“The idea of ??ecological collapse has something of an unconscious neoliberal culture,” says Emilio Santiago Muíño (Ferrol, 1984), PhD in Social Anthropology from the Autonomous University of Madrid, researcher and ecosocial activist. Emilio Santiago has dissected with a scalpel that current of thought called collapsism in his essay “Against the myth of ecological collapse” (Arpa). In times of climate emergency there is no place for melancholy or inaction, says the author of the book “What to do in case of fire? Manifesto for the Green New Deal” (Captain Swing, 2019), co-written with Héctor Tejero. Currently, He is a tenured scientist at the Higher Council for Scientific Research, in the Department of Anthropology.Half an hour of conversation by phone allows him to summarize his latest essay-
Is your book a critique of a global catastrophic environmentalism?
Yes. My book is a critique of a current that is emerging within global environmentalism and participates in a debate that is taking place in many countries, not only in Spain. It is a critique of an evolution of global environmentalism towards positions of defeat, which are not only politically disastrous, but also lack a scientific basis.
Is the idea of ??an ecological crisis or the fact that a climate emergency has been declared are also signs of a catastrophic vision. Does this also cover your criticism?
Not at all. It must be admitted that the situation is critical, that the best scientific knowledge is going to assure us that the 21st century is going to be difficult and that the tests are going to be harsh. We are facing a crisis that endangers society as we know it. Reporting that is essential. I criticize giving the crisis the category of fait accompli, with all the implications that this has on very different levels.
But environmentalism has been warning of a world that may be uninhabitable.
This has been one of its fundamental tasks and I do not think that this work of raising awareness of the worst scenarios should be dispensed with; in no case. But it is important that environmentalism does not renounce the transforming vision that has always accompanied it as a political project. The book vindicates that transformative drive and documents those scientific bases. It does not seek a mere optimism of the will, but to say: ‘things are bad, but we have possibilities to do something’. There is a solution horizon that is within our reach.
What traits define what you call collapse? You speak of a return to a pre-industrial society, a return to the immediate and local, right?
It is a complex galaxy with different voices, but the fundamental feature is to give something called collapse the status of a fait accompli or a very probable event. To this is added a series of elements that have to do with technological evolution or political simplification. Collapse also has to do with a return to the rural world or to a pre-industrial society that somehow returns, although it will never be an exact return, to the anthropological parameters of pre-industrial societies. And all this is not raised in a long-term horizon, but is something that is already conditioning our historical situation in the present.
Is collapseism a current of thought different from environmentalism? Is it a new ideological galaxy or is it a state of mind?
They are both because I believe that there is no ideology without a state of mind, but this is not a criticism; It is simply noting that all ideologies are accompanied by a state of mind. Collapse is a type of environmentalism or a drift that has always been there; we have always had collapsing drives in environmentalism; I am thinking, for example, of the idea of ??the demographic bomb from the 1970s, which already indicated some of the features. But as the ecological crisis has become more serious, and it seems that we have not taken a coherent solution path, collapsism has been gaining weight within environmentalism.
Is collapseism on the rise?
There are more and more authors who are betting on a discourse that we define as collapsing, regardless of whether the label may be another, but I am thinking, for example, of the collapsology of Pablo Servigne and Raphael Stevens. They are people who are putting together their entire theoretical apparatus and their entire ideology, putting collapse at their center of gravity. I am thinking of Roy Scranton’s book “Learning to die in the Anthropocene”, or in the deep adaptation movement, or, in our country, in the most anarchist aspects that understand that the State is going to become dysfunctional because it is going to collapse. the modern order and we have to build from communities and small margins.
Part of the collapse was based on the theory of peak oil and the end of cheap oil, but this forecast is not fulfilled…
As a personal biographical element this is basic. I grew up in the collapse that made the thesis of peak oil its horizon of political hypothesis. At first it seems that it gives you the key to explain all the movement in the world: the increase in energy prices in the first decade of the 2000s, the war in Iraq, the crisis of 2008, a crisis from which we thought we would never emerge. . But by 2017 or 2016 it was evident that economic growth had returned and that unconventional oils (fracking) seem to replace conventional oils. That made me doubt the hypotheses we were handling; I read more and realized that many of the authors who had helped to consolidate the idea of ??Peak Oil in the 2000s were qualifying their positions, such as Hugo Bardi or Mariano Marzo, saying that it is evident that we are facing energy yield problems decreasing, but it seems that this is not going to compromise, at least in the short to medium term, the economic viability of the modern world, although what it is going to do is aggravate the climate issue. The exploitation of unconventional oils is changing the focus of concern from energy to climate. They are two different foci and I think they have different implications. From the focus of climate impact we can still think of a transition horizon through systems such as renewables or degrowth, while a horizon of a hard energy shock leads us to a collapse of the modern order as we know it.
