climate change is probably a a menace to the existence of the human species so the natural environment are therefore badly impacted in the short term this threat is going to hit some more than others it is a threat that in the short term will impact on certain regions on some part of the population on the poorest people on those who have less possibility to defend themselves who have less access to resources in technology but of course there are some people who have to withstand and bear the burden the katrina hurricane in new york or more recent hurricanes of the last few weeks or floods are providing evidence of all these so these changes are striking us in an unprecedented manner and in a very unequal manner so my first question amitagoshi can we say that our ideal freedom is being questioned at a point in time when resources become more scarce so when our access to water to earth to land is put in danger oh yes absolutely i think you know in some profound sense the entire problem of climate change is very closely related to conceptions of freedom and of course everybody understands this i mean you would have seen that in in the united states the far right that's what they're always complaining about they think that climate change is a hoax to take away their freedom you know but uh absolutely these notions of freedom that we have that we have had that we we can consume forever we can consume exactly what we want all the time all of these ideas are being limited now by climate change uh you know i think we have to relate climate change back uh to certain ideas uh you know about the world about freedom for example but also about individualism it's interesting that we are here at a festival of economics because economics as a discipline is founded so much on the idea of individuals freedom of choice individual choice and so on and so forth but i think you know this always used to be seen as some individualism is to be seen as something very positive in the west but what we see now is that individualism of a certain kind can become extremely dangerous and we see this uh the clearest illustration of this is during this covet pandemic when we see uh in large parts of america people completely refusing to wear masks i mean the science is now absolutely clear that you know just wearing a mask can help can help reduce deaths can help cut down on debts and yet people refuse to wear masks because they see uh see it in terms of liberty now you know that's what i call morbid into individualism and i think that's what we are seeing more and more so earlier marina now you made an interesting point about uh who is going to be affected by climate change who is going to be worse hit by climate change again i i don't think that the correlations are very simple you know because we it used to be said the poor will suffer most and so on and so forth but if you take this corvette pandemic as an indicator we can see that gross national wealth or gdp is a very poor indicator of how countries have fared during this uh this this crisis you know of vietnam for example which has a tiny uh per capita income has come out of this crisis incredibly well the same is true of sierra leone sierra leone you know uh at the start of this crisis everyone said uh i remember especially melinda gates and so on and so forth they came out and said oh you know africa is going to collapse it's going to be terrible for africa and so on but africans have actually handled uh the crisis much better than many countries i mean at a certain point somalia was sending doctors to italy you know so i think you know the idea that we've had and which has consistently been sold to us uh that the uh that the rich will be fine the poor will suffer is a is a very crude idea i don't think it's going to work in quite that way doesn't function necessarily for the pandemic which is a problem that we're going to that we're facing in these month but actually we see here that having to deal with the ecological crisis in general terms or the pandemic in more specific terms requires that we deal with these issues for example in terms of the health care services healthcare services being curtailed due to the public spending cuts so in this sense this is very true it is not a matter of rich or poor countries but rather it's a matter of countries that are endowed with the instruments that make it possible to collectively act through the healthcare system for example education and so on but maybe we're widening the scope too much and i'm i think it's interesting to to see it's been interesting to see that during the pandemic the problem of freedom has emerged for example as a refusal to wear masks or abiding the certain constraints and limitations i understand it's a quite complicated issue in fact some of the limitations and some of the constraints imposed upon personal freedom may be useful and maybe necessary absolutely necessary to face a collective problem the problem is whether these limitations or whether a series of controls and the state of control brought about by the epidemic will become a permanent waiver of freedom or if it is only confined to the epidemic or phase or today pandemic era but let's go back to the ecological crisis into the climate changes this is an issue that includes anything such as ecological crisis on the planet in fact there's a problem of power distribution and equality when talking about climate changes and i think you've written very clearly on the topic so in the great blindness so everybody so in the derangement everybody talks about having equitable politics when dealing with the climate but if we try and get an understanding of how these function different countries we will discover that in europe in the united states in the most industrialized countries we should cut our consumption of fossil fuels reduce our emissions of green house gases by 30 by 80 90 so we should change dramatically lifestyles are we ready to do this and probably one may wonder whether this is possible at this point the issue of power of the excessive resource to of resources comes into play so who is consuming more who is consuming less and europe that faced with the climate change threat there is a kind of attitude such