Think Your Efforts To Help The Climate Don't Matter? African Philosophers Disagree

(MENAFN- The Conversation) When I drive my car on weekends, I emit greenhouse gases – but not enough to change the global climate on my own. But when I, my neighbours and hundreds of millions of other people drive, fly, eat meat and embark on countless other activities that generate greenhouse gas emissions, we raise the Earth's temperature.

This is what we might call a collective harm problem , where the acts of many together lead to harmful outcomes, but no discrete act by any one person can solve it. Debates on how to fight climate change generally settle on the need for collective action ~ but does that make personal efforts inconsequential , even pointless?

If a single pro-environment lifestyle change – like one person giving up their SUV or cutting out meat in favour of plant-based foods – will not turn the tide of global climate change on its own, it's reasonable to feel there is little that“doing your bit” can achieve. This mindset is disempowering.

Fortunately, it is not the only way of responding to the challenge. African philosophers have a different way of looking at it.

Studies assessing public willingness to contribute to climate action show that people will act even at a personal cost, given the right motivations. The urgent task for philosophers and environmentalists is to provide them with those motivations. This is where African philosophy is helpful.

By African philosophy , I mean critical reflections on basic questions about the world – spanning the nature of knowledge, existence, morality, meaning and truth, from the perspective of African philosophers.

I am a philosopher who studies the problem of what appear to be collectively insignificant individual actions. There is a concept from African philosophy that I think is helpful to understand this:“complementarity”.

Complementarity denotes a relationship of interdependence among all entities – plants, animals, rivers, humans – in an interconnected community of living and non-living things. As a framework for understanding the world, it holds that everything within the human and non-human environment exists in a relationship of mutual dependence. Everything is connected to everything else. No entity can exist and flourish in isolation.

To that extent, the flourishing of one person depends on and influences the flourishing of other things in the world – including other people and animals as companions, the plants and soil which provide food for survival, rivers and oceans that are a source of water, and the Sun which gives the energy that sustains life on Earth.

Complementarity has been used by African philosophers like Jonathan Chimakonam , Aïda Terblanché-Greeff , Diana-Abasi Ibanga and Kevin Gary Behrens to develop environmental philosophies based on shared relationships. According to these philosophers, a view of the world based on complementarity neither foregrounds nor diminishes humans. Rather, it sketches a relationship of equals defined by the mutual participation of all.

This thinking is averse to hierarchy. No individual can claim to have more value than another. Anything that exists serves as an important part of the environment and matters equally, whether alone or collectively. Complementarity holds that the relationships that unite individual things can extend to prove the value of every contribution, no matter its size.

And so, complementarity rejects the argument that anything you do to help the climate is pointless. Driving my car is not an action that exists in isolation. My emissions are interconnected with other aspects of the environment.

Similarly, individual climate-positive actions occur in relation to others taken globally, so it is a mistake to assume such actions are pointless. Rather, their relation to other actions makes them not just practically useful but necessary, to make a difference at the level of communities and globally.

According to this African concept, the race to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is a complementary effort. And so, do not be discouraged from taking your own step in this direction.

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