natural contract, I want to explore some of the cultural differences that influence the way in which a group dialogues with the Earth. In this article, I will concentrate on French perceptions, understandings and discussions of the environment.

To begin, it is important to note the ambiguity of the word "environnement" as used in France.

While originally meaning any enclosed space ("enceinte"), the word was reintroduced into the French language in the 1960's as a translation of the English word "environment" to refer more precisely to the group of elements that make up the natural and social conditions in which human beings evolve.2 Yet the word is not accepted unanimously; Michel Serres, for one, critiques the human centredness of such a term, refusing the Anglophone concept as well as the North American environmentalism associated with it.3 According to Kerry Whiteside, French political ecology distinguishes itself from Anglophone environmentalism because it refuses to centre (bio-centric, eco-centric, or anthropocentric) a new human ethics of care for nature.4 In short, nature and the human are seen as ultimately, always and necessarily intertwined.

A recent restructuring of the French ministries transformed the "Ministère de l'Écologie et du Dèveloppement durable" (2002) (formerly, the "Ministère de l'Environnement" (1971)) into the "Ministère de l'Écologie, de l'Énergie, du Dèveloppement durable et de l'Aménagement du territoire" (2007). What may seem to be a simple evolution of the political scene is, I would argue, a "gallicization" of an environmental movement imported from North-America. While the French initially tried to follow the North American example, founding their first national park in 1963 (Yellowstone National Park was founded in 1872), their current political policies reflect the history of maintaining natural spaces in France, where issues of ecology and environment are bound up with questions of culture, property and economic planning.

An essential element of this history is the role of human perspective in re(con)figuring natural spaces. Following the protection of historical monuments in France (1887), similar laws were instituted to protect - not unsettled, wilderness regions as in the U.S.A. - but rather landscapes as natural monuments. Under the influence of landscape artists and writers, these laws aimed at restoring the beauty of a particular vista that often included human elements.5 As Larrère explains, the French were concerned with preserving cultural heritage ("patrimoine") for future generations (forests, coastal areas but also farmed fields, village squares).6 Nature was and

[8] See Angus Maddison, Contours of the world economy 1-2030 AD (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

[9] See Joseph Stiglitz Making globalisation work: next steps to global justice (London: Allen Lane/ Penguin, 2006).

[10] See Eswar S. Prasad et al, Effects of financial globalization on developing countries: some empirical evidence (IMF: IMF Working paper, 2003).

[11] See Gerald Epstein and Ilene Grabel, Financial Policy Training Manual No 3 (UNDP International Policy Centre Brasilia Brazil, 2007).

[1] Michel Serres, Le retour au contrat naturel (Paris: BNF, 2000).

[2] Robert Delort and François Walter. Histoire de l’environnement européen (Paris: PUF, 2001).

[3] Michel Serres, Hominescence (Paris: Le Pommier, 2001).

[4] Kerry Whiteside, Divided Natures. French Contributions to Political Thought (Cambridge/London: MIT Press, 2002).

[5] Jean Viard, Le tiers espace. Essai sur la nature (Paris: M ridiens Klincksieck, 1990).

re-public: re-imagining democracy h t t p : / / w w w . r e - p u b l i c . g r / e n

14

continues to be framed in terms of landscape and cultural heritage in France. (See, for ex., the work of theoretical "paysagistes" Augustin Berque and Alain Roger who insist, sometimes fiercely, that what the French must work to (re)create is "landscape," not "environment").7 What this means for environmental ethics is that there is no specific branch of philosophy that operates under the title environmental in France.8 Yet there are many philosophers whose work is explicitly ecological: Fèlix Guattari, Bruno Latour, Catherine and Raphaël Larrère, and Michel Serres, to name a few. Bridging the gap between French eco-philosophy and North American environmental philosophy, Catherine Larrère upholds many aspects of Aldo Leopold’s land ethics, yet she includes both the biological and the cultural in her ethics of diversity. On what may seem a very different note, Bruno Latour argues for a more technicized, more humanized, more cared-for nature. Yet his cry for an engaged use of technology to better care for nature echoes in many respects Larrère’s appeal to the “bon usage” (good/wise use) of nature9 and Serres’s natural contract as a way of re-equilibrating humanity’s relationship to the world.

re-public: re-imagining democracy h t t p : / / w w w . r e - p u b l i c . g r / e n

So what to make of the virulent critiques of green politics and philosophy by French thinkers such as Jean Baudrillard, Gèrard Bramoullè and Luc Ferry? Their attacks seem to be an interesting form of misidentification (and oversimplification but I’ll leave that for a much longer article). Baudrillard, Bramoullè and Ferry all mistake French ecophilosophies for a deep ecology a la North American that views humans as superfluous on the road to restoring nature to it’s “original” state.10 The strong reaction of these three French thinkers to any sort of ”greening” clearly demonstrates how deeply humanism is engrained in the French psyche. In a negative way, they too demonstrate French ecodifference that resists exclusion or extraction of the human from a view of the world.

It is this principle of human integratedness that may explain the curious lack of interest in ecocritical approaches on the part of French literary scholars and theorists. While ecocriticism, the study of cultural representations of nature from an ecological point of view, has become an important alternative theory in North America, it has gone almost unnoticed in France. One might first suppose that ecocriticism is so rooted in North American views of the environment that it is unable to cross national boundaries. And yet there are now groups of ecocritical scholars in Europe (Germany in particular), India, Japan and Korea. So why has France remained an exception?

In one of ecocriticism’s founding theoretical texts, Lawrence Buell advocates for a new literary realism that pushes ecological representations of the natural world as the central focus of literary writing.11 Such an enterprise may seem misguided to French literary theorists steeped in the tradition of “le nouveau roman” and “l’ère du soupcon” and so highly suspect of any literary theory claiming to reestablish a transparent, simple connection between the world in the text and the world outside of it. In fact, the few French literary scholars working on American nature writing insist on its rhetorical and narrative aspects, as if to remind the reader that language remains an irreducible construct.12 The French reading of American nature writing is another reflection of this eco-cultural difference that retains the human frame when considering relationships to the world.

[6] Catherine Larrère and Raphaël Larrère. Du bon usage de la nature. Pour une philosophie de l’environnement (Paris: Alto/Aubier, 1997).

[7] Augustin Berque, “Paysage, milieu, histoire”, in Cinq propositions pour une th orie du paysage, ed. Augustin Berque (Paris: Champ Vallon, 1994), 11-29 and Alain Roger, Court traité du paysage (Paris: Gallimard/nrf, 1997).

[8] Catherine Larrère, ”Ethique de l’environnement”, Multitudes 24.1 (2006): 75-84 [9] Bruno Latour, ‘It’s development, stupid!’ or “How to Modernize Modernization?” EspacesTemps.net 29/05/2008.

[10] Jean Baudrillard, “L' cologie mal fique.” L'illusion de la fin (Paris: Galil e, 1992), 115-128; Gérard Bramoullé, La peste verte (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1991); and Luc Ferry, Le nouvel ordre écologique: l’arbre, l’animal et l’homme (Paris: Grasset, 1992).

[11] Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1995).

[12] Michel Granger and Tom Pughe, “Introduction.” Special Issue: “Écrire la nature.” Revue française d’études américaines 106.4 (2005): 3-7.

17

The obvious question remains: Why? Where does such difference come from? Is it a result of geographical distinctions, France being the Old World, settled long before the discovery of the New World? Or is it a matter of linguistic differences as the well-known and yet much disputed Sapir-Whorf hypothesis might suggest? Or is it rather a question of philosophical traditions that have shaped different nationalist identities, France being the defender of universalist, humanist values and North America the embracer of less traditional forms of thought?

Tentative answers to these questions have already been put forward. Philosopher Catherine Larrère suggests that there has been no real development of environmental philosophy in France because environment is seen as being a scientific/technical problem. Rather than inspiring a new ethics, ecological issues are reduced to the realm of “common sense” and “reasonable/rational action”.13 Sociologist Jean Viard develops the hypothesis that Catholic and Protestant lines divide France and North America and that nature preservation is a distinctly Protestant affair.14 Both Larr re and Viard recognize the severe limitations of their hypothesis as their explanations cover only one aspect (ideological and sociological respectively) of a multidimensional, ever-changing phenomenon.

Rather than attempting a more complete explanation of French eco-difference (which would require an interdisciplinary team of scholars), I will extend the question further to include the problem of globalization. Have the differences explained earlier in this article become less prominent because of global economic, political and social forces? Or have they become more pronounced as national identities are forced into frequent close contact?

An interesting case in point is that of Josè Bovè who first attracted international media attention in 1999 because of his leading role in the taking down of a local McDonald’s. At first, Bovè appears to incarnate the typical, distinct French spirit of resistance in order to retain local identity. Yet Bovè is a world-wide traveller who attempts to bring together different local agricultures in their fight against the use of genetically modified organisms. Examining more closely Bovè’s identity, one discovers that his techniques of resistance when demonstrating against American neo-liberal globalization are based on Henry David Thoreau’s model of civil disobedience. (Bovè has written, with journalist Gilles Luneau, a book entitled Pour la désobéissance civique, that draws from Thoreau’s On Civil Disobedience.) This is not a clearcut case of French vs. American, nor of antiglobalization vs. pro-globalization, but instead an illustration of the complex forces that play into the formation and transformation of French ecodifference. (One last note: Bovè is an important figure of alter-mondialisation, a movement originating in France, regrouping various leftist positions, and pushing for more democratic, more ecological, less economic forms of globalization.)

