Ideas - Astra Taylor's CBC Massey Lectures | #4: Beyond Human Security

Episode Date: July 29, 2024

The burning of fossil fuels causes the past, present and future to collide in destructive ways. In her fourth Massey Lecture, Astra Taylor tells us that as the climate alters, evolved biological clocks erratically speed up or slow down, causing plants and animals to fall out of sync. In a world this out of joint, how could we possibly feel secure? But there is a path forward.

Hey there, I'm David Common. If you're like me, there are things you love about living in the GTA and things that drive you absolutely crazy. Every day on This Is Toronto, we connect you to what matters most about life in the GTA, the news you gotta know, and the conversations your friends will be talking about. Whether you listen on a run through your neighbourhood, or while sitting in the parking lot that is the 401, check out This Is Toronto, wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayed.

This is the fourth of the 2023 CBC Massey Lectures, The Age of Insecurity, by writer, filmmaker, and political organizer Astra Taylor. Everyone feels insecure these days, and the natural world has also become increasingly volatile. From deadly heat domes and wildfires to catastrophic flooding and rising sea levels, our lives are now shaped by ecological insecurity. And in a world this out of joint, how could we possibly feel secure? Astra Taylor argues we are hurtling towards a future wrecked by our pursuit of human security alone, and that we need to chart a different course. Astra Taylor was born in Winnipeg and raised in Athens, Georgia.

Her most recent book is Remake the World, Essays, Reflections, Rebellions. Others include the American Book Award winner, The People's Platform, Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age, and Democracy May Not Exist, But We'll Miss It When It's Gone. Every year, we record the Massey Lectures on a cross-Canada tour, and this year we went to Winnipeg, Halifax, Whitehorse, Vancouver, and Toronto. Today on Ideas, from the York Theatre in Vancouver, the fourth of the lectures, titled Beyond Human Security, here's Astra Taylor. Hello everyone. Thank you so much for being here tonight, for taking time out of your busy lives to come and listen to this talk. It's just an incredible honor to be here in Vancouver with you.

So this lecture is called Beyond Human Security. Every four years, the US-based National Intelligence Council releases a report called Global Trends that attempts to forecast the threats and uncertainties that will shape the world for the next two decades. Authored by the Strategic Futures Group, which is an association of professional spies that has a name more befitting of an indie rock band. The report is written to encourage the White House and its advisors to stretch their thinking towards a longer time horizon. As a result, the documents have a speculative quality and are typically declassified without much fanfare.

That was certainly the case with a report issued in 2017, which was mostly ignored by the public. That is, until seemingly out of the blue, the plague it envisioned suddenly arrived. The global pandemic of 2023, as they called it, indeed halted international travel and shut down the economy precisely as they had predicted, only it did so three years ahead of schedule. Despite its predecessors and canny prescience, the next installment in the series garnered little public attention, perhaps because it focused on something both nebulous and omnipresent, rising insecurity. The 2021 edition of Global Trends, titled A More Contested World, focused on the intersecting challenges facing humanity amid conditions of, quote,

expanding uncertainty. One of the report's main graphics featured a box labeled eroding human security, surrounded by an array of menacing inputs or drivers, extreme weather, water misuse, sea level rise, geoengineering, societal and governmental change, unequal burdens, instability, conflict, and more. Inside that besieged box, the report argues, is the future we will all inhabit unless a miracle occurs. The authors bluntly describe the dilemmas we face, writing, and here's a quote, the effects of climate change and environmental degradation are likely to

exacerbate food and water insecurity for poor countries, increase migration, precipitate new health challenges, and contribute to biodiversity losses. They go on to propose that the accelerating concentration of wealth will lead to the collapse of social progress and more volatile geopolitical environments. And who will suffer the most? Predictably, those who have the least, including the billion people on the planet facing a future as climate refugees. The report concludes by

proffering five imagined scenarios, each envisioning a trajectory our uncertain future might take. So one, a dystopian world where globalization has broken down. Two, a fraught state of competitive coexistence dominated by Chinese and American hostilities. Three, a world broken into siloed blocks that leaves climate change unaddressed and poor countries collapsing. Four, a revival of liberal democracy led by the United States and buoyed by technological innovation. That one seemed very utopian. The fifth and final scenario strikes a hopeful note.

Under the heading tragedy and mobilization, it conjures a global revolution in human security. In this possible future, a heating planet has led to extensive famine and strife, sparking bread riots in Philadelphia. Traumatized by their experience of COVID-19 and hunger, young people launch a rebellious cross-border movement advocating for bold systemic change, initially for environmental policy and then public health and poverty. Green parties take power across Europe, the United Nations is revitalized,

and China joins the alliance, followed by Australia, Canada, and even the United States after environmentalist sweep elections. The result? A new international organization, the Human Security Council. Under the threat of backlash and boycott, wealthy countries and corporations fall in line. Under the threat of backlash and boycott, wealthy countries and corporations fall in line. By 2038, a growing recognition of the unsustainability of past practices has transformed attitudes about food, health, and environmental security. The only disgruntled nations are the few remaining petrostates.

Reading the scenario, I found myself nodding in agreement with American intelligence officials for the first time in my life. An unsettling experience in its own right. I could barely even say it. It was so strange. If we want to escape the little box labeled eroding human security, a massive and visionary social movement, will indeed have to shift our social systems away from the fossil fuel guzzling status quo. At the same time, as I read, I wondered if a human security council is really enough to set us on a stable course. If the challenges facing humanity are so enmeshed with a devastated planet, then shouldn't we also be asking what security means for the ecosystems, plants and animals on which our own food, health and environmental security depend?

