Monthly Archives: September 2021

For Scottish independence

This essay was short-listed in the 2021 ‘YESsay’ competition run by the National on Sunday newspaper (the winning entry is here). It sought to answer the question ‘Why should Scotland be independent?’, with the aim of informing and swaying undecided voters in the direction of voting ‘yes’ in the next referendum on the subject. The Green-SNP alliance Scottish Government is seeking such a referendum by the end of 2023. This would be the second, the first being in 2014 when the real question was ‘should Scotland leave the EU as well as the UK?’ Now the issue is whether Scotland should leave the UK in order to be free to rejoin the EU, which is a very different matter. The text of my entry follows.

Independence means having the freedom as a country to decide what to do, and to take responsibility for the benefits and costs of doing it. Contemplating independence, it is natural to ask what one’s country could do with its freedom. In Scotland’s case, competing visions might include: re-joining the EU and being able to trade and travel more easily, participate in European affairs more fully, and promote climate emergency responses more effectively; or else, being impoverished by the withdrawal of English funding, and becoming vulnerable to capital flight.

Many other scenarios are possible, but before a decision on independence is made they will all be speculative. For instance, neither the terms by which Scotland and England would part ways, nor the terms on which Scotland would re-enter the EU (or even whether it would apply to do so), can have been agreed bindingly before the vote. The most anyone can do is to promise to try to achieve certain outcomes if conditions allow, and if they remain desirable.

But circumstances constrain probabilities so, for example, Scotland is very unlikely to be able to re-join the EU in the next decade or so without independence. As a ‘Brexit migrant’ from England, one of my dreams is to obtain a Scottish EU passport before my British EU passport expires in 2026, and this affects how I think about independence. Considering the general catastrophe of Brexit, many Scots will have a similar ambition.

Such simple hopes may help to guide us through a turbulent campaign, in which narratives will proliferate as the vote approaches. Potential voters will seek as much clarity as they can get on what the various parties intend, and from whatever calculations of risk, opportunity and probability have been done by credible analysts. Here the problem, as with Brexit, is that a tsunami of contradictory promises, analyses and lies will overwhelm everyone’s ability to sort fact from fiction.

Then, on the day, people will vote according to their gut feelings, and these are only partly determined by reason and certainty. Even the 2014 independence campaign is a poor guide, since back then the choice was about whether or not to leave a stable EU member state, but now, depending crucially on how you look at it, the choice is whether or not to leave either a ‘sinking ship’ or a ‘reborn UK’.

This leaves us with the quest for independence itself, which here and now concerns only the desire for a degree of national freedom greater than that possessed by Scotland as a semi-autonomous region of the UK. This essay therefore targets desire, by highlighting some inherent benefits of achieving independence. These are based on my understanding of transformative events that result in greater collective freedom, and also the specific circumstances of Scotland’s quest for independence.

Thus, one benefit would be that for the first time in our lives we’ll be free to think about what we want to do. So ‘a young black girl’ said to Herbert Marcuse (in An Essay on Liberation, Allen Lane, 1969), in answer to the question of what newly-free people would actually do. Her reply implies that until you are free, and responsible, you can’t think freely or choose your way, or even really know what being free means.

Responsibility for yourself and others is hard, but so is life and growth. We seek freedom even if we’re afraid, because we must. There are many ways to feel more or less free, but there is nothing like freedom itself. And it always involves other questions: free from what, free for what, and with what compromises? But freedom is not about an absence of compromises. It’s about deciding what to do and what to accept.

In any case, there are at least three other inherent benefits to independence in current circumstances. The first is that breakup of the UK now seems necessary and inevitable. Union had advantages in the past, for many stakeholders and for a long time, but the mutual advantages have shrunk with the UK’s global role. Moreover, the direction of travel of England’s dominant culture is diverging from Scotland’s, and from those of the core nations of the EU.

Brexit changed everything, and England has a Brexiter government that is promoting and weaponising myths of owner-class entitlement and national exceptionalism. It is encouraging and enabling the most selfish and least cooperative elements, thus polarising English society. And polarisation is what destroys democracies by eroding the shared visions and values upon which they depend. Thus, whatever the speculative risks of independence, there is the real risk of being tied to a country that is sliding towards breakdown and extremism.

This brings me to the second factor, that England could benefit from being hit on the nose with a two by four. The shock of Scottish independence might help the English to retreat from the brink of the dumb, femicidal, piratical and isolationist values of Henry Tudor and Donald Trump. Most English have not yet fallen to the Dark Side, and they could still be energised by something that really drives home the enormity of the danger they’re in. We should remember that it was the shock of defeat in the Falklands/Malvinas campaign that broke the power of Argentinian fascism in the 1980s. Saving England by leaving the Union could be the only path that leads to sharing the whole archipelago with benign partner countries.