So what does the future hold for French eco-difference? As Guillaume Sainteny notes, the Green Party (“les Verts”) has all but disappeared from the political scene in France.15 But this disappearance does not mean that the French have no concern for environmental issues. Instead, a general greening of both right and left parties has been taking place in France as concern for the natural world is integrated into general social policies and programs. Such integration reinforces the idea that humans are part of nature, both products and producers, just as nature is part of the human. But what is the nature of such an integration, merely political or also ethical? Can it bring about the type of change needed on an individual, social and national level to establish a more sustainable way of life?

[13] Larrère, “Éthique de l’environnement”, p. 75 [14] Viard, Le tiers espace.

[15] Guillame Sainteny, L’introuvable écologisme francais? (Paris: PUF, 2000).

re-public: re-imagining democracy h t t p : / / w w w . r e - p u b l i c . g r / e n

16

Michail Fragkias - Connecting global environmental change to environmental justice: The critical role of cities and good urban governance

re-public: re-imagining democracy h t t p : / / w w w . r e - p u b l i c . g r / e n

Urban areas of primarily medium-size are not only expected to absorb the majority of future urban growth but the majority of the new urban residents are expected to be poor. The actual effect of climate change on poor and vulnerable urban residents will depend on multiple stressors and a confluence of factors such as the level of economic development of a city and its nation, the pace of demographic change, various ecosystem factors, urban spatial structure and function, and the wider institutional setting.

Climate change, and more generally, global environmental change (GEC) - the set of biophysical transformations of land, oceans and atmosphere, driven by an interwoven system of human and natural processes - has been extensively documented and is today acknowledged as reality from an overwhelming majority of scientists. These global changes can be experienced globally through the alteration of the Earth’s atmosphere and oceans (such as changes in the composition of the atmosphere, stratospheric ozone concentrations, ultraviolet input and climate) or can occur locally but so extensively that they constitute a global change (such as land use change, loss of biological diversity, biological invasions and changes in atmospheric chemistry).

Climate change is currently at the forefront of GEC realities. Through the efforts of communities such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and its 2007 4th Assessment Report, we know that the increase in globally averaged temperatures is undisputable and that since the mid-20th century is very likely (90-99% chance) that most of the increase is anthropogenic.1 Other than the general increase of temperatures, sea level and frequency of natural catastrophes and levels of economic losses, the collection of available conservative climate change models show that it is very likely that hot extremes, warm spells and heat waves, will continue to become more frequent over most land areas; that heavy precipitation events will become more frequent over most areas; that it is likely that the area affected by droughts will increase; and that future tropical cyclones will become more intense, with larger peak wind speeds and heavier precipitation but uncertain change of total number.

These scientific predictions have huge significance for human security, safety and health in the near-, medium- and long-term future as the impacts of climate change manifest themselves in distinct localities. While international pressure mounts for fast action towards established greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions targets, populations with threatened livelihoods due to irreversible climate change and its expected shorter-term effects have to start considering adaptation options. As is the case with the majority of environmental problems facing humani-

[1] Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC Fourth Assessment Report: Climate Change 2007 (Geneva: IPCC, 2007).

19

ty, anthropogenic climate change affects disproportionately the poor across different scales regions, nations, cities and neighborhoods. While clearly climate change effects result in both winners and losers, the nations and cities that have been the largest emitters of GHGs for the last 100 years will not be the ones that experience the bulk of the negative effects of climate change. The ”goods” and ”bads” of anthropogenic climate change are not distributed uniformly across populations the developed and developing world. Poor nations and populations have a reduced or nonexistent adaptive capacity that would help them protect themselves from the effects of climate change and thus face increased levels of vulnerability.

At the same time, poor and marginalized urban residents worldwide often do not have a strong voice in the political arena with a resulting weak representation in national and subnational policymaking.

Discussions over global environmental change occasionally overlook the global shift from rural to urban living that has been a defining global trend of the last 100 years. Cities have become important entities in the world’s social, economic, cultural, political, and environmental spheres. The most recent United Nations World Urbanization Prospects report pinpoints that half of the world s population now lives in cities compared to 30% fifty years ago and 10% one hundred years ago.2 Importantly, most of the future world population growth up to 2030 is projected to occur in the rapidly growing cities of poor African and Asian nations (around 80% of the total) as well as in Latin America. Africa and Asia today are urbanizing more quickly and at a larger volume respectively than the rest of the world’s regions. While we expect an increasing number of megacities, cities with population of over 10 million people, they are expected to contain approximately the same proportion of the world’s urban population around 15%; the majority of future urbanites will live in rapidly growing mediumsized or small developing-world cities, subject to many present-day urban pathologies.

Not only will urban areas of primarily medium-size absorb the majority of future urban growth but the majority of the new urban residents are expected to be poor. Poverty is increasingly becoming an urban phenomenon. While slums already constitute about 41% of urban living form in the developing world. urban growth in certain regions will come about with the formation of new slums. The actual effect of climate change on poor and vulnerable urban residents will depend on multiple stressors and a confluence of factors such as the level of economic development of a city and its nation, the pace of demographic change, various ecosystem factors, urban spatial structure and function, and the wider institutional setting.

Today it is clear though that urbanization is occurring faster and at larger volumes in locations that are at lower stages of economic development and face rapid demographic changes. City systems will continue to disproportionately affect ecologically-fragile areas and contribute to the loss of agricultural land compared to other systems. Urban growth is expected in coastal and arid ecosystems, particularly sensitive to the effects of climate change. Sprawling urban development is projected as a dominant trend but this could be reversed by the recent hike in the price of oil. Urbanization hotspots lack functions such as durable housing, access to improved water, key resources and sanitation while being overcrowded, with high levels of unemployment and social exclusion. Institutional settings in such hotspots are weak, lacking the rule of law, accountability and faced with rampant corruption.

All the above factors, operating in concert with climate change impacts create stress bundles that increase the probability of dangerous climate change.

Urban areas have begun to be considered a central element in the responses to climate

[2] UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, World Urbanization Prospects: The 2003 Revision (New York: UN, 2004).

re-public: re-imagining democracy h t t p : / / w w w . r e - p u b l i c . g r / e n

18

change during the last few years due to a combination of factors of opportunity and risk.

As the rapid urban transition to 4 billion urban inhabitants worldwide will occur (threequarters of the population) by 2030, particularly in poor countries, the fact that 80% of GHG emissions already originate in cities comes sharply into focus. On a positive note, cities are (or can be) places of economic growth and social well-being, important nodes for today's globalization, the nexus of production, commerce and gateways to the world's economy. They are also potentially efficient users of infrastructure and resources due to economies of scale, promoters of more efficient urban forms and functions, and prime spaces for intervention to change production and consumption patterns to reduce their adverse effects on GEC and promote renewable sources of energy. Local action in metropolitan areas has global effects. Due to the increased density of populations in urban agglomerations, effects of climate change such as natural disasters, health crises, disruptions in social life and the economy are felt strongly for substantial subsets of national populations.

re-public: re-imagining democracy h t t p : / / w w w . r e - p u b l i c . g r / e n

The bidirectional interactions between urban areas and climate change have fostered an impressive array of responses in urban areas during the last years - diverse international, regional, national, and local initiatives primarily created in large cities of industrialized countries focusing on climate change mitigation. For example, the Mayors Alliance for Climate Protection in the U.S. created in 2001 with more than 700 city members of different sizes was inspired in part as a reaction to the unwillingness of the U.S. Federal Government to ratify the Kyoto Protocol. The C40 climate group of the world's largest cities, originally sponsored by the Mayor of London in 2005 with the participation of 18 cities, has expanded to more than 40 largest cities in the world.3 It is interesting to note that European cities in contrast to U.S. ones emphasize a joint approach focusing on mitigation as well as adaptation. In the U.S., attention has centered in mitigation actions seeking to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases with little attention so far on adaptation at the local level.

Over the time period perceived relevant to global environmental change, and climate change processes, responses to the phenomena can come about through three primary means: technology, institutional development and change as well as behavioral and belief changes.

Although technological breakthroughs are very important (and cities play a significant role in them as centers of technological innovation) institutional development within metropolitan areas deserves increased attention - a clear sign of good urban governance.

Through globalization forces, democratization and economic development plans, the emergence of decentralized governance has brought a greater emphasis on the role and abilities of cities to self-govern which, at least in theory, allows for better informed social choice (such as the establishment of public transportation, urban development densification, realistic growth expectations and slum alleviation) and more effective and sustainable use of local resources (such as protecting ecosystem services and fragile lands). Effective urban governance is key to urban-environmental sustainability given the complex interactions between urbanization and the local, regional and global environment and at the heart of the comprehensive urban sustainability research agenda. Achieving good urban governance can further promote mitigation and adaptation actions but also create a push for economic development, addressing climate change at a fundamental level.

Researchers have summarized challenges and visions on good urban governance crucial for the design of sustainable urban futures. Institutions and organizations such as the U.S. National Academies Panel on Population and Environment and the World Bank through its World Development Report pinpoint factors such as a local government’s ability to provide

[ 3] See [http://www.c40cities.org/].

21

adequate public services to their citizens (capacity), raising and managing sufficient revenue (financial), coping with the variation, fragmentation and inequity within cities (diversity), dealing with rising urban violence and crime (security); dealing with increasing complexity in managing the jurisdictional mosaic as cities grow in population and extent (authority), sharing responsibility and coordinating for the empowerment and linking of actors in different levels of government, (responsibility sharing and coordination), offering wide participation in strategizing for understanding and consensus building and motivating actions and efforts for progress assessment (participatory governance) and networks for communications and capacity-building among practitioners and stakeholders (network building). Past and current projects of the International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change suggest paying attention to the problems of fit/match, scale and interplay of (political) institutions as they interact with the Earth System as well as the dimensions of architecture, agency, adaptiveness, accountability, access and allocation at the urban scale of Earth System governance; the Resilience Alliance group promotes the idea of participatory urban governance using adaptive and resilience-building management approaches favoring flexible, open to learning, management that can build resilience and avoiding rigidities that could result in the breakdown of socioeconomic systems.

