HomeMundo en Español Degrowth Seminar, Copenhagen Klimaforum09 - Speech by Miguel Valencia
Degrowth Seminar, Copenhagen Klimaforum09 - Speech by Miguel Valencia
by Miguel Valencia
11 December 2009
Liberating the Social Imagination to Liberate Our Villages
Dec. 9, 2009 at the People's Climate Summit: Klimaforum09
Our villages and cities are dying because of intense development. Everywhere in México, the same force is at work. It weakens our
villages, sickens and kills their inhabitants. It destroys our
communities and makes a mockery of our traditional commons.
Year after
year, it causes the loss of support capacities: water tables, streams
and lakes, groves, rainforests, and seas. It constantly impoverishes our
country's fauna and flora.
This force is modernization. It is an undeclared war waged against nature and the people's commons. In its name, the landscape is tainted with actual monocrops such as corn, barley, and palms, and also with monocrops of urban sprawl, channels, and pylons. All towns are more and more invaded by pavement, pipes, autos, noise, advertisements, commercial franchises, and WalMart stores. The peasants and town residents observe helplessly how in a few months there is the building of underpasses for freeways, big parking lots, huge malls, and industrialized housing. In a few hours they see how their public parks and gardens, sidewalks, and squares are filled with used plastic bottles or bags, aluminum cans, printed matter, and debris of metal, glass and plastic.
Mexican towns and cities are rapidly losing their peasants, artisans
and wise men and women. Meanwhile they resent a fast increase
in levels of violence, poverty and unemployment, because of the
soaring growth of the huge land monocultures, migration, drug harvest
and traffic, sweat shops and new lifestyles. Our towns are powerless
territories subject to powers without territory. The global economy now
dominates our village life, and towns and cities have
lost the means to stand on their own.
Confrontation and dissent with globalization in México: A chronicle
of bloody warfare
Dissent rose in the early 1990s, but since the beginning of this
century at least 1,500 local movements have been initiated;
campesinos, indigenous people, women, workers, neighbours, citizens of
all social strata have rejected the construction of airports, large
dams, turnpikes, oil facilities, toxic waste confinement, mining
operations, water extraction, elevated freeways, and Metro lines.
The most
relevant dissent in México:
• the town of Atenco stopped the construction
of Mexico City's new international airport
• Ignacio del Valle, the
campesino leader of this movement, is now in top security seclusion,
convicted for 120 years
• Zimapan town halted a toxic confinement
• people of San Luis Potosí City succeeded to stop operations of San
Xavier, Canadian mining company
• campesinos of La Parota stopped a
large dam project in Acapulco
• people of Cuatro cienegas continuously
oppose to water extraction in the desert ecological reserve
13 towns
movement
• campesinos against the urbanization of Morelos rice fields
• campesinos and people of Tlahuac against the 12th Metro line project
on their wetlands in Mexico Cy.
In recent years, most local resistance
leaders in Mexico have arrest warrants. At least every fortnight a local
leader mysteriously disappears or is found tortured and killed by
unknown people.
The social imagination manipulated by development programs and
globalization has been a tragedy.
For decades, the images of new cars, high-speed roads, big dams,
bridges, towers, underpasses, houses in suburbia, have devastated the
mind of the majority of Mexican people, but globalization introduced
again new images of world class weapons, cruiser sea travel,
contemporary houses, and many others that colonized the mind of part
of the low income, middle and well-to-do Mexican classes. The
American Dream or the European lifestyle has now become a part of the
social imagination of most Mexicans. But these images drive the
transformations that ravage Mexican towns, villages, and nature’s
treasures. Derived from the spectacle of wealth, several new creeds or
faiths invade not only a great portion of the Mexican people, but, I think, of
most people in most countries. This new creed could be summarized as
the following: faith in progress, development and modernization;
faith in science and technology; faith in economic growth, and faith in
the modern State and democratic institutions. As a result of the
emergence of these creeds, most people believe that there is no
dignified human life on earth without mobile phones, lap tops, bottled
water, cars, fast trains, planes... along with the idea that world class newspapers,
big radio networks and national TV broadcast are essential for a good
living. And that society cannot achieve prosperity without abundant
school certificates, university degrees and doctoral studies.
With the rise of economic classical thinking, in the 18th century
epistemic revolution, these contemporary faiths emerged:
Economists introduced the idea of a world without boundaries and
limits, unbridled exploitation of nature and the legitimization of big
risk activities; in those days, modern states lost the notions of
scale, size, proportion and limit and began to nurture industrial
activities, international trade. In that century, the fundamentals of
our legal system were created in order to protect pirates, bankers,
corporations; and then, science and technology became the most
important partners of economy. From this epistemic revolution evolved
creeds of our modern thinking; nowadays everybody is
deeply involved in only one dimension of life: the economic dimension.