But timing is key. As Martin Luther King wrote in his last book, Chaos or Community? (Penguin, 1969), “In this unfolding conundrum of life and history there is such a thing as being too late.” And he stresses this again later: “Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words: ‘Too late.’” For Scottish independence, this probably implies the sooner the better.

Timing is also and doubly relevant to the third factor, that the breakdown of global climate and ecology will kill us all in a few years without massive and sustained change. The human future is now bounded by catastrophic mid-century uncertainty. To survive means building a sustainable, inclusive, equitable economy with peace rather than war with nature at its heart, sustained by trade and communion with like-minded societies.

This requires people to understand ecology and to be responsible and accountable for their own decisions on land tenure and environmental management. It also requires systematic investment and public mobilisation in decarbonisation and new forms of social venture, business, technology and industry. All of this will be very hard to do without a high degree of local autonomy, and impossible for a subject people against resistance by a conservative, uncooperative, or hostile hegemon. Thus, from the point of view of helping to save the world, Scotland must be free in order to lead.

So there are ‘freedom from’ and ‘freedom for’ aspects to this, as there always are with freedom. But there are also more subtle positives. Imagine Scotland as a complex system. As I explain in my book Surviving Climate Chaos (Cambridge, 2021), all systems behave according to the nature of the entities within them and the relationships among those entities. In any country, these entities and relationships are shaped in deep time by geology and evolutionary biology, and in recent time by ecology, land use, language, myths and values.

All contribute to the froth of the immediate culture, which is stirred by currents from the depths and by breezes from near and far. Amongst the bubbles are determinants of hope and fear, desolation and purpose, colonies of energy and idea that shape everyone’s life experience. Sometimes a malign spore settles and grows, to infect part of the froth with a dark meme, ones like: you have NO purpose, so why not have a drink or shoot up? That one comes from the drug dealers. Or else: you HAVE a purpose, and it’s to grab and defend your own personal property in competition with everyone else, at any cost to them, and only if you fail will you be truly worthless! That one’s from capitalism.

Healthy systems have immunity to these parasitic memes, which aim to create vulnerability by fomenting purposelessness, or by distorting values so that the individual can never be fulfilled. Unconstrained, their effect is like one of those Cordyceps fungi in Merlin Sheldrake’s book Entangled Life (Bodley Head, 2020), that get into the brains of ants and make them climb high before dying to scatter spores on other ants below.

There are many places where peoples have died from the shock of contact with new cultures and dispiriting memes – the Americas and Australia are full of them – but we often forget the victims of the past in the dazzle of the present. More moving is to see a society that is withering under attack by squirming multitudes of parasites, the last old people bewildered and alone amidst new values and incomprehensible languages. Hundreds of cultures have died like this in my lifetime, and hundreds more, from the Highlands to the Amazon, are casualties in the annals of anthropology.

But here and there are societies that have survived. The Iban and Kelabit of Malaysian Borneo, the Balinese of Indonesia, and others, seem to manage by rooting themselves in themselves and the life-energy of their homelands, holding some core sense of identity close and having the confidence to use outsiders for their own purposes. And then there are those, like the Makushi of Guyana, the Zoque of Mexico and the Welsh, Basques and Catalans, who have managed to rebuild a sense of place and identity, where the infection has been halted, the language saved, solidarity and belonging re-established, and despair banished.

Part of it is blind luck, but luck without determination and cleverness is not enough. The Zoque, for example, started by bribing conquistadores with gold and were lucky enough to find one who left them alone in return. They kept on paying gold with the same purpose to successive governments, through independence from Spain and the Mexican revolution, until modern land surveyors mapped their ‘Chimalapas’ homeland as a community territory, the largest in Mexico. They also welcomed Amerindian genocide survivors, who were given land, adopted as Zoque, and helped to defend the area.

This worked for several hundred years, showing the value of creativity in seeking what’s really important: land tenure and a sense of identity, belonging, and a long-term purpose that means something. All of this is relevant to Scotland, which has striven to find its way back from a complex and damaging past as a vibrant, viable and renewed country. It is now easy to imagine Scotland as a green, healthy, creative and sociable nation with English and Gaelic as official languages, and maybe Doric and Scots too.