Finally, modern political economy - at the heart of interdisciplinary social science - suggests that the idea of good governance requires a balanced view of government a government that operates under the market failure correction framework but that also addresses government failures - systematic reasons why government may fail to serve its citizens ideally. Good urban governance has the prerequisite of a thorough awareness of the nexus of relationships and opportunities for strategic interaction between all actors and stakeholders existing in the sphere of urban and environmental policy. Today, more than ever, it is critical that we place special attention on the institutional interface of the major anthropogenic global changes of the last 150 years characterized by their unprecedented rapid pace. re-public: re-imagining democracy h t t p : / / w w w . r e - p u b l i c . g r / e n

20

Ed Wall - Watershed urbanism

This paper outlines the potential that the watershed, as a landscape area defined by the finite resource of water, has for providing such a framework for new urban settlements. In response to increasing water shortages, are there more creative solutions available than have been expressed before? The cost of moving water across the landscape will also be addressed through several contrasting examples where cities and regions are challenged through insufficient water availability. Finally, I discuss the practice of ecological footprint calculations; a method which links a measure of global hectares to human activities of consumption and waste.

re-public: re-imagining democracy h t t p : / / w w w . r e - p u b l i c . g r / e n

The earth has always relied on a level of flux for regeneration and renewal of the environment. However, until the Industrial Revolution, the earths’ ecosystems remained in balance, with no single species having the potential to affect the environment at a global scale. Beginning with the burning of fossil fuels within an industrialised world, the effect that humankind has had on the environment has accelerated and become more evident. It is only since the American scientist, Charles David Keeling, began researching increasing carbon dioxide levels in the environment 50 years ago that this effect has been recognised. A recent article describes how Keeling recognised the effect that industrialised urban areas were having at both regional and global scales.1 Increasing emphasis has been placed on ecological footprints and resource-flow analysis to understand the quantities of resources used and the amount of waste produced by individual settlements. This research has highlighted the disproportionate amount of resources used by cities and the network of global flows from across wider geographic regions. London alone has been calculated to have an ecological footprint twice the size of the rest of the UK, with 81% of its food being imported from overseas.2 The City Limits report stated that “a 35% reduction of [CO2] production by 2020 and an 80% reduction by 2050” would be required if London was to achieve a predicted earthshare in 2050, or 1.44 gha (global hectares) per capita.

Settlements and resources Mercantile cities like London have always relied on their territories to supply them with their resources. Without a supply of food, water, and building materials imported from the hinterland, city life would not have survived and flourished. For this reason, the blockading of cities has proved to be a highly effective method of warfare, as it separates the city from its territories and starves the population of food, water, and other essential resources. Cities have also evolved greatly in the last century, first through industrialisation and later through processes of globalisation, and they have achieved greater efficiency in the sourcing, processing,3 and supply of their resources. Cities have extended their territories beyond the land that they own, or even govern, becoming increasingly dependent on national and international flows of trade. These increasingly efficient systems generate profits by supplying [1] Helen Briggs, “50 years on: The Keeling Curve legacy”, December 2, 2007, [http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7120770.stm].

[2] Oswald A Dodds MBE. “Executive Summary: The Main Findings of the Project, 2002” http://www.citylimitslondon.com (accessed on December 12th 2007) [3] Marco D'Eramo. The Pig and the Skyscraper: Chicago: A History of Our Future (New York, NY: Verso, 2003)

23

large global populations with everything from baby carrots to microelectronics, always trying to reduce costs without overloading the resource-supply systems. The potential of collapse is, however, increasingly evident in societies that are so dependent on imported resources.4 The global economic decline of the 1970’s was a direct result of this dependency, as changing availability of crude oil for a growing car and oil reliant North American society sent prices soaring. The sustainability of cities clearly relies on the long-term management and control of its resources, with water and food supplies being among the most important.

Settlements and environments Human settlements have always considered aspects of the environment in which they are located. For thousands of years historic market towns have developed from the crossing of trade routes, spa towns have emerged at natural springs, and other settlements have clustered around ports, bridges, hilltops, and estuaries. Since the twentieth century urban planners have been accused of undermining the relationship between cities and their environment as technological advances in materials, transportation, and construction have allowed newly built forms to engineer the landscape. However, centuries ago, the Egyptians ignored the natural landscape to transport water hundreds of miles with innovative aqueducts, and the Romans also built linear military roads across the territories of Europe in defiance of existing landform and geographic features. Since then, globalisation of markets, transportation, and knowledge has intensified this disconnection with the landscape, where contemporary cuisine now reveals only the slightest relationships between farming and food consumption and architecture responds to a global aesthetic.

Signs of a resistance to this trend have been emerging in both contemporary and established fields. One direction comes from the environmental sustainability movement, with significant examples in the zero carbon developments by Bill Dunster. In the first of these developments, to reduce the energy in transporting building materials, a design code was established that required materials to be sourced from within a 35-mile radius. This self-imposed restriction re-established a relationship between the materiality of the architecture and the local available resources. In Italy, the slow-food movement that came to prominence in the early 1990’s has inspired both an appreciation of local food products and has led to wider ideas such as the concept of Slowtopia.5 The trend-forecasting agency, The Future Laboratory, has used the term Slowtopia to describe an emergence of slow travel, food, and culture based on the quality of the experience. Local, they predict, is expected to define quality, while energy consumption and high food miles embody unnecessary exuberance.

Is there a potential for these ideas to be developed in the discipline of urban planning?

Could the examples of ZEDFactory be applied to a whole city or region where, rather than using an abstract radius of 35 miles, an environmental measure could direct the capacity of the landscape?

Settlements and water Civilizations and their settlements have historically benefited from a close relationship with water. From ancient Mesopotamia to contemporary metropolises such as Rotterdam, New York, Tokyo, and Shanghai, the proximity to water has been essential. From trade, defence, sanitation and drinking to religious and spiritual ceremonies, water in its many forms has been at the centre of generations of human settlements. As these settlements have grown into large cities, the water has impacted both demographic changes and physical growth.

Manhattan’s response to being constrained by its shoreline was to build into the sky. Across

[4] Jared Diamond. Collapse (London, UK: Penguin Books Ltd, 2006) [5] Martin Raymond. “Autumn 2007 Trend Dossier” The Future Laboratory (2007) 23-25

re-public: re-imagining democracy h t t p : / / w w w . r e - p u b l i c . g r / e n

22

the Atlantic, huge dams in the Welsh valleys were financed by the distant city of Liverpool in order to supply their growing mercantile population with drinking water. In California, many rivers have been diverted and culverted to supply the population of Los Angeles; these engineering events are brilliantly narrated in Roman Polanski’s film, Chinatown, where murky activities of diverted water supplies, urban development, and suspicious suicides dominate.

Transporting potable water for these expanding towns has been expensive. Diverted rivers, aqueducts, canals, pumping stations, and often entire tankers of drinking water have been deployed to prevent water shortages and stagnation of economic growth. The planning and development website, Planetizen, reports that the doubling of the Arizona population in the last 25 years is straining the finite resources of the state:6 “Unchecked development threatens to overwhelm rural Arizona's limited water resources, leaving entire communities vulnerable to shortages and rivers at risk of running dry.” In Australia, some cities are proposing shipping water from New Zealand and Tasmania. A company chaired by former Prime Minister Bob Hawke has been consulting the Tasmanian government about the feasibility of buying fresh water and transporting it to Brisbane, Sydney, and Melbourne in specially designed aquatankers.7 While this method is claimed to be cheaper in the short term than building new dams and desalination plants, the long term sustainability of this is unclear. The precarious nature of importing large amounts of essential resources was clearly underscored when, in September 2000, the blockading of oil refineries in the UK brought the country to the verge of a national food crisis.8 Should other methodologies not be explored? Is there a more robust approach that can withstand changes in global politics, markets, and the environment?

Can our resources influence our urban planning in a more proactive manner?

re-public: re-imagining democracy h t t p : / / w w w . r e - p u b l i c . g r / e n

Water and the watershed One approach could be to use the watershed as an environmental measure that directs the planning of new settlements. Watersheds, drainage basins, or water divides are some of the alternative approaches for describing a land area in which all rainwater that falls within it reaches the same destination of rivers and estuaries. The watershed is one of several environmental systems that geographers use to understand the relationship between the earth and water resources, and watersheds are unique in that they bring together a measurable territory with a quantifiable and renewable resource. Aquifers, water tables, and watersheds can be measured for their size, their flows, their capacity for holding water, and their capacity for supporting flora and fauna. Because a watershed contains a quantifiable amount of renewable water and is clearly expressed on the earth’s surface in the form of changing topography, the watershed holds great potential as an urban-planning tool.

25

It is with this premise that alternative urban-planning techniques could be developed to ensure the sustainable supply of resources to both cities and their surrounding territories. If the basic needs of a population are considered as water, food, and shelter, then planning new cities around locally sourcing these essentials could achieve a greater balance of resources for our urban regions. The amount of human activity that can be sustained by food and water available from within a particular watershed can be calculated through understanding the agricultural capacity of the watershed and the available water supply within the watershed.

By combining this with ecological footprint data, resource flow analysis, and local geographic information such as the capacity of the land for human settlement, an optimum population and density can be determined for the watershed. By following this methodology, urban planners could gauge the maximum number of people that a specific watershed territory might sustain with its own resources and could therefore provide guidance on the size of new cities, towns, and villages. With each new layer or application of this approach, urban and regional planners have the potential to understand how much activity could be supported by local water, food, timber, minerals, open space, and other resources within the watershed territory.