One way of understanding our current predicament is that we are hurtling towards a future wrecked by our pursuit of human security alone. Many of the problems detailed in the Global Trends Report stem from the fact that our political and social systems rarely, if ever, take other beings' survival or thriving into account. Instead of recognizing the Earth as a commons we have a duty to care for and honoring the limits of ecosystems we need to protect, we treat the natural world as an inexhaustible resource

we are entitled to exploit. But this human-centric approach now looks to be the source of our undoing. By attempting to conquer nature, we have brought ruin on ourselves. What worldviews and ways of being have propelled this destructive and self-defeating spiral? And what other principles and practices

might put us on a less solipsistic and more secure track? What other more holistic and inclusive visions of security might we aspire to? Insecurity and security, I've argued throughout these talks, are not just about the here and now, but what we anticipate the future has in store. They have everything to do with time, and the same applies to climate change. The burning of carbon causes the past, present, and future to collide in disorienting and

destructive ways. Fossil fuels are, in effect, the past condensed, every barrel of oil, simultaneously a swath of land and an epoch of life, the product of photosynthesis and the geological remains of once-living organisms, concentrated to a potent essence. Two and a half centuries after the first smokestacks blew exhaust into English skies, we are only beginning to come to grips with the consequences of combustion. The coal put to work in Manchester at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution literally shapes our environment today, just as the emissions from the burning of fuels from Saudi oil fields, American gas reserves, and Canadian tar sands will haunt life on Earth for a long time to come.

As we incinerate our energy inheritance, nature's timekeeping methods become increasingly confused. April showers bring May flowers, or so they used to say, but this year, I spotted daffodils in February. As the climate alters, delicately evolved biological clocks erratically speed up or slow down, causing plants and animals to fall out of sync. The majority of marine life, from seal to salmon, has adjusted its migration, breeding,

and feeding patterns as a result of warming waters. As the permafrost melts, land animals across the Arctic are doing the same, forging new paths as once stable conditions change. Caribou travel further north and calve early, missing the sprouting of vital food sources on the tundra and pushing herds toward extinction's brink. Experts in phenology, which is the study of the timing of biological events

such as plants flowering and insects laying eggs, call this a mismatch. Birds arrive late for spring, having timed their migration with the sun, while plants are more attuned to variations in temperature. Flowers may bloom before or maybe after pollinating beetles, bees, or wasps arrive. Symbiotic partners misaligned. Spider orchids and mining bees, puffins and herring, the red admiral butterfly and the stinging nettle, caribou and lichen, dependent but increasingly off-rhythm pairs abound,

co-evolved species failing to connect and endangering both partners. In a world that's out of joint, how could we possibly feel but insecure? No wonder climate anxiety, defined by the New York Times as anger, worry, and insecurity stemming from an awareness of a warming planet, now affects people around the world.

It's the eerie emotion I felt as I gazed upon those unseasonably early blossoms. One made eerier by the knowledge that such aberrations will only become more frequent, indeed, routine. These days, some of us who once took security for granted are now grieving the loss of a future previously believed to be guaranteed. Others grieve a stable planet they never knew, with children, especially indigenous youth, showing particularly acute symptoms of distress about what the future holds. The question, as always, is how we respond. about what the future holds. The question, as always, is how we respond.

Will we snap shut with an authoritarian reflex, deny science, and defend an unsustainable status quo, build apocalypse-proof bunkers, or retreat to safer ground? Or can we approach this crisis with curiosity, asking how we can work together to transform our relations to the more-than-human world. Part of the insecurity many of us feel around climate change stems from the fact that no one knows exactly what will happen next. But perhaps speculating about future scenarios

is not the best use of our limited time. Not knowing can pretend disaster, or it can be a sign of possibility, and thus a spur to intervene. Fortunately, there are multiple ways to conceptualize and approach time. The first and more typical understanding emerges from the ancient Greek chronos, which means chronological time, a sequential unfolding. This is the time we're all familiar with. But the ancient Greeks had another concept, kairos, which refers to an auspicious moment, the time for decision or action. Kairos, understood in this way, is the time that

we seize. It is the time of those who turn their insecurity and anxiety into solidarity, knowing that every mote of mitigation matters, that every bit of carbon we don't release saves lives and buys time, and that without the sustained mobilization and protest movements of recent years, the catastrophes we face would be that much deadlier. Kairos says that time is of the essence, and that it is not too late for the future to be changed, in good ways and in bad ones. The only way we risk a mismatch

is by giving up and accepting our extinction as preordained. Kairos invites us to act now, whatever time it happens to be. It is the temporality of those who, even as they mourn, also organize, who vote, divest, strike, blockade, rewild, replenish, and sue. In 2018, Ontario's Conservative government, led by Premier Doug Ford, dramatically reduced greenhouse gas emissions targets. In response, plaintiffs aged 12 to 24 filed a lawsuit, Mather v. Ontario, channeling their insecurity and dread about the future into groundbreaking litigation. The lowering of emission standards the plaintiffs contend was an infringement

of their Section 7 rights to life, liberty, and security of the person as defined by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, as well as a breach of the rights of people not yet born. of rights and freedoms, as well as a breach of the rights of people not yet born. Their claims are bolstered by a growing chorus of scholars and activists who argue that the constitutional right to security of the person that Canadians possess must entail protection from environmental threats, lest that right be rendered meaningless. How can people ever be secure if government policies are actively undermining both personal and societal preservation? Shelby Gagnon, one of the youth litigants, is a 26-year-old artist and organizer from Arrowland First Nation, who focuses on food security. She has lived most of her life in Ontario's Thunder Bay. Thunderclap. The Arrowland First Nation are known as the blueberry people, but the year before last,

