It feels like the ground I am standing on is shifting. I noticed it while having lunch today.
On the radio, a report on the Irish government bringing domestic oil distributors to account for price gouging, a sharp practice response to the US/Israel attacks on Iran. I think politics works well in this type of domain: a big macro issue neatly translated into a micro concern, situated within a clearly defined container (spatially and temporally) of domestic jockeying among identified stakeholders. The job of politics in this instance is to expose the dynamics at play, and the resulting transparency will keep the market honest – or honest enough to be tolerable.
At the same time, I glanced at a headline in the Irish Farmers Journal to the effect that the cost of proposals for rewetting land had been underestimated. The rewetting proposal is part of an EU-inspired commitment to nature restoration, maintaining carbon sinks and enhancing the water-holding capacity of the land (which can serve as flood defence).
Where politics fails
Unlike price gouging, this is the type of issue where politics is much less effective. It presents as a straightforward collision of interests between landowners, environmentalists, and state rationality that can be reconciled through the fair exchange of money. But the issue does not sit easily in that container. There is an excess to it that spills over the various interests, whatever way they are combined. We need to restore nature, we need food production, we need to comply with regulations, and we need a growing economy.
The excess that sits over all of this, like background noise, is climate change, which spreads across and beyond all of our human-centred framings of the issue. We have no idea what is going to happen, but it is not beyond the realm of possibility that climate impacts will drive food insecurity to the point where nature restoration seems an unaffordable luxury and the regulations are rescinded. We can perhaps already see portents of this in the continuation of the nitrates derogation, which allows farming to carry higher livestock densities than what might be considered reasonable from a water quality perspective.
It feels like our way of doing politics is caught in a death spiral. Whatever decision is arrived at here, it will be the wrong one.
What would wise politics look like in this situation?
If we could answer that question for this case, we might learn something very valuable.
One way of approaching the problem is to consider the stakeholders not being counted within the political deliberation. The land and the climate are locked into a power relation of their own that impacts all human stakeholders in different ways. Environmentalists like food and the steady politics enabled by economic growth. More than any other stakeholder, farmers are interdependent with nature for their livelihood. The state plays a key role in deciding what knowledge and perspectives are to be considered in policymaking and implementation. A policy that ignores powerful stakeholders because they are non-human is at least half-blind.
It is a tricky one, but I sense something. Stakeholders’ conflict positions seem misplaced, and I believe that some of them, deep in their gut, actually know this. But they are so embedded in traditional routines of conflict that they cannot imagine any other way. It suits some stakeholders to maintain their traditional positions because their identity depends on it; for those in that position, the situation will feel existential, and they may project it as such.
For example, the farm lobby groups and the environmentalists may be adopting, or falling into, this stance. The stance may have them more than they have it. I don’t think the issue is going to be resolved from within a traditional political economy frame, because the climate has already changed in advance of the stakeholders: it is ahead of them.
So what is to be done?
I think there is a case for taking this as a case in point and documenting its genealogy in detail, looking at the history of land, economy, technology, and politics that precede it, and mapping the relations of power between all actors and stakeholders, human and non-human. I accept it would require meticulous research.
But the idea would be to offer a retelling of the story in a way that acknowledges the excess, and its ungraspability, and to tell the effective truth from within the context of the issue. Not to proffer a solution, but to enable more elevated dialogue, and a more sophisticated and accommodating form of engagement that can sit at the boundary between the possible and the impossible. It might be the best way (or maybe even the only way) of shifting the boundary.
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