Like ecological footprint calculations, a strong understanding of the sustainability of a region could be determined; however, by using the watershed, rather than the intangible area of a global hectare, a greater accountability by each administrative region could be achieved.

This method demonstrates a potential for understanding the landscape in measurable territories that can be analysed with regard to their self-sufficiency. The reason that water and food are used as the guiding principles is because of the importance of these resources for human survival, because of the energy-intensive methods for transportation of water and food across the landscape, and because increasingly the delicate balance in which many cities currently find themselves in relation to their water and food resources is critical. The shortages of water that have occurred in recent decades will only heighten as global climate change pushes temperatures higher. In Australia, the establishment of a Minister for Climate Change and Water underscores the connection that many societies are making between climate change and their essential resources. The sourcing of local food and materials will also become increasingly important as fuel prices rise.9 Controlling population growth within land areas appears extreme; however, it is not unprecedented. Both recent and ancient examples of population control have come about through attempts to balance available resources within a climate of growing demand. While infanticide, as practiced by some ancient Greek cities, may not be widely acceptable, voluntary birth control is still promoted in most countries. The extent of immigration control may also change through successive administrations, although it is evident at national border crossings that some travelers may be restricted from entering. And even urban planning itself implies a population control in the extent of development control that it dictates, resulting in certain sizes of settlements with certain populations.

Watershed urbanism

Potential applications

Recent European and UK directives have recognised the impact that planning and land use has on the quality and quantity of water within our river basins. In the UK, the Water Framework Directive, which came into force in December 2000, looks to reduce the negative impact of planned and unplanned human activity on the resources within river basin areas.

However, rather than just mitigating the effect of external factors on the watershed, there is potential to propose a process that increases the influence of the watershed on planning.

There is potential for measuring and guiding the use of other commodities in this way. The management of waste, for example, could be seen as a responsibility for the landscape of the watershed rather than being shipped to remote locations. The scandals that have emerged as waste has been transported across the globe are due only in part to NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) attitudes and more to the lack of responsibility that we have historically taken for our waste. The LGA (Local Government Association) estimate that landfill sites in the UK will be at capacity within the next decade and suggest that alternative proposals are required.

[6] Brenda Meyer. “Rural Arizona At Risk For Water Shortage” 2005 http://www.planetizen.com/node/16674 (accessed December 12, 2007) [7] Daryl Passmore. “Plan to Ship Water” October 14, 2006, http://www.news.com.au/couriermail/story/0,23739,20581521-953,00.html (accessed on December 12, 2007) [8] Nick Assinder. “Blair flexes muscles over fuel protesters” November 2, 2007, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/1004175.stm (accessed on December 12, 2007)

[9] John James. “The End of Cheap Food”, The Economist, December 2006 http://www.economist.com/opinion/displayStory.cfm?Story_ID=10252015 (accessed on December 12, 2007)

re-public: re-imagining democracy h t t p : / / w w w . r e - p u b l i c . g r / e n

24

26

The watershed could even redefine national and political boundaries. In several countries, watershed districts, catchment boards, and river basin districts have been created to manage issues relating to watershed resources. At present, these exist as conservation and preservation bodies that promote the protection of the water in the watershed; however, there is clearly potential to develop these into more proactive entities that use their understanding of existing resources to provide greater planning guidance. Past legal feuds over water are expected to pale in comparison to future conflicts over water resources.

Therefore, might a proactive planning approach that manages the growth of settlements in relation to sustainable access to resources avert these so-called water wars?12

re-public: re-imagining democracy h t t p : / / w w w . r e - p u b l i c . g r / e n

Future This paper outlines a simple concept that combines the flows of available resources within a definable space in order to understand the maximum settlement size that a watershed can sustain. If developed and calculated to include all resources needed for survival on the city, the watershed could become the equivalent of the city’s ecological footprint but would use a tangible spatial type, resources, and accountability. Within this framework, movement of resources and people could still occur between watersheds and countries, although only with the knowledge that each global watershed was in balance. In the future, might London be defined by the watershed of the Thames Valley rather than the ring-road of the M25 motorway? Or could New York State be defined by the extent of the Hudson Valley and recognize its reliance on and responsibility to other states? Few landscape typologies are directly associated with an essential resource and for this reason the watershed holds an interesting potential for understanding the relationship between human activity and a multi-scaled landscape.

Carme Melo Escrihuela - Towards an urban ecological citizenship

We cannot separate the city and its problems from the so-called natural environment.

Taking responsibility for nature starts in our houses, in our neighbourhoods, in our cities. That is not only an environmental activity; it is also, in the first place, a social and political goal.

When we think of the environment and nature, most people think first about issues related to wildlife, natural resources, wilderness preservation and endangered species. It is commonly believed that those living in urban areas see nature as something alien to both themselves and the city life, as something one has to look for outside the city limits as an antidote to stress, where one can find tranquillity and beauty. If there is any environment in the urban context, it is reduced to the existing green areas, such as city parks and gardens. Albeit that the city can be seen as a cause of environmental problems, it is not usually seen as a source of their solution. In fact, the green tendency toward ecocentrism has made cities sources of environmental disvalue for most ecological thought and ethics1. As a result, the urban environment, in so far as it has been humanly designed and constructed, tends to be underestimated by the green movements: can there be anything less natural, more artificial than the city? Perhaps, the key question should be, indeed, whether such stated dualism between the human-made environment or Culture - and the natural environment or Nature - truly exists.

Urban environmental activism The importance of the urban context for green activity, even if such activity is inspired by a belief in the intrinsic value of nature cannot, however, be underestimated. What might help us to move beyond this loophole is the concept of ecological citizenship. This is a concept which emphasizes the need to take personal and collective responsibility for the environment and for the social injustices that both cause and arise from ecological problems. In spite of the prevailing doxa, urban spaces offer an appropriate setting for ecological citizenship practices to be developed.

In dominant political theory, citizenship is conventionally conceived as a status which emanates from membership of a given political space since the modern age, normally the nation-state.

Citizenship status confers to the beholder a set of reciprocal rights and duties to be discharged in the public sphere within the territorial state limits. Nevertheless, ecological citizenship focuses on duties performed both in the private and the public sphere and aimed to achieve sustainability and justice2. Neither territory nor membership establishes ecological citizens’ political community; rather, this is produced by everyday activity. Although ecological citizenship could be promoted through legislation, formal education or corporate and state-sponsored initiatives, I will focus on ecological citizenship as activity performed by civil society.

One might think we have more chances to be ecological citizens in rural areas, where nature’s presence is felt closer, thus providing for more possibilities and incentives to care for the

[10] Rob Harrison. “Ten Shopping Tips for the Ethical Consumer” www.ethicalconsumer.org, Ten Shopping Tips for the Ethical Consumer (accessed December 12, 2007) [11] Andrew Simms. “Clone Town Britain” , New Economics Foundation, June 6, 2005. http://www.neweconomics.org/gen/news_clonetownbritainresults.aspx (accessed December 12, 2007) [12] Adel Darwish. “Water Wars” http://www.mideastnews.com/WaterWars.htm (accessed December 12, 2007)

[1] Andrew Light, ‘The Urban Blind Spot in Environmental Ethics’ Environmental Politics 10 (2001): 7-35.

[2] Andrew Dobson, Citizenship and the Environment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).

re-public: re-imagining democracy h t t p : / / w w w . r e - p u b l i c . g r / e n

The sourcing of local materials and resources from within our watershed areas could bring back local distinctiveness to our built environments. While shopping locally can ”discourage car use, offer a more personal service and support the local community10,” using local materials for building our cities could reduce the transportation impact, create a new local aesthetic, inspire new economies, and generate local skills. While the argument for stimulating local economies contradicts many of the benefits gained by global corporations, the argument for distinctiveness in the design and composition of our cities is critical.11 The exporting of granite from China is clearly not sustainable for countries that already have available stone resources. The use of local stone in Montana and Portuguese granite in Portugal would recreate a local identity such as that earned by the Scottish city of Aberdeen, when it was nicknamed the Granite City for its abundance of granite buildings.

27

environment. It is true that inhabitants of rural spaces have traditionally developed an environmental knowledge that, it can be argued, those raised in a metropolis lack. For instance, most urban dwellers do not know what vegetables are in season, whereas people in rural areas have long depended on such type of knowledge in order to guarantee their own subsistence.

However, the city provides a social dimension needed to explain environmental problems and to practice ecological citizenship activity. Everyday, while we keep on hearing messages of sustainability, competitiveness, and modernization of our cities, urban people encounter air pollution, small shops and availabity of local products disappearing, poverty, mountains of waste, social inequalities and privatization of basic services. What we can do as citizens in our daily routine is determined by the way the city we live in is organized. If public transport is inefficient and the sanitary infrastructure is inadequate, we will be inclined to drive to work and pay for private health care. In this context, being an urban ecological citizen means realizing that all these problems are interrelated and connected to political and economic processes. This implies that both individually and as a community we are creating unjust and unsustainable conditions of life. It is therefore our duty as citizens to accept such collective responsibility and take action.

Reclaiming the streets

re-public: re-imagining democracy h t t p : / / w w w . r e - p u b l i c . g r / e n

Ecological citizenship in the city framework is not, then, only about recycling, buying fair trade products and joining an environmental organization to go on Sunday trips to observe nature.

We cannot separate the city and its problems from the so-called natural environment. Taking responsibility for nature starts in our houses, in our neighbourhoods, in our cities. That is not only an environmental activity; it is also, in the first place, a social and political goal.

