Portsmouth 2030 – A City Transformed
At our launch night, Nick Sebley (from Extinction Rebellion) talked about the possibilities and challenges of transforming Portsmouth into a new city by 2030.
The way I see it, there are two interwoven methods to avoid the collective ruin we now face: ‘material’ change and ‘internal’ change.
Material change involves finding industrial, technological and structural alternatives to our carbon intensive society. What might this look like locally?
Well, as Portsmouth is entirely flat and only 3 miles wide by 3 miles long, promoting active travel would seem an obvious choice. Active travel means cycling and walking, and some of the ways to get the public to engage with it are through creating a network of segregated cycle paths that are truly safe, free cycle training in all schools, employee bike schemes, subsidized cargo bike hire, wider pavements and dedicated walking routes that are clearly marked and promoted.
At the same time, it would be necessary to disincentivize car use and offer instead an affordable (or free), reliable public transport system. That might involve workplace parking levies to fund better bus services and trams as Nottingham have done, congestion charges and vehicle scrappage schemes for the most polluting cars and grants to help drivers convert to electric vehicles. The benefits in public health would be significant and the reduced strain on the NHS would pay for these schemes over a decade or two. Extinction Rebellion have been accused of being extremists: but these proposals are the sober conclusions of the Parliamentary Select Committee for Transport.
The main barriers to these changes are implicatory denial about the peril we are in among the public and political class, and a lack of political leadership to puncture this denial. And this leads me to my next point: material changes need to facilitate internal change, and vice versa. What I mean by internal change is looking afresh at the way we relate to our bodies, our emotions, each other and the natural world.
We are born into a particular set of socio-economic conditions and humans are so adaptive that most of us accept these conditions as ‘just the way things are’- even when the evidence is that they are deeply harmful. Margaret Thatcher explicitly said ‘there is no alternative’, and she also said: ‘Economics are the method: the object is to change the soul’.
It would appear she has succeeded: materialism, consumerism and individualism are now at the heart of Western life, and this way of relating to nature and each other is taking root across the world. But in the same manner the ecological costs of capitalism are externalised into biodiversity loss, air pollution, poisoned rivers and contaminated / denatured soil, the emotional costs are displaced into an epidemic of mental health issues and loneliness, substance misuse, obesity, etc. We need to start joining the dots: climate change isn’t the problem, biodiversity loss isn’t the problem, loneliness isn’t the problem, teenage psychosis isn’t the problem, inequality isn’t the problem. These are all symptoms of the same core problem – which is industrialized capitalism as it is currently constituted.
Despite all the vast wealth that capitalism boasts about creating, it is still fundamentally powered by scarcity: fear of starvation, becoming destitute, having an unfulfilling job and poor housing etc. However even once we have escaped those fates, we don’t see consumption decrease: in fact, the richer and more financially secure someone is, the more they tend to consume and the more ecological damage they are implicated in … so what is going on? Thatcher was right: the economic circumstances we have been born into condition our psyche to find meaning, status, aliveness, and a sense of freedom in material wealth and consumption. And until we as a species find meaning, status, aliveness, and a sense of freedom in something else, it won’t matter how many bike lanes we have: we will be funding the same extractive and ecocidal model of relating to nature.
This is what is unique about Extinction Rebellion in terms of climate change movements: it wants to talk about how we relate to each other and the role of emotions in both our problems and the solutions. All right-wing politicians know this: if you want to motivate people, speak to their emotional brain. Let’s begin that conversation.