as that of the armed crew as an armed crew and sorry i can't hear you hello the audio is gone shall i repeat can you hear now yes i can hear you now yes please repeat no audio is gone again one two three testing can you hear me yes i can hear you okay great thank you go ahead go ahead i'm not getting any audio i'm sorry i'm not getting any audio repeat today right i'll repeat the question no i'm sure ccc right so the problem of the climate will require a dramatic cutting of our lifestyle our energy consumption and so on and so forth and you said that when confronted with the threat of the climate the powerful nations react with the politics of the armed lifeboat can you please explain to us what you mean by that uh yeah well uh you know the politics of the armed lifeboat it's a it was an idea that the ethics of the armed light boat etc it was an idea put forth by right-wing ecological thinker called garrett hardin gareth harden uh was also the the guy who wrote a very influential article on the tragedy of the commons he was a well-known uh right-wing ideologue uh an ethnic uh you know he was a sort of believed in white supremacy and so on and so forth so his argument in the politics of the uh armed lifeboat is that you know when a lifeboat is uh is about to he thought of the rich countries as uh lifeboats and of the poor of the world as people who are drowning in the sea and trying to climb on to the lifeboat you know so that was the metaphor and he makes it very clear in this argument that he is arguing metaphorically and he says this is the metaphor of the world today the rich countries are like armed lifeboats and it is in their interest to keep the poor out because uh you know if they let the poor in then the lifeboat itself will collapse and you know without this being explicitly acknowledged actually the countries of the anglo-sphere that is to say uh you know england and the settler colonies the fir the four settler the four major settler colonies have quite self-consciously been using this as the foundation of their politics and the leader of this of course was australia which went to extraordinary lengths to drive away refugees who were turning up at the borders and so on and this policy has a kind of incredible hold on the on the english speaking imagination i have to say because fundamentally you saw a brexit came about uh because of fears of migration uh similarly uh the trumpism is essentially founded upon this idea of keeping out migrants uh hence this idea of building a wall uh and so on and so forth so uh you know already it's quite clear that some of the world's major countries uh including the united states australia and so on i mean they do have a plan for climate change their plan is to keep everyone else out but is this actually a plan now earlier you talked about you talked about inequality in relation to climate change and in relation to the pandemic i think that's a very important issue because you know uh we ca to include the the pandemic in a in a discussion of the ecological crisis is not i think to widen the discussion too much i mean they're all interrelated phenomena the pandemic uh the environmental crisis the climate crisis all of these are you know they're not caused by each other necessarily but they're all effects of the same thing which is the enormous acceleration that we've seen in the world in these last 30 years you know so in that sense i think you know the pandemic can be taken as a good predictor how the world is going to respond to the widening uh planetary crisis you know which is not just climate change or or or the pandemic it's an interrelated series of crises and in that way i think the pandemic really gives us a preview of what lies ahead and the one thing we can see in relation to this pandemic is that the best predictor for how countries will uh will respond uh to this crisis is not uh it is not uh gross wealth it's not gdp it's not gross per capita income rather it's inequality the the three countries that have done very very badly the three countries that have fed the worst are the three most unequal countries you know the united states india and brazil you know these are the countries that are so massively divided uh in terms of you know ethnic uh differences uh differences of class race etc so you know i think this is actually going to be the real uh the real picture of what lies ahead with the planetary crisis so this adds another dimension you know uh to the whole idea of the politics of the armed lifeboat so when gareth hardin and other right-wing thinkers think that you know that the rich country is a lifeboat they're fundamentally wrong it's only parts of the rich countries that are in a lifeboat you know it's not the country as a whole that's in a lifeboat large parts of the rich countries are actually also drowning in the sea and they will also be kept out of the lifeboats the only lifeboats that now exist in the planetary crisis are those that belong to the ultra rich you know they the ones who have their getaways uh in their hideaways in new zealand and in other parts of the world and so on they're all prepared to take off in helicopters and jets as soon as the the crisis starts to unfold so you know the really sad thing about gareth hardin's argument about the politics of the armed lifeboat is that he himself would have been left to drown because he clearly thought of himself as a white man that you know he's safe in his lifeboat but that's not the case uh you know uh uh poor white people or even middle class white people are going to be left out of the lifeboat just as much as as black people as brown people as as migrants so in effect i mean this whole idea that you know that a rich country uh is in some way a lifeboat uh is a completely is a completely deranged notion it's not at all the case that's very very true but it is also true that wealthy rich industrialized countries still think of themselves as of a privileged country as a lifeboat and they see themselves as people having the right to continue with their lifestyle with their economic system which is based on fossil fuels even though there is a lively debate about this but after all that's the system we have developed so far and we have