By Evan Kudler, Spring 2022 Environmental Clinic Student
The story of the COVID-19 coming from a bat in a Chinese wet market spread almost as fast as the virus itself. While the wet market may have been the place of spillover, it is not where or how the pandemic began. To discover the true origins of the pandemic, society must look deeper to uncover the fact that bats are one of the species most displaced by deforestation – a primary driver of climate change. As the displacement of bats continues, their interaction with humans increases thus increasing the likelihood of viruses jumping from them to us. Experts have been warning of the increased risk for spillover resulting from deforestation and even predicted the high likelihood of a pandemic level respiratory illness occurring. While our focus on COVID-19 is warranted given its impact, it is simply the virus that ended up reaching pandemic proportions, not the only one that had the potential to (e.g., Ebola, H1-N1, Zika).
We are living through the repercussions of the world’s changing climate that are traceable, though perhaps less obviously so than drought and fires, to our societal reliance on high-greenhouse-gas-emitting consumption patterns. As the capitalist consumerism continues, the risk of further zoonotic spillover increases daily. The idea that COVID-19, or any pandemic-potential disease for that matter, is separate from climate is wrong. Disease and climate change are inextricably linked. You cannot stop zoonotic spillover without stopping deforestation. You can’t stop deforestation without changing current, capitalist-centric agricultural practices .
The deaths associated with COVID-19 are but a precursor to the expected casualties that will result from our increasingly warming planet. And both are directly tied to state action or, more accurately, lack thereof. Pandemics will continue to occur as long as the international conglomerate of governments refuses to prioritize decarbonization and remedy the consumption patterns of society. This is a tall task, but as COVID-19 foreshadows, there is only more death coming down the pipeline should we continue our inaction.
There is hope! In the years preceding 2020, climate activism was arguably at its peak. For example, there were globally coordinated school walkouts, Greta Thunberg was named Time’s person of the year, and political polling showed an increasing majority of US voters listing climate change as a primary concern. There was a plethora of increasingly disruptive actions planned for 2020, such as a disruption to Shell’s corporate shareholder meeting (which was still attempted even though the meeting was virtual). However, as the unfortunate story goes, COVID-19 upended all of that. Momentum is activism’s favorite and most feared word: If you have it, you’re golden, but if you lose it, it could be the death knell. COVID-19 stopped the climate movement in its tracks just as the snowball was starting to roll down the hill.
And yet, even with all the activism that the movement has become known for, and even with the events that were planned for 2020, we continue to see new oil & gas facilities being built and permitted across the globe. Forests are being razed for more cropland and grazing for cattle. COVID-19 can be an opportunity for the climate movement. The pandemic exposed the global ruling class’s inability to properly address an immediately deadly threat, leaving their ability to address a forthcoming even more deadly threat all that more unclear and unlikely.
As such, a return to the pre-COVID strategy of a single-front, completely peaceful climate change movement might not be enough. When we take a deeper look at some of the most successful social movements in history and look past the white sheen of peacefulness cast over them, we see an almost consistent feature. They were fought on multiple fronts, consisting of both peaceful and nonpeaceful means . From the suffragettes to the Civil Rights movement, from apartheid to LGBTQ+ rights, there was heterogeneity in the strategies for liberation. And why wouldn’t this be the case? When you’re fighting for your life and your right to liberty, a single-pronged attack most likely won’t get you to the finish-line, especially when the goal requires the changing of institutional power structures.
Unlike the social movements of the past, the climate movement has been (almost) entirely non-violent. It’s rather shocking how peaceful the climate movement has been given the threat on the horizon should the movement fail. Maybe it’s time for the climate movement to learn from the history of those who have come before it and reestablish a multi-pronged approach to liberation. In other words, I’m advocating for a re-examination of how exactly the climate movement plans to achieve its goals. When the system we are fighting is global in scale, and when the fight is for the lives of billions, adding additional prongs of the movement that focus on different, increasingly destructive means does not sound outrageous. Establishing more tactical, disruptive and destructive arms to the climate movement that target the actual means of polluting (e.g., blowing up gas pipelines and slashing the tires of SUVs) makes the asks and demands of non-violent climate activists appear more “reasonable.”
The argument has been made, however, that these more destructive measures are likely to simply result in personal consequences to the perpetrators, like being jailed, and political consequences for the movement writ large. Acknowledging these risks is necessary; however, to accept them as motivation against escalation would be akin to laying down and simply accepting the worst projections of planetary warming. The United States, one of the countries most historically responsible for our current warming trajectory, changes its commitments to meeting climate goals every 2-4 years with political administrative turnover. Expecting the standard political process to suddenly listen to the climate warnings that have been dire for decades is akin to waiting for hell to freeze over.
The current strategy has only brought us so far, and for every additional pipe put in the ground and every tree that comes tumbling down, we get further and further away from preventing the worst of climate change to befall us. If now is not the time to add on to the repertoire of tactics used by the climate movement, then when will be? Perhaps after the next pandemic.
The articles published on this site reflect the views of the individual authors only. They do not represent the views of the Environmental Clinic, The University of Texas School of Law, or The University of Texas at Austin.
