TMP Online

This is a guest post by James Holland, a climate camp and a local community activist.
Please add your thoughts below and join the debate.

People who want to make the world a better place usually start with the big things – war, poverty, climate change etc and they usually look to make changes on a national and global level, because surely you can have more impact more quickly that way?

But I want to convince you that in fact you change more by working on apparently very small and local issues. ‘Politics’ as it is, is simply too remote and too conservative, you could spend your whole life lobbying governments and international organisations and get absolutely nowhere, but a few days working to help local people stop their school being closed or even just making sure that someone unfairly denied benefits gets what they’re entitled to could have a much greater effect. This is because in addition to directly helping those specific people the more we give people hope that sticking together and solving our own problems actually works, the more people will have the confidence to try it. In short working on small local stuff is a virtuous cycle of empowerment and small victories, whereas the opposite is true of ‘politics’ where even success can mean that people as a whole feel less able to do things for themselves.

And of course it’s not only for strategic reasons that working locally is better – we directly benefit from the improvements we work for and perhaps most importantly we start to feel like part of a community, something I believe we all want to some extent. But surely this approach can’t work for the biggest and most urgent problem we face – climate change? Well yes, and in fact I believe that it might be our only realistic chance. Copenhagen showed us that Governments are unable to make a sufficiently ambitious deal, and I doubt whether they could enact one even if they did. The only way for rich countries to start to reduce emissions on the trajectory required is for individuals and communities to just do it themselves. In fact it looks really simple if you look at it from this point of view – you have probably reduced your own impact drastically in the last few years, partly because other people you knew were doing it and it seemed like the right thing to do, so why can’t everyone else do the same?

This is already beginning to happen in the shape of the Transition Towns’ movement. OK, so these groups are still largely middle class usual suspects who are mostly focussed on ‘the environment’ as a single issue, but if TTs themselves or other related groups start to form that add the goal of tackling immediate, everyday problems that ordinary people face and build a really feeling of the community taking responsibility for itself then social norms have a strange way of gathering weight and then going over a tipping point. I’m not claiming it’s guaranteed to work, relying on inter governmental process for so long has meant that we have very little time but even if we fail then we still have built resilient, self reliant and healthy communities, and surely that’s better than what your left with after another failed international conference or lobbying of governments?

For anyone not convinced tht we have repressive anti-terrorism laws, look no further than the story of Paul Chambers, in yesterday’s Independent.

I and many other liberal-lefty people in Britain use to sneer and mock the American law-enforcement for overreacting to anyone joking about Osama Bin Laden. But in a Britain, where you can be banned for life from your local airport for making a tasteless joke… maybe it’s time we stop mocking and start campaigning before we lose even more of our liberty.

According to the latest estimates, the earthquake could have caused 100,000 deaths in the poorest country in the Western hemisphere.

The home of the world’s first and only successful slave revolt and the Western hemisphere’s first post-colonial black nation, Haiti was still struggling to recover from the four hurricanes that hit it in 2008 when around 1,000 people died and 800,000 were left homeless. Reports state that most of those who have escaped with their lives have spent their first night without any shelter, some even sleeping amongst dead bodies and this is likely to continue, whilst hundreds or possibly thousands are buried alive underneath the devastation.

This disaster is not only shocking in scale but especially shocking because of the inability of Haiti to help itself. Haitians have been struggling with chronic unemployment affecting 75% of the population, 70% without adequate access to sanitation; 78% of the population live on a meagre $2 a day (the so-called absolute poverty threshold). All this plus coups and civil wars have brought intermittent political stability since 1990.

Though Obama and many leaders in the international community have pledged emergency rescue assistance, and as I write NGOs and charities descend to deliver most-needed emergency relief. It will take more than this to help Haiti into a stronger nation, but international aid and interference in the past has moved Haiti away from policies that would have delivered a higher minimum wage and agricultural strength to provide food self-sufficiency to the policies of further impoverishment to stimulate “foreign investment”.

These problems however must be tackled another day, for now do we should do all we can to help Haiti.