'Consuming the world'

Below is a copy of the presentation which I gave to the Dangerous Consumptions Colloquium in November 2018, with my notes (edited for sense and ease of reading).

 

I begin by paying my respects to Elders and custodians - in particular to the Bunurong people, on whose land we meet, and specifically to Elders who participated in and supported my research project. The image refers to:

• human activities heating the world (climate change), and
• the discourse of humanity (or 'Man') as lord of creation, with power over other species and ecosystems, through the image of the “crown roast”

The image of a lamb crown roast fits the Australian history of white invasion of Indigenous country, and over-running it with sheep (ironically still celebrated in Australia Day advertisements for lamb barbeques).

However, it also refers to the latest IPCC report on global warming of 1.5, which suggests reducing meat eating and switching to plant based foods as an important part of one possible pathway to stay within 1.5C warming.

This is the first time I am aware of that the IPCC has put strong emphasis on ‘demand reduction’ and ‘behaviour change’ as feasible parts of the response to global warming. Meat eating represents danger for planet, but also danger for human health, through the way meat is consumed in high income countries. Like other forms of dangerous consumption, meat eating is often valorised and associated with pleasure. It is also often associated with a certain construction of dominant masculine identity.

The IPCC report also mentions demand reduction in relation to transport, but seems to have less confidence that it can be achieved. However, the report does go beyond a price-based, 'market driven' focus alone. It also looks at co-benefits, and links with the Sustainable Development Goals. Like the Lancet Commission on Health and Climate Change, the IPCC report also begins to look at 'bottom up' as well as 'top down' responses.

As well as affecting climate by our 'dangerous consumption', we are also destroying biodiversity. A recent report by the World Wildlife Fund says the population of species they monitor has decreased by 60%. Similarly several indicators of the United Nations Environment Program are already at or past crisis point.  

 

The research project involved research with three Primary Care Partnerships (PCPs) from 2009-2017. PCPs are alliances of local health and community services, usually covering several municipalities. During 2011-16, we looked at theory and practice at community level.

We identified 32 projects promoting health, equity and environmental sustainability in the three PCPs. These involved:

• Sustainable food systems & caring for natural environment, healthy eating, growing food, reducing food waste, community gardening, links to Indigenous cultural awareness
• Housing sustainability, particularly for low income groups, reducing energy use and costs
• Active transport, walking cycling and public transport use

Even though small scale, these projects fit with the sectors identified by the IPCC, and with bottom up responses. This work is community based rather than market driven. However it faced significant challenges, particularly political and discursive challenges.

Across Victoria as a whole, planned action to address climate change or environmental sustainability in PCP strategic plans declined from almost 50% of plans in 2009-12, to just over 10% in 2013-17. Some PCPs kept doing the work but ‘labelled’ it differently, however there was clearly a real decline. One respondent in the research project said that the biggest challenge to the work was that climate change was so politicised that "people are too scared to even talk about it".

The politicised context was also a threat to health promotion in general. There were major cuts to health promotion and public health after the federal Liberal National Coalition (LNC) government was elected in 2013. However, there was a particular threat to work on climate change or environmental sustainability.

This political context was also gendered. Julia Gillard was the Labor Prime Minister until September 2013. The government at the time of the image above (2011) was proposing to legislate a carbon price and other measures to address climate change. Ms Gillard was demonised as a liar and ‘witch’, who had sneakily overthrown the male Labor leader Kevin Rudd, and had ‘lied’ about her intention to introduce a carbon price ('tax').

This movement was led by a conservative white male, Tony Abbott, as leader of the Opposition, but as apparent in the photo, it was not supported only by conservative white males. Several LNC female MPs went along with this. (Two of those pictured above subsequently left Parliament, one losing her seat to a female independent)

The thesis also explored the deeper level of discourse underlying this immediate level of political conflict. It explored how the discourse of mainstream economics – the most politically powerful discourse of our polity – although apparently neutral, and about ‘individuals’, actually has embedded assumptions from the patriarchal discourse of the white invasion of Australia

This approach draws on ecofeminist theory, particularly the work  of Carolyn Merchant. However, this theoretical approach is complex and not easily accessible, and can provoke opposition, particularly in conservative regional areas, where two of the PCPs in the study are located.

