Workshop 7: Avoiding climate change violence: What is to be done?

The exact formulation of this final workshop will emerge out of discussions of those which precede it. Our workshop series has not offered direct prescriptions. But it has been founded on the premise that we are already on the brink. Ironically, for many communities around the globe, with or without climate change, that brink was actually already passed a long time ago. This workshop has to review both past and present experience of violence, not to say with the broadest human interests in view - not simply those of the richest and most powerful – before it can begin to move forward to offering formulas, or otherwise, for not simply considering, negatively, the avoidance of extreme and unrelenting violence in the age of rapid climate change, but positively, the reproduction of human society both globally and locally, as if this were something worth fighting for. How can we still fashion a tolerable and sustainable society for all humanity on this planet?  What does that imply about our long-term relationship to the biosphere? Must we, more concretely, now look to radical solutions which political elites have to date eschewed? How will protection of the world’s degraded and residual bio-sinks be ensured with immediate effect?  Where is Contraction and Convergence on the global agenda? Are religious and/or spiritual wisdoms actually now our last meaningful line of defence? Can self-destruct be avoided? Or is it too actually late? In which case, how do we save an element of the biosphere so it itself can regenerate?