Vijay Kolinjivadi and Aaron Vansintjan want a world where "sustainability" isn't meaningless

Vijay Kolinjivadi and Aaron Vansintjan want a world where "sustainability" isn't meaningless

Vijay Kolinjivadi is an assistant professor at the School for Community and Public Affairs, Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. He is also a co-editor of the website Uneven Earth. The co-author, with Aaron Vansintjan, of The Sustainability Class (The New Press), he has been published in Al Jazeera, New Internationalist, Truthout, and The Conversation. He lives in Montreal.Aaron Vansintjan is the founder and co-editor of Uneven Earth and co-author of The Future Is Degrowth. He has been published in The Guardian, Truthout, openDemocracy, and The Ecologist. The co-author, with Vijay Kolinjivadi, of The Sustainability Class (The New Press), he lives in Montreal. The Sustainability Class is about those wealthy “progressive” urbanites convinced that we can save the planet through individual action, smart urbanism, green finance, and technological innovation. Kolinjivadi and Vansintjan challenge many of the popular ideas about environmentalism, showing that it is actually the sustainability class itself that is unsustainable. The solutions they propose work to safeguard an elite minority, exclude billions of people, and ultimately hasten ecological breakdown, not reverse it. A sustainability apartheid is emerging. More than ever, urban residents want to be green, yet to cater to their interests, a green-tech service economy has sprung up, co-opting well-intentioned concerns over sustainability to sell a resource-heavy and exclusive “lifestyle environmentalism.” This has made cities more unsustainable and inaccessible to the working class.#sustainability [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/sustainability] #cooptation [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/cooptation] #greencities [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/greencities] #lifestyleenvironmentalism [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/lifestyleenvironmentalism] #lifestyle [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/lifestyle] #climateaction [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/climateaction] #radicalpolitics [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/radicalpolitics] #anticapitalism [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/anticapitalism] #anticonsumerism [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/anticonsumerism] #ecosocialism [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/ecosocialism] #solidarityisaverb [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/solidarityisaverb]

Arang Keshavarzian examines the politics of modern Iran and devises an escape from perpetual war

Arang Keshavarzian is Professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University. He’s one of the most shrewd thinkers you’ll see on the politics of modern Iran and the Persian Gulf because he pays serious attention to how social and economic hierarchies constrain the formation of political solidarity. His most recent book is Making Space for the Gulf: Histories of Regionalism and the Middle East. That text studies the history of the Persian Gulf both in terms of the politics of its naming, and the politics of geography. This idea, that geography is political, stands at the centre of our conversation here. With the world’s publics, news outlets and governments hyper-focused on the Strait of Hormuz, Keshavarzian is focused on helping others grasp the fact that while the strait is currently a chokepoint, it has historically been a gateway. What if international relations could be revolutionized to protect the strait with something other than drones and bombs? The weapon of multilateralism is underused, but Keshavarzian believes that it might be the most powerful way to open up new pathways to environmental protection, social vibrancy and a more inclusive model of prosperity. In his article “Iran Transformed,” he historicizes the rise of austerity economics and politics in Iran, and the ways that this funneled wealth to a ruling elite in a country already beset by sanctions and isolation. This shift to privatization and monopoly capitalism “entrenched and empowered” the ruling class “by halting the economic redistribution that had been underway prior to 2012.” Iran’s support for Palestinian liberation is a key focus here, too, as it has in many ways defined its relationships with other states in the region, especially the genocidal regime in Israel. Fundamentally, though, the interview gravitates to the question of orientalism and Islamophobia, and its geopolitical consequences. Keshavarzian insists that “depictions of the region” present it as “peripheral to world history, an endemic zone of conflict, an energy depot for expanding industrial capitalism elsewhere, or a bastion of traditional tribalism and petro-monarchies.” The world, though, is beginning to realize that it the so-called “Middle East” is a fulcrum of global politics, and a part of the Earth that much of the planet is still reliant upon, and not just for fossil energy.#straitofhormuz [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/straitofhormuz] #oilshock [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/oilshock] #economiccrisis [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/economiccrisis] #globalrecession [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/globalrecession] #iran [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/iran] #iranpolitics [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/iranpolitics] #iranianrevolution [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/iranianrevolution] #persiangulf [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/persiangulf] #anticolonialism [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/anticolonialism] #palestine [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/palestine] #freepalestine [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/freepalestine] #israel [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/israel] #uspolicy [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/uspolicy] #usforeignpolicy [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/usforeignpolicy] #neoliberalism [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/neoliberalism] #waroniran [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/waroniran] #freeiran [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/freeiran] #islamophobia [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/islamophobia] #orientalism [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/orientalism] #revolution [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/revolution]

Aaron Hagey-MacKay opines on satire as sensemaking, and scenarios where we 'bend but don't break'

