Coherence and Coalition- Making to Fight Overheating of the Planet

Dialogues for coherence and coalition making are a precondition to fight the overheating of the planet. No person with rational or scientific temper will ever be able to predict accurately whether or not our contemporary corporate- driven 'democracy' will be able to avert climate related catastrophes. If we are able to avert catastrophes at all, it will not be because of science but because the art of politics has succeeded.

Informed friends from the environmental movements and from green parties are quite understandably puzzled why their Southern counterparts are not able to mobilise large masses or themselves into the campaign mould with clear blue prints, prescriptions and roadmaps. With all the respect and sense of humility at our command, we want to tell our Northern environmental movements that there are very many profound reasons why our public at large is skeptical about campaigns with clear prescriptive agendas. Those who understand the information, propaganda and knowledge issues in the context of power-equations will immediately agree that the historical experience of 'civilizing missionaries' had done incalculable harm to the plurality of human civilizations. In this context, it becomes understandable that people in the South are skeptical about any prescription from the North.

For being able to generate global political will to avert the climatic catastrophes, it is important that political spaces are opened up for ordinary mortals. In this era of democratic assertions, without having the informed participation of the ordinary and vernacular public, we cannot build a global movement on Ecological Responsibility.

It is a paradoxical truth that climatic catastrophes can be averted only if there is a powerful global movement, transcending all boundaries, to reverse the direction of climatic changes- from over heating to sustainable 'heating' of the planet. But 'the powerful global movement, transcending all boundaries,' can come into being only if all the boundaries and 'people' 'bound' by the 'vernacular' and 'primordial' bonds are taken seriously. No contemporary practice of democratic politics can handle this kind of tension between binary extremes of the 'global' and the 'primordial'. A small book written nearly hundred years ago by Gandhiji, called Hind Swaraj, provides some clues on how we could build such a movement.

If you are interested in getting a copy of this book, please write to us at info@saded.in with subject line "A copy of 34 Ways to Stop Global Warming".