after fires in a parched season, there were no berries to be picked. As Gagnon observed, that depletes food security, but you're also losing part of your identity. What does it mean to be blueberry people if no berries grow? Gagnan told me she sees security and sovereignty as interconnected concepts, even one in the same. Her organizing work focuses on helping communities realize their own visions of food security, given their limited economic resources and the unique ecology of the specific place, however strained that ecology may now be. Where food is concerned, sovereignty would mean the ability to eat a locally produced and culturally appropriate diet, a goal climate change, of course, undermines. Where governance is concerned, sovereignty would mean the power to say no

to polluting and carbon-spewing projects, and to pursue development on more equitable and sustainable terms. This would require Canada paying real respect to Indigenous jurisdiction and giving Indigenous laws and conceptions of justice genuine weight. Guénon hopes the Mather case will help establish a constitutional right to security that includes a healthy environment, though she knows it's an uphill battle. In April 2023, an Ontario Superior Court judge dismissed the case, but the judge did validate many of the plaintiff's arguments, including finding it, quote,

indisputable that as a result of climate change, the applicants and Ontarians in general are experiencing an increased risk of death and an increased risk to the security of the person. That leaves ample ground for an appeal, which means it may take many more years for a final decision to be handed down. Here we have a mismatch of potentially epic proportions. The grindingly slow procedures of the world's courts and the urgency of the climate crisis are alarmingly discordant. The experience has reaffirmed Guignan's sense that the Canadian legal system is not set up to protect people or the planet. As she put it, there should be more laws or a constitution for the land.

In the Anishinaabe tradition, she explained, land is regarded as a person and not property to exploit or a resource to consume. People belong to the land more exploit or a resource to consume. People belong to the land more than the land belongs to them. It follows that if the Mathur case were tried according to Anishinaabe principles, the environment would be represented very differently, with the respect and reciprocity a relative deserves. As Gagnon put it, I think of a circle whenever I think about governance or law, no being higher or lower than who or what you are, no entity separate nor supreme. Being inside the circle as it hums around us, not outside it or above it, is where true security lies.

Around the world, environmental activists are creatively engaging with the law in order to defend the rights of children, future generations, and the more-than-human world. All entities that lack traditional political rights enjoyed by most voting-age adults. From Sweden to the United States, young people have been filing lawsuits against their governments to force action on climate change on behalf of themselves and those who have not yet been born. In some places, this rights-based and forward-looking approach has yielded remarkable victories. In 2008, Ecuador broke new ground when the country enshrined the rights of Pachamama, Mother Earth, in its newly adopted constitution. adopted constitution. Two years later, Bolivia followed suit, inspiring communities around the world to begin to adapt the idea to their own regions and struggles. Soon, laws reflective of the culture of the Maori people granted legal personhood to Te Uruwara, an ancestral forest in New Zealand, and later to the Wangui River, recognizing it as a living hole spanning from the mountains to the sea.

In India, judges declared that the Ganges and Yamuna rivers and their tributaries would be, quote, legal and living entities having the status of a legal person with all corresponding rights, duties, and liabilities. Canada joined this trend in 2021 when the 300-kilometer Magpie River in Cote-Nord, Quebec, known to the Innu as a river where water flows between square rocky cliffs, became the country's first natural entity to be deemed a holder of rights. Should Canadian ecosystems ever be recognized as legal persons at the federal level, perhaps they will be granted the constitutional right to security of the person too. By placing humans and ecosystems in the same

circle, the rights of nature movement poses a profound challenge to the conceptual underpinnings of Western legal systems. Indeed, it challenges one of the foundational tenets of Western thought, namely the elevation of human beings both above and apart from the rest of creation. It's a paradigm often traced back to the ancient Greeks, first Plato and then Aristotle, two philosophers who both saw man, and yes, they definitely saw man, alone endowed with rational intellect superseded in stature only by the gods. The idea that the organic world could be sorted into hierarchical categories was one of Aristotle's

innovations. In the Middle Ages, the church adopted this motif and hammered it into what they called the great chain of being, with minerals at the bottom, followed by plants, the great chain of being, with minerals at the bottom, followed by plants, animals, humans, and then angels, all overseen by the Christian deity. In later centuries, the scheme was secularized and given a scientific sheen, a metaphysical chain replaced by an evolutionary tree. Homo sapiens, of course, occupied the most distinguished branch, a higher organism looking down on the lower ones, part of the natural world, but also better. Even if we don't go around gloating about our species-defining traits and talents, opposable thumbs, tool use, mastery of fire, language, reason,

Western thinking and the political structures we inhabit are steeped in a paradigm that presumes human preeminence and dominion. Whatever form it takes, the idea of creation as a hierarchy with our species sitting smugly at the summit always struck me as an image more illustrative of repressed insecurities than innate strengths. No doubt, we human beings are wonderful, but we're also a bit absurd, gangly, furless, and extremely chatty. Only an insecure creature, or perhaps an insecure culture,

would need to puff itself up with such pompous images, an act of defensive narcissism taken to a society-wide extreme. A secure creature, I like to imagine, could celebrate its own unique abilities while also respecting other forms of intelligence and perception. A secure creature could marvel at its own amazing thumbs without denigrating the paws, hooves, claws, webbed feet, and fins that other beings possess.

