Gonzaga climate institute guest lecturer explores relationship between economy, ecology and justice

Economies, ecosystems and people are inextricably intertwined.

That was the message in a talk Monday night for the Gonzaga Institute for Climate, Water and the Environment from guest lecturer Gopal Dayaneni, who examined the climate crisis through the role of social movements.

The crisis was built on human exploitation, said Dayaneni, who teaches at San Francisco State University’s Race and Resistance Studies department.

“It is the concentration and control of human labor that is then wielded like a chainsaw against the rest of the living world that got us into the situation we are in,” Dayaneni said.

His talk reframed the climate crisis away from focusing on the technical problem of carbon to focusing on problems of the economy and the exploitation of land and labor.

Navigating those problems means reckoning with social inequity and ecological imbalance, and their apparent contradictions. It will take returning power to local communities, he said.

Dayaneni says the way forward is through “food sovereignty,” which means small-scale farming through traditional and regenerative practices outside the industrial food chain.

He also contested the idea that the solution is through clean energy.

What is needed instead, he said, is “energy democracy.” That means energy needs to be decentralized, decommodified and community-owned, he said.

“Yes, there are contradictions,” Dayaneni said. “We can all talk about all the problems of solar, all the problems of wind, and all the problems of everything. But what we’re fundamentally trying to intervene in is the unjust relationships of power.

“And figuring out how to navigate those contradictions with that kind of a moral compass is really the thing that I’m calling on us to do, as opposed to thinking we’re going to solar our way out of the crisis.”