Which brings me to the last reason why I would vote for independence: that Scots are lucky enough to have the chance to be free. Many peoples never had this chance. Seizing the opportunity is important because people need hope and/or purpose or we get depressed and give up. We can do without one of them but not both: one or other will prevent feelings of desolation, and the degradation of self-harm. Being responsible for a local, familiar ecosystem and local, familiar people is an excellent way to nurture feelings of purpose. The sense of security from being surrounded by healthy ecosystems and trusted acquaintances is an excellent way to nurture feelings of hope.

Freedom and responsibility are gateways to these sources of hope and purpose for everyone. Scotland needs freedom for Scots to be hopeful and purposeful. And the world needs hopeful, purposeful Scots if it is ever to be free of injustice and humanity’s failed war with nature.

So, there are many useful things to do whatever the outcome of a vote on independence, and there are risks and opportunities in any course of action. But choosing independence would have the following inherent benefits:

achieving freedom itself, and the responsibilities that come with it;
reducing political risk, by leaving an England that is on a dangerous path;
shocking England back to sanity, by leaving the Union after Brexit;
helping to save the world, through wise social and environmental policies;
building hope and purpose among the peoples of Scotland; and
taking advantage of good fortune and the opportunity to be free.

Surviving Climate Chaos published

Surviving Climate Chaos is being published into a new world of lethal fires, floods and record-breaking temperatures, as well as frantic international negotiations before CoP 26 in Glasgow. This is while the IPCC warns us that we are in the last decade before Arctic, oceanic and equatorial tipping points take all choices out of human hands. This emergency calls for far greater focus and impact in our climate change response, and for the strengthening of communities and ecosystems everywhere against climate chaos.

Julian Caldecott’s new book, Surviving Climate Chaos by Strengthening Communities and Ecosystems, is published by Cambridge University Press. See my author page, and book blogs: fierce chaos and tipping points; death spirals and deadlines; the ambition to survive; chaos, strength and community, and others to follow.

Abstract. “Surviving climate chaos requires communities and ecosystems strong enough to cope with the near-random local impacts of climate change. Their strength depends upon resilience, resistance and flexibility, three consequences of system integrity. Preserving and restoring the integrity of communities and ecosystems is needed everywhere, and quickly since active Arctic, equatorial and oceanic tipping points threaten total climate breakdown. This might be postponed by extreme efforts to conserve carbon-dense ecosystems, decarbonise economic systems, and recapture GHGs, but climate chaos everywhere is now inevitable. Adaptation efforts by 158 Paris Agreement Parties reported since 2015 are converging on community-based and ecosystem-based strategies. Case studies in Bolivia, Nepal and Tanzania confirm that these are correct strategies for surviving climate chaos, where success depends upon local empowerment through forums, ecosystem tenure security and environmental education. This approach, when replicated, networked and shielded by governments, offers the best way to strengthen societies against climate chaos while achieving the SDGs. Its usefulness is highlighted for national and local government officials and aid professionals with key roles in promoting adaptation, for students, researchers and teachers, and for all people who live under threat of climate chaos.”

Some highlights from the text:

