ecoclub.com/blogs - news & views from ecoclub.com members

Font size: +
3 minutes reading time (512 words)

World Environment Day 2013

On this years World Environment Day it is becoming clearer, through a wide range of developments ranging from the violently suppressed ecological protests in Istanbul, the popular anti-gold / anti-multinational mining campaign in the forest of Skouries, near Halkidiki Greece, the ongoing struggle of indigenous communities against oil giants in the Amazon and against bauxite in India, the growing anti-fracking movement in the United States, widening global awareness about Climate Change and its main causes (Capitalism in all its forms: authoritarian, statist or neoliberal) and a constant flow of tragic sweat-shop deaths that reveal the ugly backstage of consumerism that the Environmental Movement can no longer remain or pretend to be apolitical, and that it must pick sides – either the 99% and the side of progress, of the people, or the 1%, the side of the ecocidal status quo. Or, as Noam Chomsky put it in a recent editorial, “... those who are trying hard to do something about these threats [to destroy the planet], and others who are acting to escalate them.”


The process of choosing sides is of course slowly undermining the credibility of large systemic green NGOs who may in turn have to chose between their corporate sponsors and the less gullible public. It is also creating tensions and splits within many green parties, especially those that have sold their soul and quickly moved towards the mainstream in their quest for money and votes. Let us hope that the green movement or at least its radical wing, emancipates itself from systemic political parties and assorted charities and takes its place in a broad grassroots global green-left/libertarian-left alliance. After all the Environmental movement was never about being voted into power so as to manage the system and better protect a few forests and save some endangered species, this was the mainstream media version and wishful thinking. Rather it was about moving from a ‘Silent Spring’ to a Global ‘Spring’, a second Renaissance, so as to finally achieve the noble, and as yet unattained, goals of the French revolution: Equality, Liberty, Fraternity.


In the era of rapid and decentralized communication forms of injustice, social exclusion, racism, bigotry, either in the name of tradition, religion or economic orthodoxy – another form of religion cannot be hidden or tolerated, even though armies of internet censors are doing their best in many countries in cooperation with big social networks. 

 

Tourism, and particularly its ecological and socially just forms, is in a unique place to help do away with fake traditions and oligarchic economic recipes by democratising the economy, emancipating local communities that have no other means of production and setting up alternative forms of organisation including cooperatives and worker-managed companies. This historic possibility and opportunity should be grasped by young tourism graduates who should seek a socially meaningful career rather than a well-paid position serving whoever pays them the most. After all, even Churchill recognized that if you are not liberal when you are twenty, there is something wrong with your heart (I naturally disagree with the second half of his quotation).

Shandur Polo Festival 2013
Interview on Overbooked - new book covering the to...