Urban ecological citizenship goes beyond a strictly environmental concern. It demands collective engagement in a transformative project. But what does this exactly mean? There are different ways for urban ecological citizens to embark on such cooperative adventure. Metropolitan ecological citizens could, for a start, Reclaim the Streets against the monopoly of the car, since “the car system steels the street from under us and sells it back for the price of petrol”.3 Reclaim the Streets is a British direct action network for social and ecological revolution with no formal organizational structure. Under the banner Reclaim the Streets, more or less spontaneous associations of people participate in demonstrations, parties and other related events to dissolve the existing power in the streets. These anti-engine crusaders constitute an example of what urban ecological citizenship is about, since their activity encompasses more than a tenacious defiance given the countless hazards that cars cause to human health and the environment. They are not only opposing cars as an isolated struggle, but “the political and economic forces which drive car culture”, that is, global capitalism and all social hierarchy that a capitalist economy inevitably generates and reproduces.4 Apart from the streets’ invasion by cars and the social problems arising from the car system, there are other major issues dramatically affecting contemporary life, both in urban and rural areas. A very significant one is land speculation and development, a factor that is eroding the social fabric, carried on through the connivance of local authorities with the private building sector. In this context, ecological citizenship activity could focus on urban development and its connection with social and economic transformations affecting citizens lives and the urban environment.

[3] See the Reclaim the Streets website at [http://rts.gn.apc.org/prop04.htm].

[4] Ibid., at [http://rts.gn.apc.org/prop07.htm].

Reclaiming public spaces

29

In 2000, the estate agent’s designated by the Barcelona city council to carry on the restructuring of Ciutat Vella, a quarter in the city centre, expropriated several blocks of flats for a very low price and proceeded to demolish them. This was part of the local authorities urban development project to build car parks and flats in the area. The neighbours started referring to the space where the demolished buildings were previously as ”El Forat de la Vergonya”, the Hole of Shame. At the end of the year 2001, a group of neighbours planted a Christmas tree in the middle of the Hole. With this action, they wanted to repeat once more their claims with regard to having more green areas and less car parks and new flats in their neighbourhood. After one day, the tree was cut down. The neighbours planted another one, which was poisoned by someone. But they did not give up and planted a third one...

A few months later a group of urban activists arrived in the quarter and squatted some of the empty buildings to prevent their demolition. These spaces started being used as social centres: neighbours met in order to discuss and channel their collective demands, activities such as bicycles and furniture repair workshops were organized, a series of social documentaries and the provision of legal and work-related assistance for the numerous migrant people living in the quarter. The Hole, which was collectively transformed into a city vegetable garden, and all the initiatives carried out around it, brought social cohesion to the neighbourhood. This is particularly relevant in terms of citizenship, a concept that has historically been exclusive. Still today, not everyone within the city enjoys the full legal status of citizenship; migrant people, the poor, the homeless and the unemployed are excluded from most citizenship rights. The area where the Hole is located is inhabited by low-income communities and different groups suffering various types of social and political exclusion: elderly people, young couples with precarious jobs, unemployed and migrants. This circumstance had been used by local authorities to deliberately keep on excluding such social collectives from participation in political processes and to make public opinion agree with the necessary restructuring of the city centre, at whatever cost. However, grassroots action in this context showed that citizenship is something that has to go beyond economic and political bonds. The rights to take part in collective life and the designing of the common good have to take into account material and actual relationships between citizens themselves and with the space they inhabit. In this respect, being an ecological citizen in the city also requires rethinking urban relationships, especially in order to include the socially and politically excluded.

The neighbourhood association “El Forat de la Vergonya” continues to condemn the absence of participatory public policies, the lack of information citizens receive from the local government and the priority that the city council gives to the technicians’ reports over the neighbours will.5 They have also pointed at the unequal distribution of environmental risks, by showing how environmental and social injustices in the city affect the disadvantaged and the poor disproportionately. These urban ecological citizens have been a source of inspiration for other neighbourhood groups in Catalonia and Spain, and a network of citizen-activists has been created to share information and experiences and to organize protest and participatory events.

Beyond and below urban spaces I believe that such practices in the city context are a good place to start developing an urban environmental culture which questions the dualisms between the city and the country, Nature and Culture. Nevertheless, it is important to mention here that urban ecological citizenship performance cannot be reduced to the city limits. Together with the city, there are other

[5] See “El Forat” at [http://www.nodo50.org/tortuga/article.php3?id_article=1639].

re-public: re-imagining democracy h t t p : / / w w w . r e - p u b l i c . g r / e n

28

30

relevant sites for political activity and participation, both below (the quarter, the house workplace) and beyond (the region, the world) the urban space. Ecological problems only local but cut across cities and states; they are trans-national problems, whether roots or in their consequences. Thus, urban ecological citizenship demands more than a with the city. It requires that we use the city structures as an organizational and epistemological framework to think and act globally.

and the are not in their concern

31 Nathan Young - A return to the commons? Why the environment (still) matters in democratic theory The re-emergence of the ideal of environmental commons after centuries of privatization and centralization is a highly significant development. It is important to recognize, however, that this movement often proceeds in conjunction with the consolidation of exclusive authority in other respects.

There is recently a renewed interest in the notion of the commons. Much of this interest is driven by a desire to understand the social and political role of new technologies, such as the Internet, that dramatically extend capacities for collective and individual action.

Consequently, this literature tends to investigate questions of autonomy and self-governance, but also issues of privatization and state control in these domains.1 There is a strong sense in these writings that the electronic commons stand at the forefront of a re-articulation between private and public spheres - that we are in the midst of a great sorting out in terms of rights, particularly in terms of the dynamic between mechanisms of control (property rights, regulation, surveillance) and the rights of commonality, open-access, and self governance.

However, these same themes and questions continue to play out with respect to that ’older’ commons, namely the environment. These parallels are not merely academic. The same questions of power, identity, autonomy, and democracy permeate both the environmental and electronic commons. In this essay, I suggest that study of the electronic and environmental commons have much to gain from one another, as the ongoing (and heretofore mostly independent) debates within these spheres reflect very similar and fundamental questions about autonomy and governance in free societies.

The question of ’the commons’ is an old one in environmental thought. Elinor Ostrom traces the modern debate about both the promise and the “tragedy” of the commons to Malthus and Hobbes, who articulated the dangers inherent in the collision of freedom and scarcity.2 These themes have been famously re-presented in Garrett Hardin’s article “The Tragedy of the Commons”, where he argues that the commons are inherently unsustainable in conditions of freedom and open-access, as it is in individual users’ best interests to exploit the commons to the overall deterioration of common benefits.3 The duality of state policies The core difference between the notions of the environmental and electronic commons is that the former assumes that scarcity is the rule, while the latter assumes that the commons are greatly enhanced with ever greater participation and openness. In what ways, then, are they relevant to one another? My answer is two-fold. The first reason is that state and corporate [1] See, for example, Jay G. Blumler and Stephen Coleman. 2001. "Realising Democracy Online: A Civic Commons in Cyberspace." IPPR/Citizens Online Research Publication no. 2.

[2] Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

[3] Garrett Hardin, ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’, Science 162 (1968): 1243 - 1248

re-public: re-imagining democracy h t t p : / / w w w . r e - p u b l i c . g r / e n

re-public: re-imagining democracy h t t p : / / w w w . r e - p u b l i c . g r / e n

The commons and environmental thought

33

responses to the older issue of environmental commons have set the framework for current responses to the newer electronic commons. For instance, ideas about ‘the tragedy of the environmental commons’ have long steered governments in two directions of profound significance for democratic theory and practice. First, it has been used as a justification for the worldwide movement to privatize environment and resources. The notion of ‘private stewardship’ of the environment is etched upon contemporary notions of democracy as vast tracts of property and wealth have been set ‘off limits’ from (official) public contestation. The second direction has involved the establishment of authoritarian, top-down, and hierarchical legal controls over access and usage of the commons, often despite the prior existence of local systems to mediate these same concerns.4 As the burgeoning literature on the electronic commons illustrates, these remain the two great narratives in ‘official’ responses to commons old and new.5

of enhancing global competitiveness, the provincial government has given up much of its authority over access rights. Importantly, devolution has occurred in two directions. On the one hand, the rights of corporate lessees have been enhanced, to the point where firms are allowed to trade access rights, to self-regulate on environmental issues, and to abandon territorial commitments (i.e., to process resources in the region of harvest). On the other hand, senior governments have sought to mitigate the impact of these changes on resourcedependent communities by carving out new commons. Specifically, the provincial government aims to redistribute 20% of Crown lands to community groups and Aboriginal governments.

These areas come under direct local control, with local groups (tellingly labelled “community corporations”) regulating access to the lease, as well as the sales of materials to local and extra-local processors. The system allows significant flexibility to the local corporations, with some choosing to follow the model of larger firms and others choosing a more cooperative route.10

The second reason that environmental and electronic commons are relevant to one another because both are currently in a state of flux. In this respect, scholars of the electronic commons should take note that the privatization-centralization paradigm that has anchored Western environmental governance for centuries appears to be shifting. Specifically, there is currently a significant movement underway to restore, in very selective and limited ways, the notion of locally-regulated environmental commons. This movement is evident in increasingly common efforts in many countries to establish “cooperative management” of local fisheries,6 in the notion of “community forestry” that has found particular purchase in North America and Asia,7 and in efforts to re-open lands as agricultural “commonage” in Australia and South Africa.8 It is my argument, however, that while these developments are undoubtedly driven by commitments to the principles of the commons (such as autonomy and self-governance), they are also couched in larger movements of globalization and neo-liberalism. I contend that these forces, with their attendant pressures for ‘efficiency’ in economy and governance, are recasting the commons extending exclusionary authority in some respects while creating new ‘islands’ of local autonomy in others.