But from these collapsing sectors, furious criticism of renewables is launched, considering that they are not going to be the one hundred percent definitive solution and, since they involve so much depletion of these natural resources, they despise them. But the first recipe of any IPCC report is that renewables are part of the solution, although more pieces are needed to complete the puzzle.
It is clear that the debate on renewables is not scientifically closed in terms of the power they can give us. There are many positions and the positions of the researchers who have worked on it the most vary in an immense range. There are those who say that we can still increase our energy consumption to those who say that we will have to reduce it enormously. We therefore have a certain uncertainty, which the most collapsing discourses do not contemplate. There is another collapsing approach to renewables that has to do with what type of society model we aspire to build with renewables. We have mineral resource limits, the collapse indicates this very well, but those limits are going to be very different if we bet on electric cars or public transport, because the demands for minerals change radically.
So your position…
My position is clear. In global terms, renewables are clearly positive because even in terms of their incidence on biodiversity, it must be said that there is no greater effect on biodiversity than climate change. We know it and the IPCC affirms it. If we want to stop the increase in temperature at 1.5ºC, we have to undertake a massive energy substitution process that is historic and rapid.
But they have impacts…
It is true that renewable energy has local impacts, especially if it is done badly, and the truth is that it is being done badly. It is being done wrong because we have an economic system, capitalism, that facilitates processes that have to do with the abuse of the weakest territories, with the primacy of profit and has many difficulties in planning. Renewable, yes, of course, they cannot be stopped, as they are one of our salvation tables; but we have to make a huge effort as a society so that the implementation is fair.
You say that collapse is an environmentalism without rebellion.
Collapse has a problem thinking about political transitions. Environmentalism, and this goes far beyond collapse, has a deficit in answering questions about how. We know what we want to do and why we want to do it; but the question of how this social change should be has a poor answer. Ecologism is a child of the emancipatory project, like the labor movement, feminism, the struggles for decolonization; and the basic premise was to be aware that we can be protagonists of great transformations. When someone considers the collapse as a fait accompli, despite the fact that we have room for maneuver to operate, what is done is to desert that emancipatory project; They are losing the backbone of a project like environmentalism and surely this has a lot to do with neoliberal culture. In the end, I believe that there is also some unconscious neoliberal culture in the collapsing discourses.
The Extinction Rebellion movement and others close to it protest their actions and claim that governments must act based on scientific knowledge.
I think that in Extinction Rebellion there will be more or less collapsing people. It is probably a movement that finds collapsing discourses inspiring, but I would not dare to classify it that way. What I do believe is that Extinction Rebellion is the quintessence in some aspects of something that comes from environmentalism in general, and it is not even a problem of collapse, and it is that belief in the political effect of the truth. In fact, the first demand of the Extinction Rebellion manifesto is that governments tell the truth. I have the utmost respect for the actions they carry out, I participated in some actions of Rebellion Científica and I think they are an actor that is helping to favor the transition. But that hope in the political effect of the truth is highly problematic. This is a feature of environmentalism in general and I would almost dare to say of a certain hyperrational thought on the left because this same criticism is also valid for Marxism. The truth never has a single political effect, it can inspire different interpretations and, furthermore, the truth never has an explosive effect, as if its mere enunciation allowed everything to be changed, because there are always inertias, there are power structures, struggles and all of this is done much more. complex then. I believe that environmentalism in general and collapsism in particular have a pending account with the question of truth. -The truth admits many interpretations, it can lead to ecofascism. The dispute at the end is not about the data, it is a moral dispute, and that is one of the central elements of the book. It is not that there is a lack of information; we need the best information, but above all we need a moral horizon and identity, a fight for a better society.
But catastrophism has made its way into the media, the fascination with catastrophe clicks and lays the rug for lone wolves, as you say, who wage their media war on their own and have found a springboard for fame; at least if they have not achieved collective success, their own personal success. No?
The speeches of the catastrophe have a lot of niche. We are a society educated in catastrophe. All films have mainstream arguments when they raise environmental issues and, furthermore, unfortunately we are a very resigned and very cynical society.
The environment only inspires dystopias, catastrophes and an apocalyptic future, it’s as if all filmmakers suffered from the same contamination… Why not inspire something different?
It is the climate of our time. Our age has lost perspective on the future; This, in part, is due to the ecological crisis that paints the future, which is objectively very difficult, but it also has to do with the political defeat of the most transformative projects of the 20th century.
Some people are stunned watching the end of the Sumerian civilization.