The One Dimensional Man, denounced by Herbert Marcuse in the '60s, is
now present everywhere in the world. Techno-scientists presently
conduct high risk experiments using nuclear energy, genetic
engineering, nanotechnology, robotics, in such a manner “to make
humans an endangered species,” according to Bill Joy, the great
American computer scientist. The global economy has conquered the mind of modern
man and commands his life, needs, desires, and beliefs. The idea of
scarcity, essential to economic thinking, saturates contemporary
thinking. Nowadays, because of economic ideas, multinationals and
states face a Shakespearean dilemma “to grow or not to be” -- as
economy implements the ugliness, gigantism, and accelerated change that
now subdue the modern world.
The economy operates by means of various systems and instruments
designed by techno-scientists:
Systems such as states, world organizations, central banks, financial
operations, employment, schools, universities, hospitals, media,
agribusiness, tourism, transportation. Instruments like autos, planes,
internet, and mobile phones disturb human behavior and produce profound
changes in values, beliefs, desires, and needs. In the process, certain
new values emerge deep in human mind that change social perception of
reality: an estrangement of the individual from community,
society, or the world. Alienated individuals desire to have more stuff, bigger
and faster, and they are the most influential. Systems facilitate “free choice,” but in a world without people in person. THey inculcate love
for competition, profitability, and technical concerns; they stimulate
anonymity, conformism, addictions, consumerism, servitude,
subordination, uprootedness, and disenchantment. The modern systems and values induce parting from
nature, squandering of life, stingy interchanges between people, scorn
for manual work, love for hierarchies and disdain for spontaneity. They
turn work into an addiction, and consumption as the basis of life. Techno-
systems empower the dominant system and degrade people’s minds. The
colonization of the modern social imagination is systemic. It is evident that
these economic systems are against the natural order and human
conviviality; they turn poverty into misery and bring about awful
violence that pervades the world; they drive the destruction of nature.
Schools teach the great advantages of productivity and how to become
a disciplined consumer, but they really teach how to live in permanent servitude and
dissatisfaction. Not only Coca Cola and the automobile are addictive,
also schools or clinics become a drug. As Ivan Illich said “School
opium is more powerful than old time churches.” Mass media
systematically misinform people thru excessive information and petty details; the
combination of misinformation with commercial and political
advertising produces distortion, propaganda and manipulation. Like the
VIH virus, schools destroy immunity defenses, just as drug dealers
do, and as advertising creates new necessities. Daily work is every day
more abstract and takes more hours: it strongly colonizes the
imagination. Unemployment is resented by people as a personal blame, not
as a systemic failure, which leads to paralyzed, destroyed lives. In
the new consumer society, as Zygmut Bauman says, individuals
simultaneously promote a product while they are themselves the product
they promote; they are the consumer, the marketing manager, the
salesperson and the article for sale. The exams that a person should pass
to achieve social recognition requires the
individual to recycle himself as a precious object or property, as a
product capable of catching attention, attracting clients, and generating
demand.
Modern systems produce uniformity all over the world; differences are
disappearing among cities, suburbia, towns, dwellings, landscapes,
generations, and gender. In this uniform environment the human personality
loses identity and cultural references to guide his life; individual
high risk behavior proliferates in the world: drugs consumption,
crime, extreme sports, and certain forms of sexuality tend to increase;
panic and emptiness haunt all human activities; as society malfunctions
increase, politicians and capitalists feel more powerful than ever.
The tragedy today is that too many people in the world want even
more jobs created; want ever more investments in infrastructure,
housing, hospitals, scientific experiments and technological advances.
People trust in the modern systems and in the growing economy;
people rely on the pervasive instruments and institutions that
are destroying their lives and future.
Liberating the social imagination is essential to relocate life and
economy
It is impossible to liberate the social imagination without a severe
critique of the dominant system. This liberation implies studying,
investigating, reflecting, and working on oneself. It implies philosophical
endeavors; it entails a desire to be free, a will to change our own
life style and the construction of a pertinent personal praxis. It also
requires detoxification and education in the ways of "degrowth." Without
the abandonment of the drug of growth, says Serge Latouche,
We cannot
change our own imagination and the less we will be able to change others’
imaginations. It is not possible to change the world with laws and
decrees...The key is self-transformation.... As our imagination has been
colonized, the enemy hides deep in our minds... nevertheless, because
of the systemic character of the dominant values... nobody is
responsible; the process is anonymous. .. Thus, the adversary is other
people, and we feel impotent to transform ourselves.
