“The Path to a Livable Future: A New Politics to Fight Climate Change, Racism, and the Next Pandemic” (City Lights Books) promises a lot in its title. I’m still not sure exactly what it delivered. Author Stan Cox explains how social justice must encompass not just the eradication of racism and restorative justice for those it has harmed, but also comprehensive changes to public health and a multilayered reduction in consumption to try to reduce the worst potential impacts of climate change. The second half of the book gets deep into policy solutions and ideas for how to balance these intertwined needs. But just getting to that second half was a challenge.
It didn’t have to be this way. The book features a foreword by YES! Magazine executive editor zenobia jeffries warfield that makes the work ahead of us seem less like a painful emergency surgery and more like work to dive into with gusto and pride. Reading her words got me out of fearful thinking and excited to put forth some effort; I was mentally rolling up my sleeves, and brainstorming where I might best be put to use in this new economy. That’s an extremely valuable message to receive when times are as dire as they are now.
When Cox takes over, he hints at the solutions that he recommends, including a movement toward “degrowth,” reversing capitalism’s destructive production-consumption-profit cycle by doing less and making do with less. He goes on to explain at length the reasons why this is necessary, in frank, disturbing detail. The impacts of environmental degradation on poor communities of color are just one prong on the fork. The physical and psychological damage wrought by police brutality and the grueling labor by underpaid “essential workers” living in super-spreader conditions during a pandemic, are all things we can and should approach with more care and concern.
There’s nothing here to disagree with; it’s incumbent on all of us to live with the lightest impact possible on the world, and with care for those around us, to simply ensure our survival at this point. What troubles me about this “Path,” as Cox lays it out, is his tendency to pile up the negative data so steeply, I began to succumb to apathy before the suggestions started popping up. That’s rare; I am solutions-oriented and understand that without taking the measure of a challenge, it becomes very hard to tackle. But reading this I began to feel that not only was finding enough manpower to turn the ship around going to be nearly impossible, the despair was so acute that looking for distraction, any distraction, repeatedly pulled me away from the text.
The urgency with which Cox approaches this work is entirely appropriate, and its far-reaching approach is needed. In the introduction, he describes the “job creation” language associated with the Green New Deal as perpetuating unsustainable growth and goes on to make a bold suggestion, writing, “The path to a livable future now involves not just reforming our unjust system, or budgeting a little more here and there to ‘underserved’ communities, but abolishing marginalization itself.” This made me hungry to hear more, and alert for ways to help. But the punishing quality of his description of how ruined everything is does not have enough counter-weight in the form of practical suggestions to inspire hope. Admittedly, most of this will have to come in the form of sweeping policy changes, but he uses language like “toothless” to describe the fruit of significant labor by activists so far. If nothing we do (or stop doing, for that matter) will ever be good enough, how will you build a coalition to organize around and actually enact the work?
In a speech he gave in June of 1977, Harvey MIlk made a case for his election to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. It ranged over a variety of topics relevant to city politics of the day, and the burgeoning gay liberation movement, and late in the speech he said, “A gay person in office ... can command respect not only from that larger community, but from young people in our own community, who need both examples and … hope.” I want nothing more than to feel like, at this moment, I am helping to clear trailways for the path to a livable future, but to do that I need examples to follow, and also hope. This book offers ideas that policy makers should study and enact, without question. But I was hoping to read something that inspired me to find my own place in that work; instead I was left wondering if we’re not already too late.
Heather Seggel is a writer living in Northern California.
From The Progressive Populist, November 15, 2021
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