There is a fascination with disaster; that is part of our deepest cultural imaginaries. All this has to do, and that is the thesis of the book, with the deactivation of politics as a tool for social transformation. We are a society that deeply disbelieves in politics and when you no longer believe in it and you see that things are going wrong, you think that the logical thing to do on a mental level is to place yourself in disaster. A disaster that also always has that neoliberal component is assuming that it is a challenge to your survival. It is that dark element of “survivalism”, which is like a collapse taken to the extreme; Luckily, it has almost no pull in Spain, but in other countries, such as the United States, it does.
A collapse that will not be the same for everyone…
The experiences of the collapse are going to be uneven and in many cases the State is going to be capable of managing the situation many times; another thing is that it will be bad. I believe that there are many more possibilities that we will go towards a more unequal society, more authoritarian and with degraded living conditions. But that’s not exactly a collapse. And it is not a terminological debate, because it has political implications. If you take collapse as a fait accompli, you deny the State and renounce the idea of ??governing to transform society; you are incapable of imagining being power. And we have to be able to imagine ourselves being in power.
Do the solutions have to do with degrowth?
I believe that degrowth is a good and necessary idea, but it lacks maturity. We have to move towards an economy that reduces its material sphere in some aspects, that is without a doubt. We are exceeding many planetary limits and we need an economy that decouples prosperity from capital accumulation, that is, from private business profits that are reinvested; and, furthermore, to break that kind of fallacy, between happiness and consumer society. Having said that, the big question is how we do it and at this point, from our positions, we also discuss degrowth approaches in the most conventional environmentalism and we make a post-growth bet. What does this mean? That, instead of going for the whole; that is, to a kind of decrease that would require a total takeover of the means of production and planning that seems enormously complex at the political level, betting on decreasing in specific sectors, which, in addition, allows us to have broad political alliances so that it can be real, so that the decline does not remain in the literature of essay books.
Anything else?
In addition, it is essential to introduce a climate mandate in central banks. Beyond price controls, which is the ECB’s economic mandate, it must include full employment, decarbonization and moving towards the energy transition at full speed; we need a truly circular economy that allows us to recycle those critical materials on which the energy transition depends; we need agroecology… In other words, we are on the threshold of a huge number of transformations that are possible, which are similar to other transformations that have happened in the past. And what our generation has to do is assume that this is possible and that this is the challenge.
He says in his book that the idea of ??collapse demotivates, does not excite, instills terror and also generates eco-anxiety. It is a whole catalog of demotivation.
Yes, especially if it is done in large doses; I think that in small doses a touch of catastrophism can go well; but in large doses it leads to resignation. There is a study that I cite in the book and that I was fascinated by referring to the movement of Peak Oil in the United States in which they confirm two impressive elements: the first is that most of the people who began to move in those circles chose to individual outputs; up to a quarter of the participants moved house due to the oil peak; something that seems to me like an incredible fact; but very few people organized politically. The other interesting fact of this study is that, although ideologically at the beginning there was a more left-wing sensibility, over time it drifted towards a kind of anti-politics and criticism of the great state. All of this may have a lot to do with the particular political culture of the United States; but each country has its political culture. What is relevant is that when your framework of interpretation of the world denies the ability of politics to intervene, it is normal to end up falling into individual solutions, resignation or cynicism.
In his book he praises the contributions made by the environmental movement, the green forces and I myself think that for Spain the contribution of European legislation promoted by the greens has been fundamental. But in Spain we don’t have an environmentalist party…
Well, we have tried to make Más Madrid an approved environmentalist party, we have an alliance with the Greens in Europe, and Equo is included in our parliamentary forces. And within our party, characters like Héctor Tejero or myself are trying to push for the party to be a green space party; another thing is that we are getting it. For many reasons, Spain has not been able to establish an autonomous political green space: one would have to understand the history of Spanish environmentalism and why it has been like this. I think we have had a Socialist Party that has been very intelligent and very sensitive, understanding the changes that were going to take place, incorporating those government programs and there we have a minister like Teresa Ribera, whom I recognize as a very good job. For many historical reasons, it is true that a massive green space has not been able to materialize in southern Europe such as Austria, Germany or Sweden, it is something that has not only happened in Spain.
Was Marxism also a collapse?
A part of Marxism yes. Marxism is an enormously complex corpus; surely there has not been a more complex and richer intellectual movement in the last 200 years; but there is a part that was clearly collapsing. One of the things that caught my attention the most when investigating the issue of collapse is the parallelism. I come from living it, and once I have doubts, I start to investigate what its intellectual DNA is, so to speak. And one of the things that impressed me the most are the parallels between the Marxist collapse of 100 years ago and the ecological collapse of the 21st century. They are traced, they are traced; It is impressive and that gave me clues to think that it is not a matter of opinions, but that there are structures in very strong ideas that in some contexts lead political movements to collapse positions. You read the debates on the collapse of capitalism before the First World War, you change a few words and you have the debates of today. Is awesome.