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Comment
Claire Vergerio | 4.8.20
As the global environmental catastrophe continues to deepen, the Covid-19 crisis unfolds, and the global economy slowly grinds to a standstill, more and more people are asking: what next? After the inevitable recession that will likely plunge the world into another decade of financial instability, will we go back to business as usual or will we strive towards new developmental models, for better or for worse? Since a significant portion of the world population finds itself stuck at home with few of the usual distractions, it may be an opportune moment to ponder what could be possible, and perhaps even to stretch the boundaries of the imaginable. We watched the widely acclaimed 2015 French documentary Demain and reconvened to share our thoughts. This is a forward-looking film that emphasizes not just what can be done but what is already being pursued to take our societies down more sustainable paths. It showcases vignettes ranging from San Francisco and Detroit to Todmorder, Bristol, Rejkajvik, Copenhagen, and Kuttambakkan. At a time when our narratives of steady progress are once more collapsing, the film’s motto is compelling: “Start small to grow big, and write a new story for the generations to come.” In its emphasis on the small, Demain echoes an earlier documentary about our ecological, financial, and political crisis: Solutions locales pour un désordre global (Local Solutions for a Global Disorder, 2010). But for all there is to like about these charmingly handpicked examples of new thinking, one recurring question remains unaddressed: how do we scale up the various local solutions the film presents us with?
While one can certainly admire the achievements of a small permaculture farm in Normandy, some of these vignettes seem so sui generis that presenting them as windows into a better future can come across as rather pie in the sky. The film is at its strongest when it focuses on innovative schemes that have been successfully put in place at city level, in its exploration of the move towards zero-waste in San Francisco or the gradual displacement of cars in Copenhagen, or even at national level, in its discussion of Finland’s world-famous education system. For one of the greatest challenges we face is how to go from writing a new story in theory to implementing it in practice and on a scale large enough to alter our global trajectory. The failure to put in place global solutions to our global problems—from climate change and the sixth mass extinction to mounting social inequalities and catastrophic pandemics—can sometimes lead to the fetishization of local solutions. Nevertheless, it seems that the key lies in creating models that allow for the different parts of the system to work together, within an overarching vision that gives sufficient leeway to more granular levels of development for creative thinking and community-building to thrive.
The Finnish education system is a compelling example: the national government implements a framework that not only gives individual teachers an unprecedented amount of agency but also centrally invests the necessary resources to train these teachers in the first place. With regards to the environmental crisis, Extinction Rebellion has adopted a model that is not dissimilar in its outlook: agree globally on the end goal, i.e. act now to tackle the climate and ecological emergency, and on a procedural means, i.e. set up citizen assemblies to decide what must be done, but bank on the power of local agency in all its diversity to concretize any measures. It is a given that different citizen assemblies will come up with different solutions to the same problem that are likely to reflect the heterogeneity of political and cultural sensibilities. This is about navigating the Scylla of one-size-fits-all models and the Charybdis of a vision-less free-for-all, two seductively simple approaches that will lead us nowhere good. We need to find ways to reconcile the global and the local with everything in between, notably incorporating national infrastructures as one of our many points of leverage. Despite its emphasis on smallness, Demain actually shows us that new stories are being written on all these different scales. The key is perhaps not to get hung up on size, and rather to start figuring out what type of story we can tell to allow all the parts to finally come together.
Response
Onur Ulas Ince | 4.10.20
Of the responses to climate change that Demain invites its viewers to contemplate, one is salient by its absence: the role of institutions. This is a variation on Bastiaan’s observation on the apolitical tenor of the directors’ framing of the problem and the solutions. Each vignette not only portrays self-evident consensus amongst the members of an assumed community but projects a semblance of spontaneity in consensus formation. Overshadowed by dramatised spontaneous agreement are various institutional infrastructures that disseminate knowledge, coordinate action, and mobilise resources and regulate access to them — for instance, municipal codes that allow urban gardening on public land in Todmorde; official partnerships that integrate urban composting in San Francisco with wine growers in Napa Valley; gram sabha through which local priorities are identified and negotiated in Kuthambakkam; a national legal-administrative framework that mandates stringent accreditation for teachers in Finland even as it accords them great margins of latitude in practice. Dialling in on institutional frameworks no doubt makes for a less captivating production but is crucial especially for surmounting the obstacles involved in upward scaling (assuming for a second that we remain with the bottom-up predilection of the message). Deficits of coordination, trust, and legitimacy become pronounced at socio-spatial and temporal scales that vitiate the kind of thick social relations one can depend on in a small Yorkshire town or even a mid-sized English city — compare, for instance, Bristol Pound to Bitcoin to cast the point in exaggerated relief. Yet, given the global scale of the interdependencies through which the metabolism of capital has been ripping through the reproductive capacities of the planet, more than simply a loose networks of local initiatives is unavoidable, though one need not end up with a consummate “climate leviathan.” A kindred lesson that the Occupy movement has bequeathed to the current ecological thinking is the limits of acephalic political organization. That lesson is manifest in the calls for a Green New Deal, which do not abdicate the national political-institutional terrain (and its attendant capacities of coordination and mobilisation) for the sake of glorified horizontalism.