If that were the case, we could perhaps also be more inclined to recognize the ways our grasping hands have gotten us into trouble. The idea of human supremacy has lent credence to the idea that nature is a storehouse for our kind to own and exploit. An attitude my sister, the disability studies scholar Sonora Taylor, calls suicidal anthropocentrism. Should we stay the current course, nearly one in four children will live in extremely water insecure areas by 2040. Over one billion people will be made climate refugees by 2050. And by

2070, approximately 3 billion people will live in hot zones or areas outside of the narrow band of climatic conditions that shaped most of human civilization. In the decades ahead, a million animal and insect species are poised to disappear into the void, disrupting food chains and causing cascading consequences we can guess at but cannot entirely predict. The vanishing bugs are, of course, essential food for many birds. Without these pollinators, many plants and food crops simply won't grow. Granting legal rights to nature will not stop this doomed spiral,

but it might help slow it down, and speed matters. In an essay on not losing hope, one of the lead authors of the 2022 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change wrote, every single metric ton of carbon dioxide we prevent from entering the atmosphere metric ton of carbon dioxide we prevent from entering the atmosphere lessens the severity of the impacts we bake into the system. The same goes for every day a fossil fuel transporting pipeline is blocked, every acre of natural habitat that is saved, every endangered creature that survives, and every gallon of water that remains safe to drink. You're listening to the 2023 CBC Massey Lectures on Ideas on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, on US Public Radio,

across North America, on Sirius XM, in Australia, on ABC Radio National, and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas. You can also hear us on the CBC Listen app and wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nalaoltar, and I have a confession to make. I am a true crime fanatic.

I devour books and films and, most of all, true crime podcasts. But sometimes, I just want to know more. I want to go deeper. And that's where my podcast Crime Story comes in. Every week I go behind the scenes with the creators of the best in true crime. I chat with the host of Scamanda, Teacher's Pet, Bone Valley, the list goes on. For the insider scoop, find Crime Story in your podcast app. podcast app. While we were on the Massey tour, we recorded interviews about the kinds of insecurity we see today, specifically housing and food insecurity. We'll be playing excerpts from those interviews throughout the lectures. Here is Norma Cassie, a former chief of Vuntut Gwich'in First Nation and a former Yukon MLA. Since I was quite young, I was told by my grandfather and others that their hard times are coming.

The weather's going to change. There's going to be a lot of sickness. Even the animals that we live with now will get sick. And you need to prepare and always speak out for and protect our animals and our people. When I saw that my great auntie's Lake Zelma Lake disappeared, that was the lake that provided everything for my family, everything. And all our food, everything came there, caribou, moose, muskrats, a lot of it in abundance, a lot of birds there on that particular lake. And

it was a big one. It's a five kilometer square. And that drained away in 2007. And I went home, my brother called me to come home, we need to do ceremony. So I went home and we went to Crow Flats and we did ceremony on Zelma Lake and thanked her for everything that she provided. And it was there that I knew that this was it. It's going to be pretty much not good in many ways for our environment. Because, yeah, permafrost was melting really, really fast. And it's since that time that I really saw it for sure, that what my grandfather had meant.

That was Norma Cassie in the Yukon. And now back to the fourth of the 2023 CBC Massey Lectures, The Age of Insecurity. In the fourth of her Massey Lectures, Astra Taylor turns her attention to ecological insecurity. The burning of carbon, she argues, causes the past, present, and future to collide in disorienting and destructive ways. As the climate alters, delicately evolved biological clocks erratically speed up or slow down, causing plants and animals to fall out of sync. In a world this out of joint, how could we possibly feel secure?

Here's Astra Taylor with Beyond Human Security. In 1516, the philosopher and statesman Thomas More published his treatise Utopia and introduced a new word into the English lexicon, a play on utopos, meaning no place in Greek. In this tale within a tale, a traveler describes his visit to a strange country where the inhabitants hold all property in common. Viewing themselves as cultivators of the land, not proprietors of it, the Utopians, as they called themselves, are free of the insecurity and tumult

produced by competition, acquisition, and loss. Men and women labor in essential trades, such as farming, but only for six hours a day, giving them plenty of time to study and enjoy their religious freedom. There are no ale houses in Utopia and also no lawyers. And couples get to see each other naked before they are wed. If you inspect a horse before you buy it, the traveler says to his astonished interlocutors, shouldn't you take a good look at your future spouse before you commit?'

Combining speculative philosophy with a cutting critique of the political status quo, Moore wrote Utopia in the midst of the enclosure movement, that long period when millions of acres of once-common fields and forests were fenced and hedged in England for private gain. The great transformation in land ownership set the stage for capitalism as we now know it. In an oft-quoted passage, Utopia denounces the wealthy nobility who have seized common land to feed the growing and lucrative wool trade, uprooting and impoverishing peasants to make pasture for flocks of sheep and turning the

quote, best inhabited places into solitudes. The enclosure movement commodified land and deprived commoners of material security, a monumental shift that I talked about in my first lecture. I quote Moore here because he adds a new dimension to our understanding by describing the ways humans conscripted domesticated animals to lead the charge. Sheep became four-footed agents of privatization. Their wool the period's principal source of wealth. Those who enclosed Moore complained stop the course of agriculture destroying houses and towns that they may lodge their sheep in them. Sheep, Moore said, devour men in unpeopled villages. We can see this, for example, in the brutal Highland clearances of the 18th century,

when large-scale sheep farming devoured Scotland and prompted the migration of thousands of displaced tenant farmers to Canada. Utopia reminds us that hunger for profits, labor, land, and animal products have been intertwined since capitalism's earliest days. Using sheep to propel enclosure gives a new angle to the phenomenon I've been calling manufactured insecurity, expanding it beyond a limited human frame. The privatization of land and the birth of market society not only caused many human beings to lose their homes and their ability to sustain themselves, but it also affected non-humans.