The case of British Columbia To illustrate, I use an example from my home country of Canada, specifically the province of British Columbia (BC). The economy of BC has traditionally been resource-based with a strong emphasis on forestry, fisheries, and mining. Moreover, the BC case is relevant because the province continues to hold resource rights in common (94% of BC s land-base is designated as “Crown lands”, meaning that ownership rests with the province). This arrangement has meant that BC’s Crown lands have traditionally been very tightly controlled by central authorities, who then lease access rights to private firms. Indeed, in extending this centralized control over these commons, the provincial government severely restricted access rights of Aboriginal groups and other traditional users.9

A new commons?

The movement towards ’new’commons is occurring across many regions of the globe. It is important to recognize, however, that as with the BC case these often proceed in conjunction with the consolidation of exclusive authority in other respects. Other important examples of this tendency include the Bush administration’s significant expansion of community forest programs on public lands in conjunction with radical reductions in environmental regulations of industry as a whole,11 as well as state efforts across North America, Europe, and Asia to encourage further capitalization in commercial fisheries at the same moment that governments pursue ‘cooperative management’.12 This tendency is important for new discussions of the ‘electronic commons’ and for democratic theory more generally. First, it is telling that even the most rigid regulatory frameworks change and evolve with their political-economic context. The re-emergence of the ideal of environmental commons after centuries of privatization and centralization is a highly significant development. Second, however, it is also important to recognize the strategic aspect of these “returns to the commons”, as it is increasingly common for governments to devolve to community and to corporate actors in the same moment to establish limited spaces for commons autonomy within the context of enhanced corporate rights to further enclose other (and larger) spaces. This, in my opinion, will be the next big front in the struggle over electronic commons to ensure that the open spaces are large and not sequestered, central and not peripheral.

Small but significant measures have recently been taken against this regime. On the pretext [4] See David Ralph Matthews, Controlling common property: Regulating Canada's east coast fishery (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993).

[5] Lawrence Lessig, The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World (New York: Vintage, 2002).

[6] See Douglas Clyde Wilson et al., eds., The Fisheries Co-Management Experience: Accomplishments, Challenges, and Prospects (Netherlands: Kluwer, 2003).

[7] See Mark Baker and Jonathan Kusel, Community Forestry in the United States: Learning from the Past, Crafting the Future (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2003).

[8] See Moenieba Isaacs and Mohamed Najma, ‘Co-Managing the Commons in the New South Africa’ paper presented at "Constituting the Commons: Crafting Sustainable Commons in the New Millenium", the 8th Conference of the International Association for the Study of Common Property, Bloomington, Indiana, USA, May 31-June 4, 2000.

[9] Cole Harris, Making Native Space: Colonialism, Resistance, and Reserves in British Columbia (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2002).

[10] British Columbia Community Forest Association, The Community Forestry Guidebook (Kalso, BC: Forrex, 2004).

[11] See James McCarthy, ‘Devolution in the woods: community forestry as hybrid neoliberalism’ Environment and Planning A 37(2005): 995 1014.

[12] Becky Mansfield, ‘Rules of Privatization: Contradictions in Neoliberal Regulation of North Pacific Fisheries’ Annals of the Association of American Geographers 94 (2004): 565-584.

re-public: re-imagining democracy h t t p : / / w w w . r e - p u b l i c . g r / e n

re-public: re-imagining democracy h t t p : / / w w w . r e - p u b l i c . g r / e n

32

Dimitrios Zachariadis - Social media and environmental activism

Collective blogs, Tilaphos and Tilaphos-reforest are two of the few cases in the Greek web where it becomes obvious that the collective intelligence of the users might put a remedy to some of the lingering deficiencies of the central state. Dimitrios Zachariadis, the driving force behind the two projects, explains that their aim is to disperse, through the Greek web, reliable public information regarding the loss of forest land, so that it becomes clear and substantiated with evidence, that the decline of forests in this land is an everyday issue so close to us all.

re-public: re-imagining democracy h t t p : / / w w w . r e - p u b l i c . g r / e n

Thanasis Priftis / Pavlos Hatzopoulos: How did you come up with the name “Tilaphos”? Is there a principal motive for the creator or the participants of Tilaphos-reforest?.1 Can you say a few things, about the citizens participation of in the project, either through their public or through their personal contact with you?

Dimitrios Zachariadis: When something new is created, one has the wonderful opportunity to name it. The name “Τήλαφος”, in English “ti-la-phos” is the acronym for “Time Lapse Photographs”. Tilaphos is the name of a minor open source application,2 which is part of a bigger application for registering road problems and other data of public interest. The word sounds so much like a Greek name that many in the TCL community (the language in which the application is being written) asked me what it meant in Greek. Well, in Greek it means “Telematic Presentation of Road Incidents” (Τηλεµατική Απεικόνιση Οδικών Συµβάντων) til-apos (Τηλ-απ-ος) where “π” is turned in to a “φ” (ph) because the ο of the word “Οδικών” aspirates (in ancient Greek). Thus, with the new blog, a new name was created.

The issue of public information has been in the back of my mind for quite some years. It is the deeper motive behind the creation of Tilaphos - reforest. Last summer’s fires pushed me to the initial creation of Tilaphos and the recording of burnt areas through GPS.3 It was something like a personal way out of the sorrow for what was the forest near my house, which is now gone.

The reception that Tilaphos had with the recordings of the burnt areas using GPS was really a surprise. I received lots of messages from people who found the attempt worthy, maybe because it identified with their own need of a way out of the disorganization and the inactivity that characterizes the official state, which is incapable to channel the anxieties and the needs of the people, who care about the environment, to creative actions.

The interest of thousands of Greek visitors and the many messages of solidarity that Tilaphos received during the first 2-3 months were very important, especially since the blog avoided the angry but facile protest, which usually attracts concordant disappointed people and boosts the visits, while in the long run, it may lead to pessimism and defeatism.

At the same time I noted two new things: [1] Blog’s address at [http://tilaphos-reforest.blogspot.com/] [2] See [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_lapse].

[3] Blog’s address at [http://tilaphos.blogspot.com].

35

a. Even the warmest supporters of the GPS recording effort, some of whom had a direct relation with the scientific subject, faced great practical difficulties in contributing their own GPS data. For me it was easier, because I replaced some exercise time with walking around the burnt areas, which, however, proved to be very difficult or impossible for others.

Finally, it became clear to me that notwithstanding mine and others good intentions, a massive practical outcome was very difficult to achieve, and the attempt could not yield useful results, not because there was no interest, but because the methods Tilaphos suggested could not be followed by its public. b. Discussions with Elias Tziritis of WWF and forest officials led promptly to the examination of other data sources and the discovery of the Government Gazette site (E.T.).4 The E.T. site was familiar to me from the past, but one discovers the real value of a tool only when he really needs that tool. The reforestation coordinates published in the Government Gazette by the national forest offices, although frequently incomplete, presented the answer for what could be a creative way for the friends of forest and visitors of Tilaphos to offer something productive, without having the burden to walk through the burnt areas.

The experience of Tilaphos- reforest shows, by the way, that all who participate actively, have already had a personal interest in environmental issues before they discover Tilaphos. The motive of those who participate in the project is their interest and their agony for the protection of the natural and forest resources. It is not coincidental that the majority of those who contribute data are friends or members of environmental groups or blogs.

Thanasis Priftis / Pavlos Hatzopoulos: What do you and what do the users of the datablog expect from this project? How are entries organized and put on the map?

Dimitrios Zachariadis: The datablog is a online experiment on collectivity: “Online” because it presents itself, collects and spreads information exclusively through the web. ”Experiment” because the attempt has a start, a duration and an end (considering the finite amount of data in reforestation declarations), and it attempts to prove a hypothesis: everything that seems difficult to be carried out by the state, is in reality much easier and can actually be realized by a bunch of volunteers at no cost. “On collectivity” because the data entry is collective and the data belongs to all who need it unconditionally and without any limitation.

Our common objective is to disperse, through the Greek web, reliable public information regarding the loss of forest land, so that it becomes clear and substantiated with evidence, that the decline of forests in this land is an everyday issue so close to us all. There is a need for detailed and reliable raw data which can be utilized by scientists and, at the same time, be also useful to citizens and journalists. The only thing the datablog does is to promote, using modern e-tools, existing information which is hidden in the Government Gazette. For this reason, we always include along with the information we publish the link of the specific issue of the Government Gazette that contains the information, so that all data can be cross-checked by anyone who cares to.

I wouldn’t say that the data entries are somehow organized beforehand, even though sometimes there is certain direction of where it would be better to focus. For example, the question “which comes first, the maps or the statistics?” has not yet been answered. There are instructions in three videos and one illustrated ‘how to’ and whoever wishes to, can freely use an online tool to make a data entry.

In an exceptional case of participation, that of Calliope Charkianaki, who spent a lot of personal time for the data entry and thus she acquired great experience, a more developed

[4] See [http://www.et.gr/].

re-public: re-imagining democracy h t t p : / / w w w . r e - p u b l i c . g r / e n

34

administration tool was used, which is not available to others to prevent bulk errors, but which helps to reduce the time required for the entry of large number of data by creating a sort of “production line”.

features in a blog, a “datablog”, which is kind of an innovation in the way we use blogs, although the word “datablog” is not new. Of course, such a technique can be used for any kind of information that can be structured in a formal way.

The participation of others to the data entry helped a lot in the debugging of the tools and the improvement of the operation of the datablog, something priceless for a project like this.

