Environmentalists are not members of a cult. They are your sister, your neighbour, your co-worker, your child, or even you yourself, once you start to worry about the Earth, which is being attacked to the point where it is destabilizing at an exponential rate.
Global warming is causing coastline erosion, massive species migrations, agricultural crises, water scarcity. Industrial exploitation of the land is leading to deforestation, species extinction, outbreaks of disease. Overfishing is making marine life vanish so that we can indulge in pointless overconsumption well beyond our needs. We cannot keep going like this much longer.
Yet we see, in the Western world, that environmentalists are denounced, banned, marginalized, censored and attacked. French President Emmanuel Macron, the least subtle head of state, has done everything in his power to reduce Earth Uprisings, a global youth-led climate movement, to the status of a seditious ecoterrorist organization. The police violence directed against members of this movement by the state was as violent as it was disproportionate. Their crime? In the spring of 2023, they protested against the construction of a mega-reservoir project in western France that would redirect water from natural locations to be inefficiently stored for use by big industry. The majority of the population did not support the development.
In New Brunswick, the noose is also tightening around citizens who see how destructive our way of life has become. In the spring of 2023, at the start of his electoral campaign, Green Party candidate Serge Brideau stated frankly, “A lot of people are disillusioned about politics. And me too, I am very dissatisfied with a lot of things in our system.”
Brideau’s positioning on the political spectrum testifies to the difficulties in speaking out except through the discourse established by the defenders of the ecocidal capitalist order.
As a citizen, he is facing a court injunction that stops him from opposing a blueberry farm that would destroy forests near Tracadie. As a candidate, he wears the colours of a group sneered at in the media as a “third party,” as if it were inherently in its nature to finish third, and so forth.
The public, too, has its well-known and outdated biases. However, the parliament that must be won has long since ceased to adhere to the rules of the market, confronted as it is with the power of the industrial empires and the temples of finance.
Jacques Rancière reminds us that “democracy” is not a type of regime, but a philosophical relationship to the world. In principle, a democratic question places us as equals before our collective responsibilities and no specific competence should prevail. So even if we chose our representatives by lot, the assembly might not be more competent than an elected one; but the hard truth is that it would probably not be less competent. Anyone can deliberate on the issues that affect us all; this is the conviction that guides jury selection in some courts.
By contrast, our electoral system structurally favours one particular form of competence: the skill of winning elections. A veteran of politics like Dominic LeBlanc illustrates this well. He operates a well-oiled machine that wins elections and he surrounds himself with an entourage that thinks of nothing else. This is his expertise, which does not extend much further.
As for the “electorate,” they are referred to with degrading metaphors. They are “customers” subjected to meaningless marketing campaigns, or a “hiring committee” that is supposed to choose the best person for the job, as if there were only one task to accomplish. Voters sense this contempt, to which they answer, “Again! It’s all about money! They are all corrupt, etc.”
In a system where dirty tricks prevail, where the big business lobbyists have enormous power, where backroom influence peddling counts more than rationally comparing electoral platforms, dissatisfaction is the norm. We vote against something, and we choose the lesser evil. In reality, we no longer expect anything from political actors. We are far less demanding of them than of professors, accountants and doctors. This suits them fine.
Apart from a few minor points here and there – debates on social issues or the building of a much-needed bridge – parliamentary democracy offers us the choice of the same product, in either blue or red, perhaps tinted with orange or green. Beyond this, the same ideology rules. In this context, we might hope for a few moral victories, such as the Green Party holding the balance of power, without giving in to the managerial thinking of Greens in politics, such as the pathetic notion of “sustainable development.” Hopefully, they can pull the government towards putting in place the major reforms necessary in light of our ongoing ecological tragedy.
Alain Deneault is an author and Professor of Philosophy at Université de Moncton, Shippagan Campus. A version of this commentary first appeared in l’Acadie Nouvelle on September 23, 2024.