On culture. From cases such as Hawaii (1778-1898), Iceland (1000-1262), the Holy Roman Empire (800-1806), Ancient Rome, the EU and Brexit: “Consistent differences between cultural zones in the enthusiasm of their peoples for complying with externally-agreed standards of behaviour may be legacies of deep historical experience. This is all relevant to aid programming, since it implies that taking the time and making the effort to build and educate in the context of the local culture, and creating the space for local people to find their own answers at their own pace, may well yield more robust and durable solutions than programming against imposed deadlines can possibly achieve.” (pages 79-80).
On leadership. “A particular risk arises where important environmental and social signals cannot be appreciated without a great deal of knowledge and attention to detail, so they are recognised only by a small minority. This applies often in large, complex or fragmented societies in which there are many distractions, and especially where slowly deteriorating environmental conditions are involved, or where there are slowly growing social threats such as inequality, corruption and polarisation. Here, if the danger is severe and solutions are needed urgently but there is little public appreciation of the need for action, an essential quality of leadership is a willingness to act decisively to safeguard the group but in advance of public opinion. An accountable leader must then explain what happened in the emergency and why, and be willing to accept responsibility for all the consequences. A good leader must at least be competent, attentive, intelligent, articulate and flexible, but all candidates for leadership are likely to claim all these attributes, so the choice will be up to the electorate. The latter might be expected to be on the look out for stupidity, cupidity, criminality, extremism, narcissism or a tendency to lie, since these often-concealed attributes can endanger everyone. With climate change, it would also make sense for voters to prefer leaders who understand ecology, at least to the extent that they can be trusted to grasp the basic ideas of where food, water and environmental security come from, and what climate change might mean for these necessities. Such knowledge can easily be tested at interview or by questioning during campaigns, but ecology is still seen as a minority interest rather than something that every citizen and journalist should know about. It is not feasible for leaders who are competent on climate change to be chosen consistently while this lack of interest in ecology persists. This is why the universal early teaching and learning of ecology is necessary to adaptation leadership, and therefore to adaptation itself.” (pages 81-82).
On leaving no one behind. “The most reliable, cheap and equitable way to ensure than no one is left behind is for individual hardship to be detected by other people – neighbours rather than machines, companies or functionaries of the state, and acted on by them alerting public services and monitoring the response. This offers a way to implement reliably policies of equity that require neither states nor corporations for their primary effectiveness. The key issue then becomes how to ensure that nations and corporations support and enable the operations of small groups, rather than replacing them with larger-scale systems that conflict with the ordinary sociability of our species. This choice, of whether to work with organic society or replace it with a machine state, is fast becoming urgent as the technology needed for universal surveillance is developed by corporations and bought by governments.” (pages 83-84).
On climate change mitigation. “Although what we should do in practice has long been obvious in general and precautionary terms, the existence of uncertainty inevitably fed controversy, and controversy has favoured the rich and powerful who often have least interest in promoting change. The whole thing has been described as a ‘wicked’ problem, being deeply complex, intractable, and resistant to solution, but an independent observer might say that we have added to this ‘wickedness’ through unclear intentions, political naïveté, and a specious faith on our own knowledge and ability to understand and predict the behaviour of extremely complex systems.” (pages 204-205). “The mitigation problem cannot be solved by any one country, and there is no all-knowing, global ‘hegemon with the power to impose a single set of rules’ (Chapter 1). Only nature could have that role, in wielding infinite power and universal rules, but this is seldom acknowledged. International cooperation is therefore essential, and this has fallen foul of multiple sources of reluctance to cooperate, rooted in historical, cultural and economic experiences, rivalries and reasons for distrust, ranging from slavery, trade and religion to imperialism, ideology and war. … The slow and painful process of the UNFCCC and its gradual, erratic progress towards approximate agreements on fixing the mitigation problem, is the compromise solution that has gradually been squeezed out of the tension in the UN system between everyone knowing that something must be done and no one being willing to pay for it.” (page 309).
On strengthening systems. “By assigning to local people clear, long-term rights to own, manage and benefit from ecosystems, they will become more interested in the condition of those ecosystems. By also establishing ecosystem management groups or forums where people can agree how to manage the ecosystems for which they are responsible, the ecosystems will tend to be managed in line with agreed locally-perceived priorities. Because of long-term tenure, community responsibility and forum accountability, these priorities will usually include an interest in the long-term supply, and hence sustainability, of a selection of ecosystem goods and services, for collective rather than private benefit. The forum itself will also preserve, restore or introduce practices of debate and consensus building within the empowered community. Some of these effects (e.g. biodiversity conservation, catchment services, carbon storage, conflict reduction, poverty avoidance) will also be appreciated as benefits by national society, creating an incentive among national stakeholders to support and replicate the community empowerment process. Some national benefits may be seen by outsiders, because of their different priorities, as unlikely to be adequately addressed or developed by local people, creating an incentive to improve local ecological knowledge by offering technical support, environmental education and networking with other communities where similar issues have been resolved. The net result of secure local tenure, local forums, and outside support offered but not imposed (i.e. without consent or compensation), will be healthier ecosystems and more engaged and confident local people (i.e. stronger systems) at landscape level, and improvements to governance and environmental security at the national level, as a result of which the whole country will be better able to cope with climate chaos.” (page 285).
On understanding the challenge. “Never before has an animal species single-handedly destabilised its own habitat at a global level, and in the process brought to a halt the evolutionary trajectories of millions of other species. We are doing this while also applying the full force of investigative and analytical technology to document and explain events and foresee outcomes, and also while in full possession of enough advanced ecological and anthropological knowledge to make sense of what we are seeing. The adaptation communications are an ever-deepening ocean of knowledge to which any student, researcher or teacher should be drawn at this, the most interesting and desperate time in human history.” (page 322).
On the role of small groups. “A small group can be potent if it wants to be, and partnerships are vital. There is nothing to stop everyone on Earth becoming an active part of the climate response by joining with others to make a difference. We are social animals and can achieve nothing outside of social systems, including the saving of the ecological systems on which we all depend. And one of the ways that a small local group can make a real difference is by joining forces with others to enact change and to insist on it. The more groups there are, and the more they talk with each other, the more valuable they all become, to each other, to local and national governments, and to the future.” (page 323).