by Patrick Bond
The Mercury, 5 July 2011

Think ahead five months, but first, back last month. For we’ve just witnessed a preview of critical differences between civilized society, trying its best to get into the COP17 summit in Durban to make some minor climate policy modifications at the edges, and uncivilized society trying to generate eco-social change on the outside in order to save the planet.

Amongst the world’s highest profile activists is Greenpeace International director Kumi Naidoo, who in his Durban youth learned and practiced the highest arts of democratic advocacy within the Natal Indian Congress and anti-apartheid youth structures.

Last month, Naidoo scaled a Greenland deep-sea oil platform to present 50,000 signatures against dangerous Arctic drilling. Last week, his Johannesburg comrades dumped five tonnes of coal at MegaWatt Park in Joburg’s northern suburbs to protest Eskom’s climate-catastrophic Kusile powerplant construction.

With extreme weather events worsening in recent months, who can doubt the imperative to get a global fair, ambitious and binding deal to halt greenhouse gas emissions within the next four decades, and to cut them in half within a decade? Such a superhuman, genuinely multilateral effort has been tried once before, in the 1987 “Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer”, which, thank goodness!, banned chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) emissions by 1996, in the nick of time.

Since then I know of nothing else attempted by elite global negotiators aside from AIDS-medicines access – granting an exemption to intellectual property rights at the 2001 Doha World Trade Organisation summit, driven from below by the Treatment Action Campaign – to solve world-scale economic, environmental and geopolitical crises. Nothing. The elites have been pathetic.

Blame the neoliberalism of the 1990s or the neoconservatism of the 2000s or Barack Obama’s fusion of the two vicious ideologies since then, but it’s usually vested corporate interests in the US and Europe that block progress, impose austere economic imperatives (as is even hitting home for western workers from Greece to Wisconsin) which in turn generate even more desperation for ‘growth’ at any cost, and then ignore their historic responsibility for climate-change culpability.

Top US State Department negotiator Todd Stern, who has already publicly written off the COP17 on two occasions, put it plainly at the Copenhagen COP in 2009: ‘The sense of guilt or culpability or reparations – I just categorically reject that.’

That attitude is why Greenpeace and others in society passionate about the environment are so desperately needed, putting their bodies on the line to dramatise the threats and solutions. And why much more civil society unity on strategy and messaging is vital.

But as an Australian civil society unity initiative (‘Say Yes’) exactly a month ago showed, this is not easy. Two activists at the website ‘Climate Code Red’, David Spratt and John Rice, asked tough questions about the Australian climate lobby: “Do the branding imperatives of large NGOs, financially reliant on e-list supporters, drive them to market themselves as separate and distinct from, and of higher standing, than other NGOs and the community groups with which they profess common purpose? Is this one reason why climate advocacy is so often chronically divided and ineffective?”

More specifically, local environmentalist Glenn Ashton suggests Greenpeace should devote its energies and brand to deeper organizing: “Sure they may dump some coal in front of Eskom and climb an oil rig near Greenland but that is not edgy at all – the system is not being confronted in any really meaningful way, just at a soundbite level, capturing awareness for 15 seconds and then getting lost again in the corporate media noise.”

Adds Desmond D’Sa of the South Durban Community Environmental Alliance (SDCEA), “Greenpeace did a good action against Eskom, but where were they when we ran our community campaign against World Bank financing for Medupi last year? Why don’t they support local activism?”

These complaints join others about Greenpeace’s naïve climate policy messaging: supporting Pretoria’s negotiating stand in Copenhagen and encouraging Jacob Zuma to turn up on the last day even though, predictably, he sabotaged the Kyoto Protocol there; supporting SA tourism minister Marthinus van Schalkwyk to head the UN climate body though he was a laggard at home; and supporting carbon trading (what critics term ‘the privatization of the air’) even though at Bisasar Road landfill that strategy locked in environmental racism.

But in this time of urgency, I think we have to find common cause amongst all the visitors to Durban, something underway through the laudable ‘C17’ group that is today, at a public meeting at the Botanical Gardens, trying to fuse even the pro-corporate pro-trading politics of the World Wildlife Fund with the radical grassroots sentiment of SDCEA. Can it be done, and how?

My gut feel is that in contrast to the hopelessness of a UN conference where procrastination, paralysis, pollution and profit will probably beat the interests of the people and the planet, it’s the indominable spirit of Greenpeace staff and those like them, willing to take huge personal risks for the sake of the planet and people, that will shine through.

One reason is the host locale, Durban, whose 20^th century legacy of heroic figures willing to make great sacrifices includes Dube, Luthuli, Naicker, Meer, Biko, dockworkers, community activists, women’s groups, the Diakonia legacy, the Mxenges, Turner, Brutus and so many others. But the most compelling for climate politics may well be Mahatma Gandhi, who a century ago in his Phoenix settlement built up a tradition that Naidoo continues today, satyagraha, putting bodies on the line to shake the system and avert its destructive course. Off the coast of Greenland, he upped the anti for all of us concerned about this planet.

For given what is at stake in the case of climate chaos, it’s only the tree-shakers on the outside who will change power relations to permit the jam-makers on the inside to eventually cut the deal that the world needs to survive.