Farmed animals were forced to conform to industrializing modes of production while wildlife habits vanished, quickening the rush into what we now call the sixth extinction. As colonization advanced, livestock were once again put to work, propelling enclosure and destruction, this time of indigenous territories and lifeways in the Americas. The settlers who crossed the Atlantic did not do so

alone. They brought pigs, cows, chickens, goats, and also, of course, disease. Disease that in many cases stemmed from their close habitation with livestock. In 1666, in a complaint to colonial authorities, an indigenous leader named Madigan, speaking for the Anacostan, Doeg, and Patuxent in the Maryland colony, pointed to settlers' animals as the source of his community's insecurity and unhappiness. Your cattle and hogs injure us, he said. You come too near to us to live and drive us from place to place. We can fly no further. Let us know where to live and how to be secured for the future from the hogs and cattle." The brewing conflict was both material and metaphysical.

It was a question of controlling resources and also, on a deeper level, conceptions of reality. Until settlers arrived, the idea that animals could be owned was alien to the indigenous people of the eastern seaboard. Animals could be hunted, but were not subservient to human beings. But for settlers, domestic animals were private property, and wild ones were common property. In both cases, animals, like the rest of the natural world,

were things God granted humans the right to own. This metaphysical framework informed the settlers' shifting idea of the commons. In England, the commons involved both rights and responsibilities, and the rules governing sharing could be strict. But in New England, the commons became a repository from which anyone could take with no corresponding duty to reciprocate or to replenish what was there. Alan Greer, a professor of history at McGill University, calls this new arrangement the colonial commons, one that imagined the sprawling continent as an open and inexhaustible resource to be exploited and enclosed by settlers at will. The colonial commons, he explains, was made possible only by disregarding and undermining what he calls the indigenous commons,

the mosaic of distinct systems of government, each with its own unique rules for managing property and apportioning rights and responsibilities within clearly demarcated territories. The colonial commons found justification in the fervid insistence that indigenous peoples had no systems at all. Otherwise, their land would not be free for settlers to commandeer. For settlers, the absence of fences and of domesticated animals provided ample and convenient proof of a, quote, lack of civilization. John Winthrop, who was the second governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, reflected the standard settler perspective when he insisted that because indigenous people, quote, enclosed no land nor tamed cattle to improve the land, their abundant territory could be appropriated. colonists interpreted the lack of fencing as a sign of a lack of ownership,

when in fact it was merely a sign of a lack of livestock and thus a sign of a lack of need for fencing. This self-serving view would find its quintessential expression in the writings of John Locke, the philosopher most associated with the writings of John Locke, the philosopher most associated with the development of modern ideas of liberty, democracy, private property, and also security. The need for security, he believed, is why people get together to form a society in the first place. Locke argued that people are entitled to make land their sole possession when they mix their labor with the natural world,

thereby improving it and privatizing it. He contrasts these allegedly industrious and rational people unfavorably with commoners, by which he meant both English peasants and the indigenous peoples of the Americas, people he claimed let resources go to waste. peoples of the Americas. People, he claimed, let resources go to waste. Locke's argument upheld the classic justification for the English crown's dominion over the continent. He imagined, quote, bands of wild Indians who, lacking fences and unable to subdue the land, had no legitimate claim or title to their territory. And so settlers took the land, in part by setting their animals loose.

As Virginia de John Anderson documents in her book Creatures of Empire, the ecological consequences of settlers' rambling and ravenous menageries were evident as early as the 17th century. Free to forage whatever they could find, cows and pigs consumed delicate grasses, seeds, and roots, and quickly reduced the land's capacity to regenerate, spurring their owners to, of course, take them further afield. Hogs dug up clam beds, cattle spread weeds, erosion took its toll.

From Canada to Mexico, the herds of hoofed mammals that arrived in colonization's wake radically changed the landscape and introduced a new biological regime that made it harder for indigenous people and indigenous creatures to sustain themselves. As the land became depleted, settlers pushed forward, moved elsewhere, enclosing and exhausting the land. The cycle repeated. It was a logical consequence of the colonial approach to the commons, one that undermines its own security by taking more and more instead of taking care. Here in Canada, no creature epitomizes this voracious dynamic more than the beaver. By the time Utopia was published at the start of the 16th century, Eurasian beavers had already been hunted to oblivion. When vast beaver populations were discovered in North America, enterprising investors, most famously the Hudson Bay Company, launched another deadly hunting spree.

The continent's beavers were methodically turned into fashionable top hats that built immense fortunes and shaped this nation. By the early 20th century, where there had once been perhaps hundreds of millions of beavers across North America, only 100,000 remained. But the story of the beavers also reminds us that the commons can be replenished. Today, thanks to coordinated efforts,

beavers are a rare conservation success story. Their North American numbers now exceed 10 million, and the benefits of their resurgence cascade like a spring-fed stream. Ecologists now recognize beavers as a keystone species, right? That's a species essential to maintaining an entire ecosystem's well-being. When reintroduced to an area, beavers set in motion protective and reparative natural processes that can fend off some of the dangers posed by a warming planet, from counteracting rising temperatures to combating erosion and drought. Beavers also do wonders for biodiversity.

Ecohydrologist Emily Fairfax calls the revitalized zones beavers create refugia, areas where diverse groups of creatures can survive adverse conditions. Her research focuses on the now terrifyingly common megafires and how beaver-altered landscapes have the remarkable ability to withstand extreme heat and raging flames. Beaver refugia are a kind of utopia, only better because they are real. The antithesis of the colonial commons, they are places where plants and animals can find safety, rebound, and heal. By cleansing water, fighting fires, and sheltering other species, beavers are model stewards of ecological security. beavers are model stewards of ecological security.

