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Would the environmental movement be more successful if it put less emphasis on the abstract problem of carbon dioxide — a problem that lends itself to “technocratic solutions and geoengineering” — and focused instead on, “ How do we want to live here” on Earth?
In an interview with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on “RFK Jr. The Defender Podcast,” author and public speaker Charles Eisenstein discussed how environmentalists should frame the politically divisive issue of global warming.
“What I call ‘carbon reductionism’ reduces the global ecological crisis to one thing that we can measure and technologically control,” Eisenstein told Kennedy.
Eisenstein is the author of numerous books. His latest is “The Coronation,” a collection of essays from “the COVID moment,” due out this summer.
Kennedy pointed out that carbon emissions lead to environmental degradation and hurt human health.
“How do you frame it?” Kennedy asked Eisenstien. “It’s hard to make political progress on [environmental and health issues] without kind of identifying a single culprit and then targeting legislation to address that, right?”
Eisenstein replied, “I feel like we’re projecting something onto a linear cause-and-effect that is actually not that linear.”
He added:
“We’ve had a global, a worsening ecological crisis, we’ve had a worsening health crisis for at least two generations, maybe more. And this has been happening for my entire lifetime.
“Yet at no point did we say, oh my God, we have to change everything about the way we live.”
Einstein suggested environmentalists could make the climate crisis issue seem more manageable by concentrating on local concerns.
“We can say, ‘Okay, let’s regenerate,’” he said. “Let’s preserve any pristine ecosystem. Let’s replant the forests … let’s restore the wetlands. Let’s bring beavers back to the waterways of North America to slow down the water and create more life.”
“That’s something that appeals, I think,” he added. “It goes beyond existing partisan, ideological divides.”
Kennedy likened this strategy to different approaches in the fight against COVID-19.
“Do we do it by finding a technology to battle this microbe, which is … a vaccine or something?” Kennedy asked. “Or do we focus on helping people get their immune system strong?”
Eisenstein also cautioned against the “accounting mindset” that happens when setting carbon emission reduction goals. This approach can lead to “yet another policy that is based on numbers, which … incidentally can be connected, financialized and incorporated into carbon markets and carbon-derivatives trading.”
Kennedy and Eisenstein agreed that a healthy environment nourishes humans in ways that cannot be measured.
