Equality, Health and Climate Change.

Great interview with Naomi Klein by Rob Hopkins at her recent visit to Transition Town Totnes.

Talking about several of the issues discussed at a recent Crisis Network conference on violence and climate change. Within our discussion group I asked whether it was useful to link all these ‘social objectives’ like equality, justice, and health to climate change. Is this strategy ‘greater than the sum of the parts’ or bring each down to the ‘lowest common denominator’ i.e. if our critics find a angle to argue against for the climate change debate, does that bring the social justice down as well? Will the critics presume that we are using climate change for our left-wing causes, thus providing another reason for them to be distracted from the issue?

"Maybe it did work, but like I said, the whole discourse on the right is about how climate change is a socialist plot to bring in world government and redistribution of wealth!  That’s the discussion that’s going on.  We’re not in any way responding to it and laying out a world view and saying, “yeah, we do believe in internationalism and here’s why.  We do believe in redistribution of wealth and here’s why we do think it will benefit your community and the vast majority of people on this planet and here’s why we don’t have to be afraid of it.”  Naomi Klein by Rob Hopkins

I guess I'm trying to look at this from a local perspective. If these arguments can work globally why can't they work nationally or locally? This is my argument for linking health inequality with climate change in Liverpool and Wirral. We have great social inequalities just within Merseyside. So we need to lay out a new world view - one that is Equal, Green and Well (Sarah Dewar, 2020 Decade of Health and Wellbeing). Can this start from communities fighting to maintain services and infrastructure and work upwards (as opposed to waiting indefinitely for that trickle to come down?) Completely different to Totnes but with a similar history of radicalism (see City of Radicals, hosted by Liverpool City Council in a completely ironic way...), could Liverpool be the place to develop this new world vision? As the annual Transition Network conference is heading this way in summer (8-11 July)- it could just happen!