A major issue regarding data entry by untrained users is the correction of errors. Some types of errors take as much time to correct as if entering new data, or even more, because they need careful inspection and they always require an out of “production line”, one-off procedure.

Hope is to have as few errors as possible, in order to avoid the loss of time and the disappointment which comes with errors, something that is until now fulfilled.

Thanasis Priftis / Pavlos Hatzopoulos: How was the datablog implemented, technically speaking? How do you manage the administration and the issuing the collected data?

Dimitrios Zachariadis: With a lot of personal time and much less sleep!

The first thing regarding the technical implementation was to maintain zero cost. The need to keep data available for a long time without having to pay the cost for the disk storage and the server maintenance, the daily backups, etc. was the choosing factor. For reasons of their own, certain big companies offer free storage, bandwidth and technical utilities that could be properly exploited.

re-public: re-imagining democracy h t t p : / / w w w . r e - p u b l i c . g r / e n

37

One project objective, which we will start to implement now because we needed data in order to begin, is to develop widgets that could be used in any web page for publishing datablog’s data without having to visit our webpage. In this way, we hope to make it easier to diffuse the available reforestation information.

Thanasis Priftis / Pavlos Hatzopoulos: What does web. 2.0 mean for you? What kind of microformating applications could result from similar projects?

Secondly, we wanted the capability of dynamic data search using existing tools in order to make it easier for the end user to use the data. This includes search engines, as they are one of the main ways of finding pieces of information in the web. The search application of the Government Gazette was an example to avoid because, while it is helpful for retrieving issues of the Gazette, it is not adequate for queries on reforestation areas, making it quite difficult and sometimes even impossible to recover that kind of data. Besides, the content of the Government Gazette’s issues is not accessible by the search engines.

Dimitrios Zachariadis: The concept of web 2.0 is quite fluid, I think. For me, the view of the inventor of web, Tim Burners Lee, is very close to this new concept for the web, without, of course, excluding numerous other paths that the human imagination could follow. Nevertheless, almost infinite text-based data already exist in the vastness of the web, taking into consideration the human capability of recovering it. What doesn’t exist in a satisfying degree is a standardized form, a formal outline, which can describe the information’s structure in a way that machines can automatically process it. This is what Tim Burners Lee calls the Semantic Web.

Thirdly, we had to find/create the appropriate tools to utilize the data, so that the, possibly non-expert, end user would be interested to search and study it without any mediators.

Most of the existing websites, and this naturally stands for Greece too, seem simply to follow the logic of printed paper with text and graphics. This does not facilitate the access of information that is found spread in millions of pages, because without the proper tools it is impossible to be exploited.

Fourthly, a very important requirement was to find a way to enter the data so that it would not be hidden, but instead presented along with the contributor s name, allowing for immediate use of it, even though it might contain errors, rewarding in this way the contribution.

This attribution of credit in every piece of data entered is a very important condition for the operation of Tilaphos.

Since finding of a sponsor provider was excluded for the moment, we exploited the option of using the free-hosting services offered by companies, mainly in the form of blogs. This had the advantage that the news feed could operate like a web service, especially if it allowed parametric queries. Several options were examined and finally we chose Blogger, the platform provided by Google, because: a) it allows javascript programming on the web pages, thus making programming of the tools easier, b) it has an open API for the news feed, which also comes in the form of JSON+script that allows any third party web page to use it without restrictions, c) it has an total storage capacity that exceeds 7GB, d) it makes it possible to enter html tagged data in the comments to articles, which are visible publicly along with the contributor’s name and are also available in the news feed.

We have therefore a blog, whose contents consist of structured raw data and not arbitrary written news, the entry of which is made by the users with tools written in javascript, which provides the capability of presenting the data in the form of maps or spreadsheets etc, or provides it through a web service in the form of a news feed. I named this combination of

According to Tim Burners Lee, as he puts it in his book ”Weaving the Web”, the next step for the development of the web is the creation of search engines, whish would be able to add some rational processing to a search, so that instead of looking for pages containing keywords, we could actually search for information answering general questions.5 In our reforestation case a question would be “Which municipality in Greece has the most illegal occupations per citizen per acre?” A search engine in the Semantic Web would visit the Tilaphos-reforest datablog and find there some answers using the existing data tagging.

Microformat technology plays such a role in providing a structure to the data to a satisfying degree: without altering the appearance of a webpage, just by changing the content of some HTML attributes, namely “class” and “title” and following some coding conventions, it is possible to develop, in HTML, the structure that a browser needs in order to understand the information it is presenting.6 Currently there are a lot of microformat tools, and if I am not mistaken, future Firefox editions would offer natively the capability of exploiting them, a feature that presently exists with plugins like Operator, Tails Export etc. We can in just one click, for example, send directly to our mobile phone a complete address, including phone numbers, from a web page conformant to the microformats spec, without having to copy anything. We can view maps using information contained in pages without having to find and enter coordinates. Imagine all of the reforestation info that exists in the Government Gazette

[5] Tim Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web (New York: Harper Collins, 2000).[6] See [http://www.et.gr/].

[6] See [http://microformats.org/].

re-public: re-imagining democracy h t t p : / / w w w . r e - p u b l i c . g r / e n

36

marked using microformat specs and how easy the recovery of the data contained would be.

otherwise it cannot be considered open and free.

The Tilaphos-reforest datablog works exactly like this: it tags the data entered by the user from the Government Gazette, so that when it is pasted to the datablog as a comment, it has the right format for the presentation tools to recognize the information, while at the same time it presents the data in a form that the end user can read easily. Due to the limitations of HTML code allowed by Google, the data/comments tagging is similar to microformats but not the same. It needs one more step to make it absolutely compatible. The data conversion to this final form using the microformats “adr” and “hCalendar” specifications will start soon.

The first question that needs to be answered is whether one wants information to circulate in the web and for what kind of usage. If the answer is “yes”, then there are three ways to serve it: for humans readers, for machines or for both at the same time. Most of the western countries have answered the aforementioned question with a “yes” and a lot of information has been put into the public domain.7 As a result, numerous web services have been created as well as web standards, so that public data would be usable by machines, or by intermediate services and end users. People and organizations, who are interested in using such data, produce better results both quantitatively and qualitatively, while other people are better informed for what is going on. The provision for free access to public information can be found in the Greek Constitution, Article 5A (Right to information), where the right of every citizen to participate in the Information Society is explicitly stated. Therefore, theoretically, the Greek state has answered the question with an unconditional “yes”.

One can apply the microformat specifications today in every page he is allowed access of the HTML code. New specifications can also be created by following the microformat principles, for data that is not covered by the ones that are available. Names, addresses, calendars and events are commonly used for such applications of microformats. Every page containing such pieces of information can be coded easily in conformance with the microformat specifications, offering visitors the value of the already existing semantic web tools.

re-public: re-imagining democracy h t t p : / / w w w . r e - p u b l i c . g r / e n

39

There exists also, of course, the social side of web 2.0, the social media, which offers plethora of communication possibilities and the means for forming social and interest group networks; they are enjoying tremendous popularity in the web. I do not have any doubts about the social role that the social media play, but I have serious reservations whether this freedom of speech or expression constitutes a form of “e-democracy.” Although the freedom of expression is extremely important, it is not the only virtue in a democracy. The social media can balance to a certain extent the deficit in voicing citizens opinions, a deficit that exists in contemporary western representative democracies, without, of course, filling the institutional gap: what is essential is to voice opinions in a political agora, so that informed citizens will be able to take part in the political decision making. In reality, without participation in the political decision making, the freedom of expression seems to be an empty word, politically speaking, more of a dispel of dissidence or a mere protest, without however yielding significant gains in the political level, at least until now.

With these views in mind, Tilaphos-reforest seeks to consolidate the participation in the blog to a useful practical result.

Thanasis Priftis / Pavlos Hatzopoulos: When is an information considered open (licensing, internet web service)? What’s your experience from the domestic and the international public administration regarding data collection?

Dimitrios Zachariadis: Information written on paper is practically closed information nowadays.

Can anyone imagine a graduate forestry student, wanting to write a paper about the decline of forest land in Greece and having to enter one by one all the data published in the Government Gazette issues? He will simply never write that paper because he will choose another subject. The state may reply, turning a blind eye, that this information is open and freely accessible, although, in reality, it is almost closed, since it cannot be easily exploited using existing means, considering the current mode of producing content and knowledge. Imagine what would have existed from Tilaphos-reforest, hadn t the Government Gazette offered the possibility of viewing its issues on the web, just as it was the case a few years ago: there would only exist 10 entries on burnt areas recorded with a GPS, rather than the 1830 entries of declarations of reforestation, created within a month. In a few words, it is not sufficient that the information be published somewhere; it should also not cost an arm and a leg to use it,

Recently, I searched for some data from the National Statistical Service of Greece. The National Statistical Service of Greece has been collecting a plethora of reliable data about the Greek society and state (down to the detail of small settlements) over many decades and offers it without restrictions, stating at the organization’s presentation that foreseen data users are “the business world, scientists, analysts and citizens.” Most of this data is in the form of PDF documents, while there are also some in XLS format. Such a reliable source of information should follow a strict standard form in order to avoid errors and double entries (or omissions) of information and disambiguate the codes used. There are examples of double entries and omissions in the National Statistical Service of Greece data, even in the XLS files, which indicate, as far as I can tell, hand-written interventions into the final documents.

As far as I know, the state administration and many public organizations (e.g. universities) produce a significant number of quality raw data. Until now, the unresolved problem is that there is no data release policy. A confirmation of the lack of such data release policy can be found in the texts that some of these organizations post to their web pages as their objectives. There is rarely, if at all, any mention about providing reliable data to professionals and citizens, unlike the case of the National Statistical Service that was mentioned above. The Ministry of Environment, Physical Planning and Public Works is, unfortunately, a negative example, even though it’s the ministry of works and engineers. The Intellectual Property Organization is another sad example: it addresses the Greek citizens only in English.