A second provocation is sparked by the coverage of a small permaculture farm in Normandy. While it is tempting to think of the (re)discovery of permaculture as a timely reaction to the monopolistic and destructive practices of industrial agribusiness, demand-side factors such as the taste for organic produce and locavorism amongst the affluent urbanites offer a less exalted explanation (a current case in point is the Covid’s exposure of the class dimension of “farm-to-table” networks in New York state, evidenced by the glut of fresh produce piling up at farms whose principal vent in upscale restaurants has all but evaporated). To be clear, one can hardly have a quarrel with reintegrating horticulture into urban and peri-urban ecosystems, not least practices of agro-ecology that enlist the equilibrating tendencies of natural ecosystems to promoting resilience in food production. But the social principles on which such integration is carried out and the function of urban agro-ecology within the global food regime remain crucial questions if its benefits are to extend beyond the usual suspects. In the granular picture of permaculture in the French countryside, one loses sight of the broader fact that agro-ecological practices have been the mainstay of small-scale agriculture among the peasantries of the Global South (as well as in Europe prior to its historic depeasantization), before it was adopted by lawyers-turned-horticulturalists. Upon reflecting on it, it is difficult to shake off the resemblance between, on the one hand, spotlighting the promise of small-scale farming for a sustainable future while looking past the pressures faced by actual small-scale farmers, and the techno-utopian dreams of colonising Mars as a solution to our ecological crisis rather than changing our ways to recuperate the earth that we already inhabit.
Ayça Çubukçu | 4.10.20
Tomorrow is a cute film, shot by a group of young, jet-setting French filmmakers to address, on the face of it, climate change. It tries to take us seamlessly from Copenhagen to Chennai, from Michigan to Normandy while developing a message of hope: Communities can come together to find local solutions to overwhelmingly global problems. The film is divided into chapters addressing aspects of climate change—food, energy, “the economy,” democracy and education. Among others, the audience is invited to admire a businessman producing envelops in sustainable a fashion; a special currency used by banks and businesses in Switzerland; anti-caste organizing in a village in southeast India; and city-wide composting San Francisco. By the end of it, as desirous as I was for hopeful solutions, I could not help but wonder: What exactly is the problem that this film addresses? Is it capitalism? No. Is it democracy? No. Is it the reasons and consequences of climate change? Not quite. Then what? At its best, this is an endearing film about “taking back control” at the local level, whatever that may entail—organic farming, renewable energy, local currencies, village democracy, variants of Montessori education. Boutique solutions, in other words, to not so boutique problems that have overwhelmed our filmmakers into a desire “to do something” about a phenomena they cannot quite identify. Despite its ambiguities, however, the sheer agency and collective determination exercised at the grassroots level (when it is that, instead of “business solutions” that the film generously highlights) is inspiring, as the audience is invited to face the challenge of imagining, and acting for, tomorrow.
Bastiaan Bouwman | 4.9.20
I was struck by how Demain brings questions of on the one hand climate change and energy resources and on the other hand economic thinking, models of democracy, and education into a single frame. The film presents the transition from the former to the latter as inexorable. In for a penny, in for a pound: if you want to address global warming and environmental degradation, you will have to reconsider the political, economic, and pedagogic foundations of our societies altogether. The question this raises is whether the answers to this latter set of questions can be as apolitical as the film-makers seem to imply. All reasonable people, they seem to say, will adapt in these ways, given the necessity at hand – as long as they can overcome the opposition and indifference of (global) corporations and political elites. As Claire rightly points out, this argument is not intrinsically connected to scale: though the film gives pride of place to small-scale communities, it seems self-evident that sensible policies directed at reshaping the world in response to climate change will need to be adopted at all levels, from the local to the international.
But this scaling up, while necessary, will have to address questions of legitimacy and efficiency, by the film’s own logic: if deliberative democracy along the lines proposed by David van Reybrouck – an advocate of sortition, or government by lot, over and against elections – is an ideal the film-makers favor, it is not clear how this would work at the international level – which, given the nature of the problem, we cannot do without. Moreover, the film’s schema of the people versus intransigent and ignorant corporations and politicians seems to take for granted that the former will agree among themselves, at least sufficiently to carry out – across the scales – a set of policies that amount to a coherent whole measuring up to the challenge. This view elides the inevitability of internal ideological disagreements arising, not least with respect to questions of distributive justice and citizenship. How will unequal burdens be shared? For example, how will the looming question of potentially hundreds of millions of climate migrants and refugees be met, particularly by those focused on community and rootedness as the hallmarks of a healthy and resilient society? Here, as in the case of questions of economics or pedagogy, the answers will be deeply contested, and the outcome will depend, among other things, on the narratives different sides have at their disposal. Such narratives will have to go beyond laying out an array of practical fixes and more fully engage with questions of politics.