In the early 1980s, when I was barely a toddler, my family decamped from Canada and headed south to the desert. We traded Manitoba blizzards for scorched sand and open sky, towering swerve, cacti, and 10-foot succulents called elephant trees. As a kid, you learn fast that the fuzzy appearance and name of the teddy bear Cholla belies the harshness of its barbs. A jumping cactus, as they're also called because they literally seem to reach out and attack you, will quickly teach you that nature is not a mere thing and certainly not something to be messed with. teach you that nature is not a mere thing and certainly not something to be messed with. Arizona was where I got my first lesson in the importance of protecting the commons and the folly of western conceptions of private property. My father was a graduate student studying chemistry

with a growing family to feed, so we moved to Tucson's south side where the rent was cheap. That was the house where my sister Sonora was born. She was named for the Sonoran desert that surrounded us. Dad's parents lived a little more than an hour away near the Mexican border and up a jagged driveway at the top of a dusty Patagonia mountain dotted with scraggly juniper trees and inhabited by squadrons of javelinas. Yes, that's the proper term for the bands of roaming and raucous creatures that resemble wild pigs, but are, in fact, oversized rodents with hooved feet. I loved the strange creatures and my grandparents' strange house

with its wood-burning stove, its cuckoo clocks, its hand-cranked coffee grinder. But most of all, I was fascinated by my grandmother, fascinated by the ways we disagreed. She baked big batches of sugar cookies, as grandmas are supposed to do, but with a gleam in her eye. She knew their sweet scent would fill the room and that I, a dedicated seven-year-old vegetarian,

would refuse to eat them because they were fattened with bacon grease. My grandmother was as sharp as the prickly pears you could see from her porch, but I was just as obstinate. Grandma's house was far from any stores and unconnected to most municipal services. Resources were conserved out of necessity, not out of tender-hearted ecological concern. Rainwater was collected on the roof, toilets flushed sparingly, and all trash tossed into an abandoned mine shaft. It was a chore I initially cherished, heaving black bags into the void, a satisfying test of my childish strength. Grandma was a die-hard libertarian. An emphasis there is on

the word hard. And the land belonged to her. If she wanted to dispose of her garbage in a pit, that was her business, just as any veins of valuable metal would have been the previous owners to exploit. My grandma had been a stay-at-home mother to six boys while grandpa worked as an immigration officer. When he was stationed at the airport in Winnipeg, she discovered the work of Ayn Rand. Rand and Milton Friedman were her gurus, capitalism her gospel, and she saw any government regulation as an unforgivable imposition on individual freedom. The market, not the government, knew best. In my grandmother's imagination, private property was

absolute, the line between what was hers and not hers watertight. But land, of course, is never watertight, and that is true even in the desert where water is scarce. As time went on, I'd lug the black garbage bags down the hill and throw them into the hole, watching them land with a thud atop the years of refuse piling up and think of the other pits I had heard the grown-ups discussing. From the 1950s to the 1970s, not far from our first house on Tucson's poorer and mostly Mexican-American south side, private military contractors had regularly dumped toxic waste into open air holes in the desert floor, and this waste had filtered into parts of the city's public water supply. Thousands of people drank it, and many died, came down with rare illnesses,

or like my sister Sonora, were born with disabilities. The south side of Tucson was an industrial sacrifice zone. As a child, I didn't understand these dynamics fully, but the stories of water contamination shaped my sense of reality and my sense of security too. I became obsessed with pollution, recycling, the ozone hole, extinction. I had climate anxiety long before the phenomenon had an official name. I knew that the garbage pit in my grandmother's mountain touched the valley below, that the boundaries between bodies and ecosystems, self and not self, were porous and blurred, that pollution did not just keep to a particular property because someone

owned it. My philosophical outlook was in some ways straightforward, an extension of the moral lessons children are regularly taught. By disposing of trash in the desert, a group of adults had polluted something that was not theirs to begin with, something we were all supposed to share. Earth, water, air, these are things that every person and animal needs. They are commons that should not be cordoned off or corrupted. Commons, of course, was a word I did not yet know, but I understood the concept nevertheless. I also understood that sharing had rules, rules being a basic tenet of any child's game. Something being common was not a license to destroy it. My grandmother had a dimmer view. Sharing, she thought, is destined to fail because humans are selfish.

She agreed with the economists and policymakers who argued that common resources will always be sullied and public goods taken advantage of. Because no single person or corporation owns the water or air or the welfare state, they will inevitably be overused and exploited by individuals seeking to maximize their own gain, dooming the commons to be even more poorly treated

than the privately held ground bursting with her garbage. My grandmother saw the colonial version of the commons as the only possibility, a pessimistic outlook that gained legitimacy from an influential article written by a biologist named Garrett Harden and published in 1968. Indeed, Harden's six-page article would become one of the most cited scientific papers of all time, and it remains highly regarded and often taught today. Published in the esteemed journal Science,

the tragedy of the commons asked the reader to imagine a scene that would soon deteriorate. Picture a pasture open to all, Hardin writes. In a world of competitive individualism, a rational herdsman, as Hardin called his protagonist, can be expected to put more and more and more animals out to graze on the land, precipitating environmental disaster. As he put it, individuals locked into the logic of the commons

are free only to bring on universal ruin. In Hardin's fable, the overgrazed pasture is a metaphor for all of society, indeed the entire planet, one he believed was being wrecked by overpopulation. The commons, be they open fields and farmland, air and water, or the water and welfare state, need to be enclosed for their own security and preservation. Only private ownership can keep things from being destroyed. But the evidence says something different. In 2009, at the age of 75, political scientist Eleanor Ostrom became the first woman to ever win the Nobel Prize in Economics for her work on the commons.