some difficulties in imagining a transformation of this system but i was also thinking about another aspect back to the armed lifeboat and the poor people trying to find a place on this presumed lifeboat in a certain sense this is a metaphor but this is actually happening in real life amongst the reasons why people migrate and there are many many different reasons of course many people have their own personal reasons others have collective reasons but one of the collective reasons is for sure the transformation of our environment and climate change with all the consequences it implies and the impact of climate change which is not allowing people to survive in their own country so sometimes we talk about environmental refugees this is a vague definition maybe we should see the reasons why these people migrate but for sure the ecological crisis is one of the reason pushing these people away from their countries and making migration necessary i was actually mentioning the most recent events and there's one of them which is really terrible which is a fire on the lesbo island in greece in a refugee camp this has nothing to do directly with the climate change but it has to do with the failure of european migration policies however it also makes us think of another important theme because we know that one of the impacts of climate change which is often evoked is the movement of masses of people who will be obliged to leave their country because of extreme climatic events drought floods and many other related reasons conversely in europe and in the united states so to say in the so-called wealthy countries who that view themselves as a lifeboat well these countries refuse these people they see them as a burden they're afraid of them so the armed life fold is not a metaphor in this sense it is a real situation so do you think that also what i've described is a description of the armed lifeboat uh that's a that's a very interesting uh that's a very interesting point marina yes certainly i mean it's absolutely true that europe as well is literally implementing the politics of the armed lifeboats you know uh i mean you know now they're actually sending out uh many countries in europe are sending out a naval naval ships uh in order to keep uh these boat boat loads of migrants away from their away from their borders and it has also led uh in another way to a deeper and deeper intervention for example italy has now tried to push uh to stop migration at the source uh source levels it's trying to shut down those migration routes within africa and within asia with very little success uh you know so you know the first the first thing that this tells us is that obviously the world has to have some sort of collective response and it has not had a collective response and that's going to be a source of increasing unrest around the world it's going to be a source of increasing conflict but remember also that you know there are also massive internal displacements occurring and this is not just uh in uh you know in the poorest parts of the world you know i've i've just been reading a very interesting book by uh our common friend stefano liberty the the journalist and the book is called chata it's just come out from rizzoli and uh over there he interviews some people who were displaced by the flooding in the region called at the mouth of the poor river it's called a pole or something like that i'm not sure exactly how you pronounce it but in 1951 after a major flood 180 000 people were displaced and they've never gone back and that area has continued to lose tens of thousands of people uh over the years and let's not forget this is actually in the veneto this is uh one of the richest parts of italy you know it's not as if it's even you know in the south of italy or something so you know i really think that we have to get rid of this idea that uh you know that the poorest parts of the world are going to be hit hardest because one of the things we see it's perfectly clear now is that uh italy is is one of the countries that is being hardest hit by climate change there's more and more uh evidence of this you can see it in the droughts in sicily uh you can see it in the sudden sorts of you know the sudden rain bomb events that have been hitting in italy recently uh most of all and this is the point that stefan oliverty makes at great length in his book uh you know it's that it's the shrinking of the alpine glaciers that's going to be a major problem for italy in the long run especially for the for the po the pole river is just so important for italy and if the alpine glaciers dry up it's going to be another major issue for italy to face so you know we are facing this uh every country in the world now is in one way or the other uh facing uh you know a catastrophe it's a multi-dimensional catastrophe that is unfolding in uh in very strange ways uh and often you know one of the strangest things about this catastrophe is that often it's the richest people who are in the way of the worst uh climate change impacts consider for example a city like houston you know houston is uh it's the global hub of the fossil fuel industry it's the fourth largest city uh in the united states it's a place of immense wealth but over the last few years it's become more and more clear that houston in the long run is probably not going to be a sustainable place to live because they've had flood after flood many of these floods have uh have very badly affected uh middle class and wealthy people as well as poor people uh we see this also in these california fires uh you know which have hit many extremely wealthy areas so you know uh in a sense there is no lifeboat that's that's the thing that we are seeing now you know the waves around us are so high uh that no lifeboat can protect you from it in europe and in italy we have transformed the environment we have transformed in the last 100 years the environment the environment impressively so it's very true we are talking about issues that are striking in the entire world and our countries in particular but let me go back to the idea of freedom that we mentioned at the very start of our conversation you write about the idea or conviction that human beings have an unlimited