Green

It’s odd, but in the Muslim blogosphere, I seldom find mention of the fact that humanity, or at least the wealthier minority of humanity, are currently running headlong towards an international calamity: global warming. Of course, it’s the poor who will suffer the most, the dollar-a-day poor who already live on nothing but hope. That’s if we do nothing. Are people doing anything? What needs to be done?

My carbon footprint is relatively small. I’m primarily a consumer of books. I buy local food produce where possible and live relatively simply. I don’t drive and I certainly don’t fly. All the light bulbs in my house have long been energy efficient. I am a turner-offer. I’m lucky in that, when I gave up work to care for Joel, I was faced with debt and the electric had to be repaid via a card meter. Having to top this up weekly means we remain conscious of waste. The big drinker of power in our home is the tumble dryer, which is regularly used because Joel and washing lines, clothes horses or rotaries have not traditionally got on, but this year, insha Allah they will.

I believe the catastrophe we face cannot be understood solely in environmental terms. Energy consumption is a bi-product of economic consumption, and consumerism is now at the heart of Western and Western-influenced culture. The economics of choice is really only one choice - to become a buying and selling drone in the globalizing, neoliberal phantasm of eternal economic growth.

Reflecting on this year’s economic, environmental and political news, I remain convinced - more than ever - that affluent nations face a stark choice. Either we transform ourselves or the civilizations that we imagine to be so sturdy, yet which are in truth so incredibly fragile, will fall apart. The current imbalances of power, in every sense of the word, are unsustainable. Who knows how long we have? - a century, a generation, even less, but unless we can agree a consensus on how to manage the challenges of global environmental, economic, political and social justice honestly and fully, our muddled, self-serving compromises of low-wattage light bulbs and well meaning blogs will be met with the populist politics of dread: totalitarianism, with state violence normative, and all culture subservient to political oppression.

Inevitably, such dire predictions will be and have been mocked. And the fact that I look to the Qur’an in support of my contention will no doubt invoke even more sardonic laughter than usual. But the message from Allah is unmistakable. Corrupt societies don’t last. Whether it be down to crooked trade, or xenophobia, or Deicide, or just pissing on the poor - and let’s face it, Europe is guilty of all of these, the end result is a polity and society digging its own grave. QED.

I do not advocate a single, neatly packaged solution for every nation, but there is one solution that I believe must be part of every solution. The world must shrink its cities. There must be no city, I believe, with a population above a million. The same decentralization and localisation must take place in every other walk of life - in the production of food, goods and ideas, and in the governance of our communities. The 21st century must become the age of the town and village.

Why? I proffer no ideology - the deconstruction of our megaurban spaces is simply the concrete first step to the realisation of one notion: we must practice every aspect of the business of life as close to our homes and local communities as possible. This is the only environmentally sustainable way, and the only practical means by which humans can reconstruct cultures outside of consumerism. There are dangers in this, of course - village nepotism is as corrupt and corrupting as any state-level wheeler-dealing, which is why I advocate a substantial shift in balance, rather than an anarchist utopia. But we also have a great and powerful liberal, globalizing balance to the threat of micro-tyrannies - the Net. And that must stay free.

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Filed under: Main on December 30th, 2007