I am now trying to relate this analysis more clearly to public discussions about climate change and environment. Some examples of such discussions come from participants in the thesis, others I have seen in media and twitter, and in academic sources.

One type of discourse often drawn on is about culture, lifestyle, and even addiction. For example, a participant in the research spoke about a “car culture”, saying people would get into their car to go from one end of the street to  the other (talking about a street in a country town such as the one in the image). I also conducted a review of relevant health promotion literature, which looked in part at suggested causes for the ecological crisis. Several articles suggested 'lifestyle', or people's desire for affluent lifestyles, as a cause. Some academics, such as Frederica Perera (2008), specifically use the language of addiction (‘Children Are Likely to Suffer Most from Our Fossil Fuel Addiction’).

I also recognise the role of capitalism, or commercial determinants, and the concept of creating ‘addictive products’, which others will talk about in this colloquium. However, I want to explore deeper levels of discourse, and consent, particularly how mainstream economics often constrains us, including people working in public health, into a form of consent to its assumptions.

I don’t know much about these images and their sources, so show them just for fun, but they do convey messages about advertising and masculinity that are significant culturally, even though contemporary ads aren’t normally so blatant and make at least some appeal to women and diversity (sometimes in a very patronising way).

Different suggestions, such as those shown above, can be found in both popular and academic sources. Many are sensible. But I am concerned with examples of how the apparently neutral language of economics, maths and numbers, actually hides many issues of power and inequality, and diverts from real issues and responsibilities that we need to face.

This may arise from the intersection of contemporary, supposedly ‘non-gendered’ and ‘non- racialized’ ideas, with a continuing underlying discourse that is in fact gendered and racialized. There are continuing historical influences, for example in Australia, from a discourse in which the normative individual clearly was, in the late 19^th and early 20^th century, and in some ways implicitly still is, a white adult middle class man.

In this analysis I am focusing particularly on suggestions about technology and babies.

One of the commonest examples of what I call the ‘technology will save us’ approach I see in popular discourse, is a focus on electric cars, powered by renewable energy. I think this was particularly cleverly demolished by this image which I saw on twitter.

Clearly the resource implications alone of changing the entire fleet (millions of cars) in 10, or even 30, years, are enormous, and would have major environmental consequences. But even if this reduced carbon emissions, and reduced the negative health impacts through less pollution, many of the environmental and social issues are not changed. The environmental impacts of roads and infrastructure, and the mining and production of metals, plastics and glass, would not be reduced, and some could potentially be increased.

The idea that we can keep living much as we do, but with new technology, seems to involve a reluctance to admit that major social change is needed. Even the focus on climate change alone, rather than environmental degradation more broadly, can be reductionist, although this is a separate and complex issue.

The quote and the picture above are both from Scientific American on population issues. The language of the quote is neutral, about average “people”, or individuals. However the picture tells a different story. It is about a woman of colour. The discourse of population growth and climate change is not always racist and sexist in its unspoken subtext, but it often is.

The parallel with the discourse of economics is suggested by the utility curve. People are envisaged as individuals who want to maximise their utility. This is all supposedly value free and neutral.

 

When we look deeper, there is no average person

On a country or national level, there are particular countries, Australia being one of them, which have very high incomes, high CO2e levels and large ecological footprints, but low birth rates
There are others that have high fertility rates, and are very low on the other indicators, like Afghanistan. Basically even if the population of Afghanistan doubled in a generation, it would still represent a very small fraction of the environmental impact of countries like Qatar and Australia.

Stable population is an important goal. Improving the conditions for women in low income countries (which many, although not all, of those who focus on population growth admit is necessary) is also important. But focusing on these issues alone is a diversion from the responsibilities of high income, fossil fuel producing countries.

Ultimately I suggest we need to change from the dominant ‘economistic’ discourse, where we are conceptualised as individuals who compete for resources in order to improve our utility, to one in which we are understood as part of a socioecological system, where we all have responsibility to care for each other and share resources fairly and sustainably. As one of the participants in the research project said, we need to think about 'what kind of future we want'. In doing this we can learn from ecofeminist theory and from Indigenous knowledge.

 

 

‘Random people on the internet’ are those who shared their thoughts with me on the research project blog and on twitter and the internet more broadly.