freedom is what prevents us from seeing and recognizing and facing the ecological crisis for example in the great derangement in your essay you mentioned the encyclical laudato see pope francis laudato si which stresses the problems caused by climate changes which the pope links to social issues ecology poverty as well as justice have to be faced all together you can't resolve one problem if you don't solve or consider the other and this applies to rich countries as well as within every single country but you also mentioned this because it questions one of the certainty of modernity so the power the um of men over nature so the idea that human beings have no limitations or the idea that men can forge the surrounding environment as what as much as they want and contain the environment an idea which has then been argued about by many ecologists for example and after the chernobyl nuclear accident there had been an in-depth debate in italy among scientists women feminists concerning the awareness our awareness of limitations human beings are have no limitations or in terms of bending nature to its own will to his own will we need to be aware of our own limits and limitations so the idea of freedom of an unlimited freedom that it doesn't make it possible for us to recognize the ecological crisis are you referring to the promatic idea of human beings dominating nature is this what we should question in a way yes absolutely of course we must i mean it's perfectly clear that human beings far from dominating nature are completely at nature's mercy you know in many ways this moment of the planetary crisis as i think of it is uh comparable uh you know to a moment in the 18th century when lisbon was completely destroyed by a great earthquake and that great earthquake suddenly already back then in the 18th century european uh enlightenment thinkers voltaire and so on uh believed that uh you know the humans had already conquered nature you know already sort of dominated nature and so on and so forth and when the when lisbon was destroyed in this way suddenly they woke up and said oh my god no no uh it's not quite so simple and but you know we haven't changed since then and of course this is completely attributable to the european enlightenment it is entirely an enlightenment idea going back to say francis bacon and rene descartes and so on you know who literally believed that you know nature had to be tortured in order to extract its secrets and thereafter you know they used these metaphors you perhaps know of caroline merchant's work who showed so clearly that you know how important these ideas of torture were to the development of early science you know so yes i do think that uh western science and technology has given us this kind of completely perverse uh idea of you know the relationships between human beings and and the world beyond but let us not forget these ideas are all elite ideas uh the peasantry the farmers the people who live close to the land even in the west to this day don't subscribe to these ideas that's what's actually what is so strange about this whole thing that a tiny minority basically of europeans and westerners you know manage to impose their beliefs about the world on the rest of the world you know and continue to do so i can assure you and i'm sure you know this also if you speak to you know uh ordinary farm farming people uh in italy you know in sicily wherever uh they won't tell you that uh they won't say to you that humans have dominated nature or conquered nature anything of that kind and certainly they will not say that to you in india or indonesia or in africa this is an elite idea it's an elite idea that has been forcibly imposed upon the rest of the world through colonialism imperialism and conquest that's all there is to it but again you know what is so interesting again is this uh is the argument that you were making earlier uh about uh about the nature of ecological interventions so if you if you if you look at what is happening around the world today the places that are actually being worst hit i don't know if you've ever read alfred crosby the ecological historian who wrote a very powerful book in the 70s called ecological it was a sort of ecological history it's called ecological imperialism and what crosby and many other ecological historians have shown is that imperialism fundamentally was an ecological project it was a project of remaking uh the three components of the new world uh into what crosby calls neo europe's that is new europe's now if you look today where the worst impacts of climate change are unfolding it is exactly in those parts of the world that have been most extensively re-engineered to look like new europe's so california southeastern australia a lot of these places are actually within the annual sphere because they were the ones who did the who did the biggest ecological interventions so you know the midwest which is now uh the missouri river is is absolutely overwhelming uh you know two centuries of ecological interventions so here again we see and this is true also of what happened in the colonies i mean uh bombay as a city exists because of massive ecological interventions in a in a in a landscape which is completely unsuited uh you know like the poor delta uh bombay is built upon a delta region you know and increasingly we see that with sea level rise this delta region will go back to being half water you know so you know this is actually one of the curious aspects of the of the planetary crisis those parts of the world that are actually being now it's almost as if the land itself is rising up to throw off uh you know the forms that were imposed on it through this period of uh colonialism and imperialism you know and i think again you know you mentioned uh pope francis and lagatu last week i did an event with the mayor of assisi and she told me that pope francis is about to release another encyclical which is you know related to climate and environment and so on and apparently he is going to release it in assisi on the grave of saint francis as you know as i've written in my book i think pope francis is one of the great visionary leaders of the world today and the reason why he is a great visionary leader of