She was honored for a long career dedicated to debunking Hardin's exaggerated claims. For Ostrom, exposing Hardin's fallacy was not some progressive crusade. For Ostrom, exposing Hardin's fallacy was not some progressive crusade. She was a capitalist, but she was also an ardent empiricist, when curious to learn what real people actually do. To feed this curiosity, she spent decades meticulously collecting hundreds of examples of people sharing scarce resources. Groundwater management near her native Los Angeles, cattle herding in

Switzerland, lobster farming in Maine, communal forests in Japan, and fisheries in Nova Scotia and Sri Lanka. None functioned as the free-for-all open pasture Hardin had envisioned. Far from being tragic, commons have the potential to be maintained successfully and sustainably, in some cases for centuries on end. In the Spanish city of Valencia, for example, a vast and collectively run irrigation system established by Arab and Berber farmers over 1,000 years ago still serves over 10,000 farmers today. Security under these arrangements is the result of communally agreed upon rules that

cultivate trust, participation, and reciprocity, and that include systems for self-monitoring and resolving conflict, and all geared towards a further time horizon, not immediate reward. Ostrom was fond of saying that there are no panaceas, only possibilities. Private property or anti-democratic coercion, which was Hardin's other solution to avoid tragedy, are not the only options for managing scarce resources. The destruction of the commons is not inevitable. When I was in my 20s, my grandmother asked where I got my socialistic ideas. She was as befuddled by my values as I was by her bacon cookies. Was it my Canadian mother's influence?

Some meddling professor I'd met in college? The intellectual crowd I'd fallen in with in New York? The libertarian comic strips and copies of Frederick Hayek's The Road to Serfdom she had pressed into my hands had done me no good. In fact, they had only convinced me that making markets paramount was the wrong approach. If I could talk to her today, I'd say that my political commitments were born of observation,

my own form of childhood empiricism. I saw that animals suffer, so I decided not to eat them. I understood the water streaming from our taps was connected to earth and industry, and I wanted it to be clean. It's always hard to trace why we evolve the way we do, but if there's a taproot for my worldview, it reaches back to that trash-filled mind. I knew that I lived in a common world, one my grandmother's utopia of private property could neither properly value nor make secure. In 1974, Garrett Hardin published another article, this one in Psychology Today, building on the arguments he put forth in the tragedy of the commons. Titled Lifeboat Ethics, the Case Against Helping the Poor, it once again

invited the reader to picture a scene, this time an ocean instead of an open field. Small vessels full of wealthy passengers float perilously in a sea of drowning people who threaten to capsize the ships. The only way for the privileged few to protect themselves, Hardin argues, is to keep others out. Out of the lifeboats, out of the rich countries, out of the commons, by hoarding resources, halting immigration, and ending international food aid in order to reduce the global population of the poor, who he acknowledges are overwhelmingly non-white.

Hardin says, Hardin's ideas align with the current of thinking now called eco-fascist, one on the rise in our uncertain times. It is based on the narrowest and meanest conception of security, of guarding one's privilege at the expense of others' lives, lives both human and non-human. We know where this approach takes us. The scramble to achieve superiority by subjugating other people and creatures

has yielded a pyrrhic victory of megafires, heat domes, polar vortexes, atmospheric rivers, super storms, super droughts, and mass extinction. My commitment to thinking about security for the more-than-human world, like my interest in rights for nature, stems in part from my conviction that biodiversity has political as well as biological value. Each species we annihilate diminishes what we might call ecological democracy, underscoring the urgent need to devise a political system that can effectively represent and protect the interests of other life forms. The benefit to animals and insects, not to mention the 40% of plant species now imperiled by climate change, should be more than enough on its own to jolt us into fighting extinction.

But we should also cultivate solidarity with the more-than-human world out of crass self-interest. Biodiversity is essential to our existence, to the security of the ecosystems we are embedded in, to the food systems we rely on, and our ability to avoid future pandemics. When an ecosystem is healthy, biodiversity buffers the transmission of deadly pathogens, genetic variation dilutes and disrupts pathways of contagion. This means that the same shrinking and fragmenting of wild habitat that decreases biodiversity around the world also increases opportunities for what scientists call spillover, human-animal contact and cross-species infection. As a 2020 United Nations report on pandemic prevention explains, infectious diseases typically emerge as a result of human activity. They are yet another

insecurity-producing symptom of human hubris, an outgrowth of long-standing attempts to conquer nature. Land use changes, above all the clearing of land for intensive animal agriculture, are responsible for one-third of all emerging diseases, like the hurricanes and droughts and fires that result from a warming world. Novel and dangerous pathogens are connected to human activity, though not in the straightforwardly conspiratorial way some people like to imagine. The 1918 influenza, for example, likely began as a bird of swine flu on an industrial farm. Today's modern feedlots are even more congenial to harmful microbes

because they crowd huge numbers of genetically similar animals together. In the U.S. and Canada, livestock are dosed with 80% of all medically important antibiotics the countries consume, a recipe for breeding drug-resistant superbugs. As one medical journal recently put it, intensive animal agriculture gives viruses countless spins at pandemic roulette. The American Public Health Association, the largest organization of public health professionals in the United States, has repeatedly called for a moratorium on factory farming for this reason.

