During one of the worst droughts of its recorded history, the UK has taken to fining citizens £1000 for watering their lawns and banning single use grills. No, you shouldn’t water your grass during a drought, nor should you have open flames under such conditions. The real questions are, knowing what we know, why do we still have lawns? Why are we halting single use grills but not the emitters who have created apocalyptic climate conditions?
Even if states refuse to hold emitters responsible for climate change accountable, their commitment to punishment and legislation at the level of the individual rather than proactive policy reveals that adequately addressing the crisis they have co-produced goes against their very function.
In a fictitious world wherein the climate crisis is the fault of the individual, if the UK acted proactively, it would have paid each citizen £500 in 2015 and aided in converting their lawns to less water intensive and more resilient native grasses and wildflowers. It would have provided rain barrels and filtration systems to every household to store water during the wettest months. If the state was so concerned with single use BBQ’s it would have reimagined public space with life giving ecosystems and more permanent grills in safer locations.
These interventions, however, while satisfying the state’s obsessions with regulating individuals rather than corporations, would of course not solve climate change. A mass reimagining of “green space” might slow it down or at least lead vulnerable regions to be more resilient, but the state is oriented toward regulation and punishment, not transformation.
As I wrote recently, spaces considered “green spaces” in populated areas are often not green in the sense they are life giving. Just that they aren’t completely inorganic. However, lawn grass is unnatural. The inability of modern “green spaces” to survive drought reveal that they are themselves evidence of an earlier destruction of native and life giving “green space.” The literal shallowness of their root systems are apt metaphors for their function as aesthetic vehicles of colonialism both in the periphery and metropole.
Because manicured lawns of the post-colonial capitalist world are status symbols or symbols of class aspiration, even as they begin to fail under the conditions of the climate crisis, states are committed the idea of them. This is especially true for England whose 18th-19th century property law defined natural fields, prairies and collectively run regenerative foodscapes as “waste lands.” That is, lands which were not being used to their full capacity toward capital accumulation.
The subduing of British colonies and colonized peoples abroad was directly tied to domestic land reform. The 1793 Board of Agriculture was created for this purpose. As sociologist Jesse Goldstein writes in her article Terra Economica, “if improvement abroad required the subjugation of unwilling natives in the colonies, improvements at home required enclosure, and the subjugation of unwilling commoners.”
Land not sanctioned as natural habitats which humans were to be dislocated from, either needed to be cultivated for the accumulation of capital or serve as an aesthetic vehicle for colonial domination. Goldstein goes on to write, “fences and hedges besieged the landscape. Not only were these markers a forceful symbol of possession, but they also served a practical purpose, managing the flows of living bodies, animals and humans alike.” Enclosure was the primary means by which the government converted the natural world into parcels which in function, and in imagination, came to serve as engines of capital accumulation.
The Western state’s commitment to fining and regulating how individuals relate to private and public land reveals the state’s inherent punitive relationship to its citizenry, but also its commitment to the nation’s foundational mythic relationship to land and nature. A “rewilding” of private and public space enforced via fines and regulation would satisfy the state’s commitment to governance through punishment, but it would destabilize a modern visual language of “possession,” of separating people from the land in order to convert them into workers and citizens within clearly marked classes in service to capital accumulation. States converting public and private land to something closer to its natural state prior to mass enclosure would be proactive and beneficial for the climate crisis, but it would weaken the symbolic universe the modern capitalist state requires to legitimize its power.
In theory, one consents to be governed in exchange for outsourcing responsibility for their own life to the state. Part of the allure of a state is that in the event of disasters, there is an entity equipped to protect the citizen. Should the state “need” to encroach upon the private lives of its citizens, it is accepted that it doing so will be in service of their own good. The allure, however, quickly revealed to be an illusion when that state is tasked with choosing between the maintenance of capitalism and the wellbeing of its citizens; when the decision it should enforce are ones that would ultimately weaken its mythic power.
The self-preservation instinct of states, inseparable from the short-term profit-based worldview of capitalism, cannot think far enough in advance to understand that without their immediate, proactive and forceful intervention to address climate change, the collapse of ecosystems will likewise collapse states and—in the end—nations. The very political and geospatial inventions which capitalism required will—along with the requisite natural resources—cease to exist. The very citizenries which states govern through punitive measures will become ungovernable simply because the material conditions which made the democratic state possible in the first place will have dissolved.
The solution to climate change (though we are past a solution, and now must reorient ourselves toward harm reduction, management and survival) has always been systemic. States and corporations have asserted an individual culpability and thus solution—recycling, paper straws, electric cars, fines for household water use. The “solution” can’t be individual and yet—because efforts toward systemic change have largely hinged on advocating for systems to fundamentally hold to account, reform or abolish themselves—it also must be.
In the world in which states function as we have been led to believe they do, public and private lawns—both as a symbolic tool of power and water intensive dead zones—should be converted through policy. Because this won’t happen or won’t happen fast and comprehensively enough, we need to do it ourselves. We need to convert our own lawns. We need to convert abandon lots. We need convert public lawns and “green” spaces. States can charge individuals with vandalism for converting public parks to prairies, but if we wait for governments to pass the policy which legislates that conversion many of these same lawns will have already been transformed by drought to dust.
We to need to assert life affirming ways of being while disrupting ways of being antithetical to living. We need to completely disrupt the supply chains and processes which we have become dependent on. We need to break the war machine, big oil and big tech.No, this kind of mass action will not save us. But neither will states whose very material and mythic power sources are dependent on a material and symbolic universe directly antagonistic to human life.
They will fine you for attempting to hang on to the unsustainable and dying world they’ve built for (against) us before they’ll facilitate for you a new world in which can feed yourself. That world is up to us. Their world has sabotaged our lives. We in the West must in turn sabotage our own lives so that we can reimagine them. And in this reimagining, save them.
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