Thanasis Priftis / Pavlos Hatzopoulos: Finally, what does public information mean? How difficult is, let’s say, for the Hellenic Mapping and Cadastral Organization to implement the Cadastral Register through a convenient flexible schema? Would such a suggestion be utopian?

Dimitrios Zachariadis: The slogan “The public information belongs to the people”, that is Tilaphos’ heading, is a tautology. Public is something that by definition belongs to the citizens.

Nevertheless, in Greece, the slogan is still an unfulfilled requirement because public information produced on taxpayer’s money remains in the drawers of civil servants, as if it were their property.

Every piece of information, which is not defined as private is in essence public: almost everything that can be physically accessed by the public belongs to the public sphere: roads, sidewalks, city block limits, field, river, forest and shoreline borders. Public is every piece of information collected with public money which does not break the restrictions of Article 9, 9A

[7] See James Boyle, The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind (New Haven: yale University Press, 2008).

re-public: re-imagining democracy h t t p : / / w w w . r e - p u b l i c . g r / e n

38

40

and 19 of the Greek Constitution for the protection of personal data and the privacy of communications. Namely, research, intellectual or artistic creations ordered, paid by the state or endowed to the state which also owns the intellectual rights, statistical data and electoral results, are all public property. Public is every piece of information published in the issues of the Government Gazette, as is the obligatory information which must be written on public documents (addresses, postal codes, the state borders, county and municipality borders etc.) or/ and is defined by state laws.

The Hellenic Mapping and Cadastral Organization, for example, has collected topographical and cadastral data of Greece either directly by their own means, financed by the state through the ministry of Environment, Physical Planning and Public Work’s budget and that for the public investments or by charging license fees, or indirectly by other public organizations, which are obliged by law to provide them to the Organization. Nevertheless, the Hellenic Mapping and Cadastral Organization does not provide ANY data free of charge, not even the municipalities borders of the new national Kapodistrias project. These cost the outrageous amount of 1450 e- while their copyright statement makes their use in the web illegal. Of course, I am not referring to the whole Cadastral Register, which might involve issues of personal data regarding property, but to elementary territorial data of the country’s administrative structure.

41

sector organizations. I doubt that you will find anyone offering even the trashiest piece of information freely to the Greek citizens. A policy for open data access is necessary to allow the Greek society to reach a higher level in its ability to produce reliable content and knowledge. The improved quality and quantity of content and knowledge gradually elevates the level of all social processes that take place in a society and increase the citizens trust in the institutions and the people who govern them.

Nevertheless, the argument that such a proposal is utopian rather presupposes the acceptance of the outdated idea about a state-of-experts and citizens-subjects, which has already reached the limits of its ability to produce results and now seems to be faltering between disasters with which the state-of-experts cannot cope, like last summer s fires or the water contamination with toxics, and the indifference and cynicism of the citizens-subjects.

The results of the current shortsighted policy can be observed by anyone who navigates the web for the aforementioned administrative regions or for other territorial data of Greece. The only available data comes from American universities and are country or prefecture borders, many decades old, of unsuitable accuracy and of no practical use for anyone who lives in Greece. There are also other international sources operating on a participatory base, geonames.org for example, which offer a great number of point data, for Greece too, through a web service, but you cannot find an official Greek free topographical data source, not even a university. It’s quite noticeable that even the National Statistical Service of Greece, which generally releases statistical data into the public domain, does not provide any of the topographical data it collects for free.

If one envies the progress of other western countries or of companies which operate there, one should pay attention to the conditions which nourished and sustain them. Many maps used

by Google, Yahoo or Microsoft, for example, are based on satellite images provided freely

by NASA. One can read the following remarkable for its frugality and comprehensiveness statement, under the photographs published in the web and coming from American public organizations (here from National Oceanic and Atmospheric Organization - NOAA): “This image is in the public domain because it contains materials that originally came from the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, taken or made during the course of an employee’s official duties.”8 I do not think that further explanations are necessary.

A policy of open access to public information in Greece is not utopian, because the current state of affairs here lags far behind what happens abroad. Count the number of web services, which the Greek state operates along with the universities and all the greater public

[8] See [http://www.noaa.gov/].

re-public: re-imagining democracy h t t p : / / w w w . r e - p u b l i c . g r / e n

re-public: re-imagining democracy h t t p : / / w w w . r e - p u b l i c . g r / e n

The realization of a policy of openness for such pieces of information in the web does not face any technical difficulties, since the technology involved is already mature and mostly free to use in the form of open source software. If the Hellenic Mapping and Cadastral Organization allowed free use of this kind of information, I am pretty sure many would be interested in providing it through the web. Tilaphos could be one of them, using the technical specifications based on the microformats principles.

Peter Barnes Peter Barnes is an entrepreneur and writer who has founded and led several successful companies. At present he is a senior fellow at the Tomales Bay Institute in Point Reyes Station, CA. In 1976 he co-founded a worker-owned solar energy company in San Francisco, and in 1983 he co-founded Working Assets Money Fund. He subsequently served as president of Working Assets Long Distance. In 1995 he was named Socially Responsible Entrepreneur of the Year for Northern California. His previous books include Who Owns the Sky? Our Common Assets and the Future of Capitalism and Capitalism 3.0 His articles have appeared in The Economist, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Christian Science Monitor, The American Prospect, the Utne Reader, Yes!, Resurgence, and elsewhere.

Carme Melo Escrihuela Carme Melo Escrihuela is a research fellow at the School of Politics, International Relations and Philosophy, Keele University, UK. She is completing a PhD thesis in the field of Green Political Thought, on issues of citizenship, civil society and ecology. She graduated in Law at the Universitat de Valencia, where she comes from.

re-public: re-imagining democracy h t t p : / / w w w . r e - p u b l i c . g r / e n

Michail Fragkias Michail Fragkias is the Executive Officer of the IHDP Urbanization and Global Environmental Change project housed by the Global Institute of Sustainability at Arizona State University. He received his Ph.D in Economics from Clark University in 2004. Michail was a postdoctoral scholar at the Center for Environmental Science and Policy at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University and has published urban land use change, urban growth modeling, urban spatial structure and its interactions with the environment.

Bill McKibben Bill McKibben is an American environmentalist and writer who frequently writes about global warming, alternative energy, and the risks associated with human genetic engineering. Beginning in the summer of 2006, he led the organization of the largest demonstrations against global warming in American history. He has published several books on environmental politics, including Hope, Human and Wild and Deep Economy: the Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future. Bill is a frequent contributor to various magazines including The New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, Orion Magazine, Mother Jones, The New York Review of Books, Granta, Rolling Stone, and Outside.

Stephanie Posthumus Stephanie Posthumus teaches 19th and 20th Century French Literature at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. She is currently constructing a French "ĂŠcocritique" on the theoretical basis of political ecologists' work Bruno Latour, Edgar Morin and Michel Serres. She has most recently published articles in Dalhousie French Studies on the intersection of structuralism and ecologism in French author Michel Tournier's work and in Culture and the State on the subject of dialogues taking place between ecology and technology.

Philip Sarre

of edition

Philip Sarre is Senior Lecturer in Geography at the Open University in the UK, and has been head of department for a total of 7 years. He has written on a variety of topics in Geography and Environmental Studies, both in Open University teaching texts (most recently jointly editing A World in the Making with Doreen Massey and Nigel Clark) and in research publications (highlights including Human Geography Today, with Doreen Massey and John Allen). His recent research, joint with Dr. Petr Jehlicka, was on the values and strategies of Czech and Slovak environmental nongovernmental organisations and has produced articles in Environmental Politics and Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers.

Dan Smith Dan Smith has been the Secretary General of International Alert since December 2003 and is a member of the Advisory Group for the UN Peacebuilding Fund. Having served as Associate Director (1988-91) and then Director (1991-3) of the Transnational Institute, Amsterdam, Dan Smith took up the Directorship of the International Peace Research Institute, Oslo (PRIO) in 1993. He is the author/co-author of ten books and editor/co-editor of six on peace and conflict issues, including The State of the Middle East: An atlas of conflict and resolution (2006). He has produced over 100 journal articles and chapters in anthologies, as well as several reports including the pathbreaking A Climate of Conflict (2007) on the links between climate change, peace and war. Dan Smith was awarded the OBE in 2002.

Ed Wall Ed Wall is a senior lecturer in Landscape Architecture at Kingston University, London, Ed is trained in urban design and landscape and he was working for the EDAW design firm on the master plan for Governors Island in New York. He has served as visiting critic on Urban Design Masters at Columbia University and for Landscape Architecture Masters at the City College of New York and has exhibited several design competition entries at the Van Alen Institute in New York.

Nathan Young Nathan Young is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Ottawa. His research focusses on issues of social and economic development in rural and resource-dependent communities and regions, with particular attention to entrepreneurship. He is also engaged in several research projects looking at issues of environment and governance in coastal regions of British Columbia.

Dimitrios Zachariadis Dimitrios Zachariadis is an electrical engineer (University of Missuri-Rolla) with a postgraduate degree in computer science (City University of NY). He was the director of telemetric and telecommunications operations during the construction of the natural gas pipeline in Greece and a technical advisor in other private works.

He was advisor to the Minister of Transportation s on matters of tellecommunications and a member of the National Telecommunication’s Committee. He works as an telecommunications and telemetrics advisor.

re-public: re-imagining democracy h t t p : / / w w w . r e - p u b l i c . g r / e n

authors