Stewards must be far sighted

Rod Gallagher’s letter (ST 27/12) picked up an important question of ‘stewardship’ in the administration of local governance. 

There is plenty there to criticise, especially in relation to the increasing religiosity of bogus ‘woke’ ideological narrative and its baleful effects on our social/reproductive commons. However, of their many and egregious vices, woke concern for the stewardship of our natural world isn’t one of them. Marxism was riddled with nineteenth century pseudoscientific pretensions. Climate science isn’t. It is just another venue for science wonks who create and follow peer reviewed research, in the same way as they do in geology or astrophysics. And they don’t trawl the internet for climate ‘expertise’ coming out of obscure free market ‘foundations’ and ‘institutes’ funded by fossil fuel interests.

Worrying about our increasingly damaged environment is a bit like worrying about the rise of the Axis powers in the 1930s. Everybody has had fair warning of what is coming.

It is the responsibility of stewards to be far sighted in their administration. Preparing policy against predictable climate change adversity isn’t just sensible, not doing it is an irresponsible and self-indulgent betrayal of our descendants, who will have to live with the consequences of present inaction.

Both the social administrators and their manufacturing, services and mining opposite numbers are equally regime parties to the catastrophic deregulation and privatisation of the commons they are supposed to be stewarding, which are collapsing as a result, whether social or ecological infrastructure. 

Supporting local council efforts to prepare us against an ecologically destabilised world is as important as decolonising the imperialist Woke Ascendancy out of our social institutions, and for the same reasons.

Christopher Nagle, Grantville