Aaron Hagey-MacKay is a Canadian satirist as a longtime writer for The Beaverton and host of ‪The Goose Media on YouTube. In a piece for The Tyee, Aaron writes that "satirists, like journalists and academics, are targeted by authoritarian bullies because satire deals with hard truths." In this conversation, he insists that, while he's not a journalist, he's invested in satire as an "anti-dominant strategy" that allows folks who care about the people and the public to "bully up," assailng the coldness and rabid individualism that have become fixtures of the Second Gilded Age. He doesn't believe that climate communicators have fully internalized the fact that we respond more to messages of affordability and generosity than stories of loss and pain -- though, he acknowledges that miserable stories of collapse and catastrophe have a way of capturing our attention. This is why he wants to tell stories where we "bend, but don't break," using humour and humility to poke holes in the absurd myopia of our chaotic moment. We've seen campaigns against more comfortable, livable ways of being from powerful interests. Forms of narrative capture that condemn us to fossil fuel dependency. That means we need more outlets like The Goose and more communicators like Hagey-MacKay, who understand that if we can make clean energy a wise choice and address people's genuine anxiety, we can radically and rapidly make climate action unremarkable and everyday. #climateaction [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/climateaction] #climatechange [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/climatechange] #climatecrisis [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/climatecrisis] #environment [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/environment] #climate [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/climate] #climatejustice [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/climatejustice] #globalwarming [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/globalwarming] #climateemergency [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/climateemergency] #affordability [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/affordability] #climateactionnow [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/climateactionnow] #renewableenergy [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/renewableenergy] #environmentalist [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/environmentalist] #cleanenergy [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/cleanenergy] #ecology [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/ecology] #environmentaljustice [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/environmentaljustice] #greenenergy [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/greenenergy] #satire [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/satire] #humour [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/humour] #comedy [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/comedy]

Ava Val believes in comedy as a source of joy, site of community and weapon against cynicism

Ava Val is a John Candy Award-winning comedian/musician/actress from Toronto. Her honest and insightful-yet-silly and spontaneous account of her transgender journey has turned heads across North America, earning her repeat appearances at renowned festivals including Just For Laughs, JFL Toronto and Vancouver, Off-JFL/Zoofest, and the Winnipeg, Halifax, and Arctic Comedy Festivals, among others. Val's talents also earned her a writing role on the 30th season of This Hour Has 22 Minutes, a spot on season four of Roast Battle Canada, and an indelible appearance on Canada’s Got Talent. She is the first trans person to achieve several of these credits. In addition to her numerous taped standup performances for CBC Gem, CraveTV, CTV, and CBC Radio’s Laugh Out Loud, she also has a new standup comedy special “So Brave” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gKN_4pBKGt8 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gKN_4pBKGt8]), hosts the podcast “PodGis”, and was a lead cast member in season 3 of OutTV’s Drag Heals. In this conversation, we discuss what makes comedy such a potent form of resistance to hatred, how it exposes and embarrasses the ignorance of the far right, and why transphobia is closeminded, normative bullshit rooted in an effort to safeguard a violently narrow notion of what constitutes being "at peace" with oneself.

Wim Carton dissects the gore, gaslighting and chaotic consequences of fossil capitalism

Wim Carton is Associate Professor of Sustainability Science at Lund University, Sweden. He's the author of over 20 academic articles and book chapters on climate politics. His work has appeared in top journals such as Nature Climate Change, WIRES Climate Change and Antipode. His book with Andreas Malm, The Long Heat: Climate Action When It's Too Late, is a study of the science and politics of geoengineering, carbon capture and "muscular" climate adaptation. The book offers what Wim calls an "event ethnography" of the people and organizations adopting tactics to fix the climate crisis, and the ways they end up fixing the status quo of climate breakdown through capitalist accumulation firmly in place. Carton and Malm learned in their research that functionaries are "very aware of the flaws and the problems" with their approach, but can't or won't abandon the assumption that the "solutions they've always believed in" will succeed, despite so much evidence that markets, private capital and the pursuit of profit are leading us into the slow violence of escalating disaster. One of the core problems is technological optimism, or the dangerous persistence of a mechanistic worldview when it comes to the way the world works. Regardless of how necessary it will be to build resilience as we hurtle into the long heat, faith in climate adaptation is strengthening as the resolve for addressing the drivers of climate change weakens. We can't allow adaptation to "substitute for dealing with the real problem." In this moment, too, we see the emergence of technologies like carbon capture and storage or geoengineering replacing and displacing the push for mitigation. Carton talks about the dark side of these technologies as forms of "reputation management" that enable further investment in fossil fuel infrastructure. The planet doesn't care if we ignore its limits. If we create an entirely new climate, we are playing with fire. Allowing the ruling classes to "look away from the suffering that is being rained down, literally, on people in Gaza, Iran and much of the Global South" will only deepen the coldness that characterizes our current age. In opposition, we need a revolutionary alternative that holds power to account, to rage against the deadly incrementalism that defers action and renders the future unlivable. In Wim's words, crises always expose "cracks in the system," and right now, in the context of an imperial war sowing chaos in the site of some of the most rapacious fossil fuel extraction, the "obvious solution is to go full-on renewable and reduce dependence" on this toxic sludge. #juststopoil #endfossilfuels #phaseout #fossilphaseout #ccus #geoengineering #climateadaptation #technologicaloptimism #technology #capitalism #endtimes #climatebreakdown #fossilcapital #climateaction #thelongheat ⁨