Page 222 - Carbon Capitalism and Communication Confronting Climate Crisis

218 G. MURDOCK

of some people is that it’s pretty strange to give a natural resource a legal
personality. But it’s no stranger than family trusts, or companies” (Farand
2017). The Whanganui settlement is already providing a potent point of
reference. A week after the New Zealand parliamentary vote, the high
court in the Himalayan state of Uttarakhand cited it as a precedent in
support of their decision to grant the status of ‘living human entities’ to the
Ganges and Yamura rivers.
The fact that all three rivers have special spiritual significance for the
local peoples will almost certainly be used by proponents of business as
usual to limit the scope of future claims and present them as hang-overs
from a pre-modern past with little relevance to contemporary conditions.
But the idea of the commons is not so easily circumscribed. At its heart is a
fundamental opposition between the continued corporate exploitation of
resources and peoples in the pursuit of profit maximization and alternatives
based on custodianship, collaborative production, and the equitable and
just distribution of both rewards and costs. Working out how these alter-
natives might be organized is the most urgent question now facing anyone
concerned to dismantle the continuing destructive impacts of carbon
capitalism.
Pursuing this project arguably requires a shift in perspective.
Environmental campaigning has tended to underline the urgency of taking
action by promoting stark images of disaster, typified by the iconic pho-
tograph of a polar bear mentioned in the introduction to this volume,
clinging to a small sliver of ice, staring out into a dark sea where until
recently the ice sheet stretched to the far horizon. Recent Gallup polling
suggests that these images, and the continual stream of climate disaster
fiction, are escalating public anxiety with 45% of Americans polled in early
2017 saying that they now worried ‘a great deal’ about global warming, a
significant increase on the 25% who gave the same answer in 2011 (Saad
2017). But, as Jodi Dean reminds us in her chapter, apocalyptic visions can
have the effect of inducing resignation and even a perverse pleasure in
witnessing the onwards march of destruction. While demonstrations of the
severity of climate change impacts remain a necessary reminder of the scale
of the problems facing us, campaigning also needs to emphasize that
another world is indeed possible by celebrating victories in the struggle
against fossil fuels and the success of practical alternatives: the local com-
munities now generating sufficient power from renewable resources to be
self-sufficient; the successful co-operatives reorganizing production, and
the movements to repair and reuse rather than discard electronic consumer