Technocratically fiating a Green New Deal will never reorganize production and thus leaves capitalist dynamics intact. The alt learns from indigenous groups and socialist movements across the planet to forward green national liberation.

We need to really take stock of what we are talking about: a socio-technical revolution which goes well beyond command-and-control halting of hydrocarbon incineration. In this sense, I worry, too, that much of the new eco-socialist rhetoric is only somewhat less parochial, technocratic, and technicist than the GNDers. Managerial discourse of a clean-tech evolution is important but insufficient. There is a labor question, or specifically an agrarian question of labor.7 The GND, because it is fundamentally about a rejiggering of global energy use and a low-key jobs program, fails to address far too many questions. Where are we supposed to get food, when entire patterns of urbanization have been built on dollar-cheap food lubricated by dollar-cheap energy? Will we keep using hydrocarbon-based fertilizers to plant corn, which anyway might be devastated by the next blight to which Monsanto’s monocultures are uniquely vulnerable? Where will we get new genetic stock? Is that simply the job of hard-working peasants on the Mexican milpa? Do we bear any substantive burden for the transition? Why does scarcely anyone talk about this?

Moving from North to South, I wonder what happens when we stop talking about the Green New Deal, or even some eco-socialist models which effectively mimic the muteness of the GNC on questions of sovereignty and agriculture, and talk instead about something knottier but better, because it is big enough for everyone. What if we replace, or minimally complement, talk of a GND with something like (although by all means let us find a more felicitous phrase) a green consummation of national liberation? Some may object that national liberation is a done deal, a political vessel foundered on the shoals of neo-colonialism. But for Cabral, national liberation always looked to the far horizon, its aims set well beyond setting hands on the colonial state’s machinery. It was a perpetual revolution. It was a human force governing, but governing as a liberation movement, a revolution in power, impossible to ossify let alone petrify.

We may contrast such popular mobilizations with the developmentalist dream. Its current state is certainly due to violent external counter-revolution. But it is also often due to the internal inability to democratize social and economic power—to turn people’s war into people’s democracy. We have the good fortune to know much better now the difficulties of dividing technology from social structure, especially in the countryside. And if we wish a democratic society, we need a democratic countryside, and that countryside needs to be democratic not through parliamentary procedures but through control over production. We have the even better fortune to be able to learn from the labor of those who learned the post-colonial or developmentalist governments made mistakes. This is what peasant-oriented anthropologists, agronomists, and ethno-botanists from Mexico to India to Tunisia realized: the laboring classes of the rural world were the keepers of the keys for permanently sustainable and effectively decentralized socio-economic production, using technologies perfectly adapted to place and averse to centralized appropriation.8

It is not even remotely a coincidence that the land-based technics which one finds in the latest IPCC report are not such indigenous technologies. Catastrophic bio-fuels figure heavily. Top-down developmentalism reigns. Consultation with rural smallholders—who produce at least half the world’s food, and most of whom are women—is non-existent. And the blind spot when it comes to the countryside endures.

Here we might begin by listening to the victims of the visions of modernizers in sketching a popular response to climate change. The peasant international Via Campesina has been raising its voice for years about the capacity of smallholders to cool and feed the planet. Zero Budget Natural Farming in southern India, enfolding hundreds of thousands of farmers, shows it is possible to scale up those techniques using a popular mobilization model.9 Cuban agriculture shows the use of state scaffolding in such a project. On the other side of the socio-ecological coin, we know such ways of farming can seriously absorb, mitigate, and reduce CO2 emissions. The Climate Land Ambition and Rights Alliance (CLARA), in its report Missing Pathways to 1.5° Celsius, notes technologies and institutions like restoring resilient natural ecosystems, a full-scale shift to agro-ecology, streamlining food storage, shifting away from the over-processed foods that the wealthy avoid if they can, eating less dairy and meat in certain regions of the world alongside adaptive multi-paddock grazing, dropping input-intensive farming, and so many other ways of doing things can reduce agriculture-based emissions by two-thirds by 2050, and swing land-use-based emissions from 5 Gigatons of carbon dioxide equivalent to -10 Gigatons.

Is this large-scale socio-ecological engineering? Sure, if we accept that planning is not the issue. The issue is that planning be democratic, sustainable, and responsive as opposed to the fruit of technocratic fiat. As CLARA adds, “This holistic, nature-centred approach is no less a complete vision of our future than that implied, but never explicitly stated, in models suggesting the need for planetary geoengineering and devoting large areas of land to bioenergy cropping.”10 If it is engineering, it is of the kind where every woman and man is an engineer and every engineering project is open-source, collaborative, and democratic. It welds a political vision to a substantively democratic reworking of the food and land systems. Such a solution means not authorizing rural peoples’ destruction through the hemlock of modernization. It means not converting lands to bio-fuels cultivation or REDD, REDD+, or any of the alphabet-soup of carbon-emission-evasions which spot and blot climate change politics. It means complementing calls for an overhaul of our energy system with calls for a bottom-up overhaul of our agricultural systems, and certainly finding a way to respect the calls for sovereignty which emanate both from First Peoples in these lands and the peoples of other lands.

Finally, then, maybe I ought to end with where I ought to have begun and note that one of the issues is not so much producing solutions as it is one of institutionalizing the capacity to listen and learn from those who already have good solutions, but whose solutions are almost always ignored. It is time to start listening. Not before it is too late. But precisely because it is already very late. We cannot know if it is too late until it is. That simply makes it ever-more-imperative to begin to get it right, right now.