He quotes
Zygmut Bauman: “There is a common world in the globalized society and
this is the unique thought ...” Latouche says “beyond the elite, the
ensemble of values and beliefs shared by people is considerable.” To
liberate our villages, many people should abandon many ideas, like:
having a car, a house in suburbia or a university degree; they must
abandon the idea that having an employment is good for his health and
his future. We degrowth activists have to demonstrate that we can live
much better with much less infrastructures, equipment and things,
and with minimal dependence on governments, parties and big
enterprises.
But the liberation of the social imagination also implies the voluntary
defense of territories, animals, forests, rivers, seas, peasant
cultures, people’s commons, traditional knowledge, endangered species,
clean air, public space, and human rights. It also implies rejection of
GMOs and their harvests, nuclear power, agribusiness, mining and
petroleum operations, toxic waste pools, dam construction, big
farms and livestock operations, cookie-cutter housing, automobile use, and "developing" our local environment. It implies also denouncing the misleading notion of
sustainable development. Liberating the social imagination means revitalizing the village by producing for
local needs and consuming local produce; organizing micro-
cooperatives and micro-syndicates; reducing work-time voluntarily and cutting
consumption, and constructing new ecological communities with rigorous
rules. It also means growing vegetables by our own dwellings or nearby
in the eco-region; to walk and bicycle for everyday mobility; to modify
toilets and water facilities; to separate residues for reuse and recycling; to support local
money, savings and loans, and to use or produce hand-made products. Abandon the use of automobile, bottled water and red meat consumption.
On the other hand, liberating the social imagination means also to
enhance political and social involvement within our village
environment; to collaborate with citizen initiatives; to voluntarily
work on environmental and social issues without the support of the
governments, foundations or national or multinational companies; to
experiment on ways to survive the economic crisis, peak oil
and climate change; to refuse to empower the State and "free
trade" and to break with the symbolic system of globalization. Last but
not least, to make art an integral part of our lives.
A cultural revolution emerges when men and women work together for the
rebirth of their village, town or community, when they expand the realm
of gratuity and solidarity, when they are blessed by the love for
nature, altruism, cooperation, luddism, autonomy and beauty.
This cultural revolution begins in our minds, the moment when we
become aware, as Baruch Spinoza did, that simple poor life constitutes
in itself a source of light to inspire us to understand the
different dimensions of poverty and our own potency; that the joys of
frugal or poor life permit us to liberate a strong desire to live
free to our natural limits and avoid external affections or
imaginations that diminish or inhibit this desire and our capacities.
And he says to let reality teach us this truth in order to comprehend
the world as it is here and now; in that way we can liberate
ourselves from all forms of servitude and acquire a freedom rooted in
need; thus, we can find good responses to very difficult questions. We
have to discover and respect the essential link between desire and
reason, for the good deployment of our own potential, to facilitate
the creation of societies based in freedom and respect for everybody’s
singularity. Spinoza said that “weakness solely consists in letting
external things conduct our lives and decline what demands our nature
in itself." Centuries latter, Gandhi said: “Freedom can be achieved
through inner sovereignty”
Climate change, peak oil, and high risk technologies can easily bring
harsh, painful, corrective changes in our villages in the coming years.
But joyful, pleasant transformations will come from the discovery
of our inner power and potential while we voluntarily adopt a frugal,
poor, simple, and slower life.
--
Miguel Valencia
ECOMUNIDADES
Red Ecologista Autónoma de la Cuenca de México
¡DESCRECIMIENTO O BARBARIE!
Acción inmediata frente al Pico del Petróleo y al Cambio Climático
Textos recientes en red-ecomunidades.blogspot.com
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Editor's note: Miguel Valencia's speech will be available on this website also in Spanish. His previous articles on Culture Change are The energy transition in México: Towards a post-petroleum era and PEMEX privatization / Downshifting . Miguel Valencia has been associated with Culture Change since its inception in 2001 (after it changed from being the Auto-Free Times magazine for the Alliance for a Paving Moratorium).
Culture Change mailing address: P.O. Box 3387, Santa Cruz, California, 95063, USA, Telephone 1-215-243-3144 (and fax). Culture Change was founded by Sustainable Energy Institute (formerly Fossil Fuels Policy Action), a nonprofit organization.
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