The city of Missoula is making a good faith effort to identify and mitigate the impacts of climate change but those "futurist" planners can only imagine scenarios that fall within their collective experience. Local drought affects local farmers and local politicians can devise policy "fixes" to help. But what happens if you try to imagine global drought and its geopoliticl effects? What if we envision a 2050 where governance has broken down, where local warlords control all economic activity? Where all the pollinators have been destroyed, where methane is boiling out of a melted perma-frost and there is no grain market or copper market or beef market? How does a local taskforce plan for that level of collapse?
Should they be planning to stockpile guns? Naomi Klein tried to warn us that "this changes everything" but local policy wonks operate in a well-worn framework using a standardized playbook. We are told "our house is on fire" so we gather "stakeholders" who meet regularly and come up with documents. These get explained to the public which then submits comments and a taskforce comes up with policy proposals. It is time to panic and yet that is not a mode civic leaders are keen to embrace.
And this is where the ambiguity, so disorienting for the general public, begins. On the one hand we are told it is an emergency and yet the activity to address it looks like any " agency planning process", a forest plan, a recreation plan, a subdivision proposal etc..The local techno-managerial types seem to see a path through and it hardly feels like a "crisis". Just enact some forward thinking policies and mitigate the identified problems! You're welcome!
Oh man I wish I had this as comment into into the Local Climate Vulnerabilities open house two weeks ago. It is going exactly along the format you describe. As were the SC / Fwd Mt / Climate Smart 100 percent clean energy forums -- more like a charette.
ReplyDeleteI and a few others did push the idea of "declare a climate and environmental emergency". --- We'll see.