In news on Greece and fracking, some seem to lightly regard the risks they think others should take.
Cross posted from Pruning Shears.
Two stories this week, one local and one global, got me thinking about the same question: Is it better to try for everything all at once or to slog away with progress in small chunks? The local(-ish) story concerns the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) and its approach to anti-fracking activism.
A little background. CELDF got its start in Pennsylvania, where the Marcellus shale represented the first really big fracking play in the east. Communities found they were getting steamrolled by the state, which was paving the way for fracking via a host of industry-friendly laws. Towns that objected were (and are) constrained in their ability to say no to fracking. CELDF's response was to go for the whole enchilada: instead of, say, challenging laws on the siting of injection wells, they pushed for Community Bill of Rights laws (CBR).
CBRs assert a Constitutional right of democratic self-determination and argue that communities' interests in a healthy, sustainable environment trump the oil and gas industry's preference to treat neighborhoods as resources to be used up and discarded. I am entirely sympathetic to that in theory. In practice though it's a really tough nut to crack. For one, it's an all-or-nothing approach - one that basically anticipates eventual adjudication by the Supreme Court.
Unfortunately, cases take a long time to arrive there. While CBRs' legal status wind through the courts, the actual fracking that CELDF finds so objectionable continues unabated. It seems like communities might make a more immediate impact by using the tools they still do have - like weight limits for vehicles, noise ordinances, road use maintenance agreements and so on. Small ball to be sure, but they would slow down - and maybe even end - the activity these communities object to.
That may not be as satisfying, of course. It's much more spectacular to invoke the country's founding principles and have a dramatic showdown at the highest court in the land. Anyone want to take bets on how the current Supreme Court would rule in a fight of industry versus local activists?
What's also troubling about CELDF's approach is its seemingly cavalier stance towards communities. Usually this attitude is implied, but Valdmanis gets a refreshingly candid admission:
The fund's rebellious approach has drawn fire from the oil industry, legal experts and established environmental groups. And the criticism is likely to grow as cash-strapped local jurisdictions find themselves on the hook for defending ordinances in court cases they have little chance of winning.
But Linzey says his goal is not to write local laws that are popular, or stand up in court, but rather to trigger a public debate about community rights to local self-government - even if it means a community ultimately falls into financial ruin.
"If enough of these cases get in front of a judge, there is a chance we could start to have an impact within the judiciary," said Linzey. "And if a town goes bankrupt trying to defend one of our ordinances, well, perhaps that's exactly what is needed to trigger a national movement."
Or perhaps a town going bankrupt will go bankrupt in obscurity. Perhaps suggesting that a national movement will be triggered by CBRs is just a way to rationalize a shitty little vanity project that doesn't give a good goddamn about the communities which will bear the burden of the project's likely failure. Perhaps communities that end up with gutted public services (and jacked up prices for the ones that remain) will not take the same detached view of things as CELDF. And perhaps those communities would have a palpable sense of gratitude towards, say, fracking companies that threw a few coins towards mitigating the damage wrought by the wild-eyed radicals. If we're going to wax philosophical on how the CBR approach will shake out, perhaps those are more likely outcomes to consider.
The global story is Greece, and the "go big" item here is Sunday's referendum on - essentially - Greece leaving the Euro (Grexit). I've seen analysis with wildly divergent viewpoints on it. Here's a more optimistic (an extremely relative term with Grexit) take from David Dayen: "It may initially look terrible – there’s no sunny scenario here – but the status quo offers no hope at all, and over the long term, the country can rebuild."
Meanwhile, Daniel Howden has a darker prediction:
It has been clear that the choice awaiting Greece was a future that looked like Portugal, a degraded economy of the European south; or Serbia, a proud nation led into the international wilderness by populists’ lies and fantasies of Russian rescue. Neither are good choices, but one is incalculably worse than the other.
On economic sites I frequent, Paul Krugman thinks Grexit is the best of a set of bad choices, while Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism has posted a series of blistering critiques (most recently).
Like with CBRs, I'm theoretically massively in favor of Grexit. Greece is now in the fifth year of a Depression and austerity budgeting has created unconscionable human suffering. Dump the bastards, make them eat their losses, crank up the printing presses, shove handful after handful of drachmas into every Greek's pockets, export the hell out of your products with your newly-cheap currency, and welcome vacationers across the continent for the same reason. Take a short term hit in order to end the vicious cycle of budget cuts and decreased revenues, and re-assert democratic control of the nation. Oxi!
But again, the devil is in the details - and revolutions usually don't bother too much with anything outside the big picture. It doesn't seem very wise to simply postulate the existence of engaged and competent leadership, available social infrastructure (like a large and well prepared civil servant class), etc. There are a multitude of factors that have to line up in order to avoid long term, widespread misery. From the outside none of that can be measured, and maybe not from the inside either. It's like not knowing the width of a chasm until after you've jumped.
This comment from spacemanspiff gets at my unease:
A viable left government should always demonstrate a clear understanding of the practical demands and strategic necessities of directing and carrying out the activities of the state. They should always foreground the interests of poor and working people and demonstrate an understanding of the impact their work will have on the immediate lived realities of the people. They should also be able to speak to the specific interests of other political actors and be able to propose practical changes to the mechanics of policy and administration. Syriza has consistently failed in these things, and increasingly so in recent weeks.
So again like with CBRs my enthusiasm fades.
This isn't meant to be an endorsement of incrementalism, or maybe it is and I just don't realize it. Sometimes big, sweeping changes are called for. You can't get across that chasm in two half jumps after all, and sometimes the best you can do is estimate the risks and jump without knowing exactly how far you have to go. Maybe the kind of leaders who usher in revolutionary changes are clueless about managing the thing afterward, and must necessarily be succeeded by more technocratic types.
All of that may be true, but it would be nice to see what's called the prefiguration too: What do you do the day after you succeed? Say you get your wish, how then do you move forward? What are the steps for implementing the plan? You can't just say, let's win first and we'll take it from there.
And of course, it would also be nice to let everyone know what to expect should the grand design fall apart. It's been known to happen.