the world is because he doesn't speak in terms of the deadly ecological forms of thinking uh that go back to the to 19th century europe he is really talking about a human kinship with other beings and that is what is so important this is the language that comes to us this is the framework that comes to us from indigenous traditions especially north american indigenous traditions who've always defended the land are on behalf of what they say or call our other relatives and by the relatives they mean rivers they mean the land they mean animals and they mean the past the ghosts of the past and this is what is so striking to me about the language of uh that pope francis uses it's a complete departure uh from what you might call uh a post-enlightenment uh kind of christianity or indeed a post-enlightenment way of thinking about the world well first of all i would like to see if there are any questions from our audience uh i know that many people are connected online so if you have questions please feel free to ask them we still have a couple of minutes but in the meantime i would like to ask you a question do you see any signs of hope i know that it is difficult i know that the climate change is becoming more and more serious were imprisoned in a worldwide pandemics i mean all what we said so far but are there any signs of hope any signs of a reaction maybe a reaction from the bottom you mentioned the fact that the people living on agriculture all over the world they have never thought that men could dominate nature they know perfectly well that they have to accept nature but i'm thinking of new movements like the one started by greater timberg that has involved many young people or estimation rebellion or popular movement all over the world there is some opposition say to the building of a dam to the exploitment of a mine to those works of development between inverted commas that actually aggravate our debt with nature so do you see any signs of hope yes absolutely you know i think these new movements as you say that that have started up uh for example greta tunberg and uh extinction rebellion all these movements are to me signs of great hope now i should say to you that you know we're calling them new movements but we can see that they have a generic connection with earlier movements such as for example uh on occupy wall street occupy wall street in turn has has connections with the anti-globalization movements of the late 90s which in turn has connections with with the civil rights movement and the civil rights movement in turn has connections with gandhian non-violence gandhian non-violence in turn harks back to a whole tradition of uh of the resistance if you like that goes back to the resistance to enclosure acts in uh in england in the in the 19th century and much further you know there are so what we see actually is just as these uh mechanistic ideas were being put in place by european elites you know uh that there was a counter tradition of resistance and this counter tradition of resistance was most of all uh was most powerful if you like uh amongst indigenous peoples in the americas and in australia and it was also very very powerful uh amongst uh amongst uh african-americans it's what cedric robinson calls the black radical tradition which always drew upon other sources you know upon sources of if you like of non-mechanistic ideas of the world i mean vitalist ideas of the world and of course at the moment you look back on this history you can see that even as mechanism was rising to dominance there was always a very strong countervailing tradition a vitalist tradition which was constantly suppressed so this is what i see you know these new movements that are coming into being around the world are not in any way new they go straight back to the industrial revolution and even earlier to the 17th century in italy you had campanella uh in naples and so on so this is a long tradition and this tradition is now suddenly bursting forth why is it bursting forth it's because everybody can see now perfectly clearly that these mechanistic ideas of the world these mechanistic enlightenment views of uh you know mechanistic modernity is collapsing around us we can see it you know everybody can see it now it's become perfectly clear and you know the forms of politics that are increasingly proving to be uh ineffective are actually those forms of let's say green politics that rely upon those old mechanistic models of understanding the world what we are seeing here is something quite different and if you if you've been to any of the occupied uh movements or if you've been to a black lives matter movement or any of these movements you can see that they're drawing their energy from a completely different source a metaphysical source that is completely different from uh mechanistic modernity if you like the problem will be that of achieving efficacy with these movements with this resistance in order to influence political decisions but i don't think that we will be able to solve this problem this evening however we have to think about it we have to make these forms of resistance effective the people willing the power today seem to be totally waterproof with regard to this crisis which is so evident to all of us they're blind to it i haven't received any questions from the people who are following uh following us on the internet therefore i would like to thank amit of course for participating in the festival of economia di trento thank you very much for widening the horizon of our debate and for being with us i would like to thank the city of trento the beautiful theater hosting us and the festival of the economy for bringing all these topics into the debate especially how the climate crisis demands that we rethink about our idea of freedom thank you very much amit of gosh thank you thank you mourinho and thank you to the festival i i feel very deprived that i never got to see trento which i believe is a beautiful city but thank you very much for inviting me and thank you very much for hosting this event well hopefully next time you'll be able to come in person with no pandemics you will be able to visit trento and be our physical get i certainly hope so thank you thank you you