Jeremy Adelman | 4.9.20
OK, I am going to resist Claire’s injunction to relax about scales. I had such a strong reaction to the film’s global vs local framing. It’s still rippling through my cognitive system, heightened by the fact that so many of us have been immobilized and thus localized in what’s clearly a global crisis. The film-makers want us “to start small.” Maybe, in our current condition, that’s all we can do. Claire’s point about what she calls the “granular levels” of thought and action are key to the film, and our futures; the great theories of social transformation have tended to poo-poo them. They deserve a fresh look. But damn: I so want us to think big, to re-imagine interdependence, to think about estranged togetherness.
Now that I got that off my chest, what the film really got me thinking about was less the spatial scales, but the temporal scales. Demain. Tomorrow. Local/global was so prominent that the more subtle – and maybe more powerful? – overtone about time scales only creeps up gradually. If anything, thinking about time is a stealthy takeaway from the film. Maybe we should think in different temporal scales. Why work on five-year plans? Why twiddle our thumbs waiting for the atmospheric engineers to suck carbon from the skies? Why not do something tomorrow? The film reminds us that there is a way of thinking about time that does not imply losing control of it, of having to wait – which is, in the words of Pierre Bourdieu, a way of submitting to a world in which everything has to come from others. So, we wait. But if we think about tomorrow, maybe we don’t have to.
Sophia Kalaztzakos | 4.9.20
There’s no more “perfect” vantage point from which to rethink issues of scale than being in NYC during the COVID 19 pandemic that has dismantled the daily lives of millions of urban dwellers. Up and down the avenues trucks and people render visible the supply chains of food, goods, and services coming from outside the city walls straight to our doorsteps. The film might have overemphasized local solutions to a global problem (i.e. climate change) but in this crisis it strikes a cord drawing attention to what have previously been under-appreciated networks that start locally, move regionally and finally stretch globally underscoring that interdependence exists at every scale.
As many of us – those more fortunate – await for someone to press PLAY – time is what we have; to ponder on what is possible and what we would like to change. Perhaps the global is too big to think of first; perhaps the smaller scale allows us to pilot new ideas in order to both visualize and produce outcomes. Test driving new concepts, new policies, even new imaginaries gives one agency to change what is largely forced on us as unalterable.
Food, I find, is a good way to start especially given how much time we are all spending cooking from scratch. The film reminds us that corporate interests have propagated the myth that industrial agriculture is the only way to feed billions of people. It points to the nature of waste and the possibilities of moving toward a circular economy today and not in some futuristic time. It demonstrates that rescuing cities from automobile hegemony is not only more economical but increasingly more appealing to urban dwellers.
If there is one thing that the COVID 19 pandemic forces us to confront are questions of scale: it’s a virus that swallowed the world, led to a shutdown of the global economy in order to flatten the curve of contagion so as not to overwhelm hospitals and thereby save lives. It generated bail out packages in the trillions because it caused colossal unemployment. It also produced a dramatic reduction of carbon emissions of a scale that not even Paris had thought possible.
It made it abundantly clear that ignoring our interdependence is a recipe for recurring disaster while embracing it restores our sense of agency and allows us more flexibility to respond.
Pascale Siegrist | 4.8.20
Claire ends her thoughtful summary of Demain with a reminder not to get hung up on scale. In the spirit of the film’s happy-clappy celebration of out-of-the-box thinking, we can then ask: what are the alternatives? The film identifies the level of the ‘local’ with that of the community; its overall remedy for the crisis is to divert power away from far-off multinationals (and states?) back to the people on the ground. We see people who rightfully take great pride in their common achievements and new connections being made through collective empowerment in schools, villages, neighbourhoods, and entire cities. But what if our notion of the community as based on a sense of local rootedness is part of what is getting us so hung up on scale? Covid-confined to our apartments we are simultaneously discovering balcony singing with neighbours we have never met, as we are made aware of the geographical complexity of the networks of the people that we check up on, work with, and are trying to have skype parties with. That these latter communities are less physically close does not make them less worthwhile or less able to generate change in the world. Global political movements like Extinction Rebellion also show that a sense of belonging can transcend local affiliations, that there might be a space for rootless cosmopolitans in tackling our complex global crises.