Our choice

Abstract

As I write, in the first month of 2019, Australia swelters through one of the hottest summers on record. Extreme weather is the global norm; the science is clear: the frequency and intensity of weather events are the result of anthropogenic climate change, in turn the consequence of human choices that produce greenhouse gases. Once considered a matter of international concern, the recent global attitude seems to have shifted: ‘oh, yes, we know all about climate change; governments are already dealing with it’. Yet, governments are not dealing with it. At the end of 2018, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reminded us that far from dealt with, far from being nothing to worry about, the earth is now very close to the point of no return. According to the IPCC, we must choose now if we are to limit global warming to the 1.5 C above pre-industrial levels necessary to avoid dire climate consequences from which we may never recover. Our choice, then, matters. Here I want to focus on one source of that choice: the liberal concept of property. Property comprises things, rights, and relationships. Things, because through property we control everything that we use: our homes, cars, laptops, clothes, shares in companies, etc. Rights, because law confers on us the right to use, to exclude others from use, and to dispose of things. And, relationships, because rights are conferred by law not in relation to the things, but to others. Rights are held in relation to others, thus forming relationships between the holder of the right and all other people, allowing me, for example, to use the car, exclude others from using it, and to sell it. Rights/relationships are not absolute – while they confer the power to decide, to choose, about the use of things, that choice is fettered by obligations, imposed by legal regulation. Both rights and obligations are, then, creatures, constructs of law. The rosy picture I’ve painted is one of theory and of law. It is not how most people understand property. Rather, the practical understanding of property is more likely to be one in which the holder of property enjoys absolute freedom to choose, in a self-interested and preference-satisfying way, about the use of a thing. And so long as choice conferred by the concept of property persists in law, then it matters how every person understands, as a practical matter, what that choice means. So long as an individual, when faced directly with a clear and specific choice thinks first of themselves, free to choose to suit themselves, without any regard for others, then the consequences of anthropogenic climate change will inevitably follow. Unless property, or liberalism itself, is removed entirely, the state might control, and even prevent, some choices, but it cannot prevent all of them. This is further complicated by corporations: when those entities choose what to produce, then individual choice – about what to wear, sources of energy, and so on – is narrowed, and not always in a beneficial way. Property represents a tool, used by each of us, individually, and all of us, collectively, to choose how to use things. This in turn allows us to produce three climate consequences. First, spatially, we exert supreme, absolute, and uncontrollable power over the citizens of other nations, creating a set of unequal, or asymmetrical, relationships that alter the social, political and economic structures within those other nations. Second, temporally, we alter the social, political and economic structures of other nations for future generations. Third, and above all, through property we engage, perhaps unwittingly, in what I have previously called ‘eco-colonialism’; we colonise both other nations and our own; we are both coloniser and colonised. The choice is ours: continue to use private property as a tool of eco-colonialism, or redefine its meaning so as to prevent climate consequences. The time to choose is now: the longer we wait, the closer we come to the catastrophe we are already beginning to live.