Given these and countless other challenges, we cannot limit our ambitions to the Human Security Council that the Global Trends Report envisioned, though I admit that would be a good start. Only more than human security will suffice. We must work with the natural world rather than against it, cooperating with the sun and wind to harness renewable energy, with the oceans and forests to sequester carbon without choking or acidifying them, with biodiverse plants to cool our cities and feed the world, with animal allies like water-protecting and firefighting beavers who provide refuge for other species. firefighting beavers who provide refuge for other species. Yet despite the consensus from the United Nations and leading scientists and physicians that our future security requires paying attention to

the interconnections between human, animal, and ecosystem well-being, a human-centric and profit- hungry attitude dominates. Instead of recognizing biodiversity as an essential component of biosecurity, Canada and the U.S. have recently passed laws that paint environmentalists and animal rights activists as urgent security threats. In addition to working with nature, we also, of course, need to work with each other. This requires turning our climate anxiety and insecurity into solidarity. Solidarity that is strong enough to respond to rising authoritarianism and to overcome the special interest championing the inadequate business-as-usual solutions

that make up the standard menu of government climate policies today. Ensuring a baseline of material security for people, especially a Greens job guarantee that can facilitate a just transition away from fossil fuels, is a critical part of coping with climate disruption. As activist and author Naomi Klein has written, the more secure people feel knowing that their families will not want for food, medicine, and shelter, the less vulnerable they will be to the forces of racist demagoguery that will prey on the fears that invariably accompany times of great change. Material

security, she says, can help us address the crisis of empathy in a warming world. But as Klein and others rightly insist, we cannot simply revive the social policies of the past. Instead of looking back nostalgically to the 20th century welfare state, which is predicated on assumptions of limitless economic growth and ecological extraction and marred by racialized and gendered exclusions, we should aspire to a forward-looking vision of a state that provides security for all in a way that is sustainable, a state that is both decarbonized and democratic, what I like to call a solidarity state. Rooted in the collaborative ethos of the commons,

a solidarity state aspires to both political and economic equality and a recognition of our fundamental interdependence, including our interdependence with the more-than-human world. As Anishinaabe linguist and lawyer Lindsay Burroughs has said, nature needs rights, but humans need a bill of obligations. Above all, we need the obligation not to take anything from nature unless we also take care to replenish it, so that we honor ecological limits. Limits are

something human beings have had to confront time and again. In the dialogue Critias, Plato laments land destroyed by mismanagement, describing the barren soil, absence of trees, and abandoned shrines where fresh springs used to be, describing them as the skeleton of a sick man, all the fat and soft earth having wasted away. The Sumerians, Romans, and Mayans, and other ancient societies pushed past ecological limits too, spawning instability and hastening civilizational collapse. To read accounts of the colonial era is to encounter settlers marveling

at their own destructive impact on the environment and sometimes planning the devastation outright. The difference today, of course, is that this destruction is now happening on a global scale. The image of the natural world as an inclusive circle instead of an exclusive hierarchy is not rose-colored romanticism. It is a more accurate reflection of the science that describes our reality, where we are embedded in an elaborate sustaining circle of life, non-life, and even semi-life. My father is a

medicinal chemist whose research focuses on viruses, including the one that causes COVID-19. research focuses on viruses, including the one that causes COVID-19. Viruses are microscopic sequences of DNA or RNA reliant on hijacking the energy of host cells to replicate. They inhabit a category-defying limbo, a strange gray zone between living and non-living, animate and not. What I see in my father's work is less a drive for mastery than a sense of mystery. Viruses are hardly lovable, but my father has shown me that they deserve our respect and even awe. The fact that our lives depend on biological and physical processes we can barely categorize in complex dynamics we certainly do not command, should occasion wonder, in a large dose of humility.

This humility is the ethos I associate with the good and generative capacities of insecurity, the kind that can help us be curious, connect, evolve, and maybe even survive in a radically changing world. I don't have a blueprint for a society in which all our problems are solved forever. Nobody does. As Ostrom said, there are no panaceas, only possibilities. I don't believe in utopia, but I can imagine a more hopeful future where our problems get more interesting and complex, a complexity befitting the tangled and unpredictable world that we live in. Should a handful of fossil fuel executives have license to incinerate the planet? Instead of such dull and demoralizing questions, the kind

of questions we're faced with today, we could aim to build a secure and sustainable society that will allow us to grapple with far more compelling philosophical and practical riddles. If nature has rights, should invasive and sustainable society that will allow us to grapple with far more compelling philosophical and practical riddles. If nature has rights, should invasive species have equal protections? Where does a watershed end if all ecosystems are connected? How can we make decisions and exercise sovereignty when our actions have global repercussions? How can we ensure freedom and dignity for everyone while respecting ecological limits? These are the sorts of questions worth pondering and the answers are not readily apparent. But for all that is

uncertain and unsettled there is one thing I do know for sure. The illusion of human security at nature's expense cannot hold. Thank you. Thank you. You've been listening to Beyond Human Security, the fourth of the 2023 CBC Massey lectures, The Age of Insecurity, by writer and political organizer Astra Taylor, recorded at the York Theatre in Vancouver.

Your local bookseller will have the book version of the lectures, The Age of Insecurity, Coming Together as Things Fall Apart, published by House of Anansi Press. Our partners in the Massey Lecture Series are Massey College at the University of Toronto and House of Anansi Press. The Massey Lecture Series is produced by Philip Coulter and Pauline Holdsworth. In Vancouver, special thanks to Stephen Quinn and Anne Penman. Online production by Alfea Manassan, Ben Shannon, and Sinicaj Jolic. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso.

Technical production, Danielle Duval. Our senior producer is Nikola Lukšić. The executive producer of the Massey Lectures and Ideas is Greg Kelly and I'm Nala Ayyad.