“We hope that we can work to build systems of energy and re-source democracy; reparative and restorative justice; regenerative economy and agroecology; stewardship and equitable redistribution of power”.
BY NNIMMO BASSEY
School of Ecology on Commons, Care, and Community Energy Sovereignty
The socioecological crises in the world today can be traced largely to the disconnection of humans from nature and from communal responsibility. The crises have been reinforced and locked in by systems that enclose and subjugate nature and peoples to the forces of exploitation and degradation. The mindset that sees nature as cheap and disposable indicates the depth of depravity into which humanity has sunk.
In this school, we will interrogate the systems that have governed land, food, energy, and collective life in a debilitating extractivist logic that is leading to tipping points at most sectors. We will not only interrogate but proffer alternatives that will ensure we do not end up reproducing the very logic that we aim to replace.
Nigeria and other African nations are trapped in the colonial extractivist mould that permits the trashing of nature and impoverishment of peoples as long as foreign exchange drops into corporate and national purses. The rule appears to be that dispossession and degradation are permissible in resource-rich sacrifice zones, while exploiters and holders of political levers are treated as sacred and inviolable. This has ensured that expanding fossil fuel and critical minerals frontiers operate through enclosure to displace communities, privatize land and water bodies, concentrate decision-making, commodify nature, and permit environmental genocide.
In recent days we have engaged in wisdom gatherings in multiple locations — in Africa, Southeast Asia, and Latin America. Through these gatherings, we examined the epistemic and ontological foundations of ecological justice, centring commons, care, and community energy sovereignty as structural preconditions for a post-extractive future. The wisdom gatherings provide us with scaffolds of deep knowledge embedded in our language and customs for constructing the needed egalitarian and stewardship systems.
The demands from our Schools of Ecology and Wisdom Gatherings include an end to the erosion of commons governance and a rebuilding of ecological integrity and social cohesion. It is inescapable that a true socioecological transition must be sought through the pursuit of justice, movement building and recovery of popular power. Such a transition must address the key issues of who governs life, land, and livelihoods, and on whose terms.
Without a commons-based governance energy transition, we will simply be changing words and languages while remaining on the treadmill without any serious progress. Some simple questions can offer us clarity regarding the future we must both dream and construct. What factors have built the cannibal political and economic systems in the world today? What logic makes people insist that nature must be commodified before she can be defended? What has made it possible for the world to agree there is a climate crisis and at the same time refuse to take the fundamental steps needed to tackle it? Why is it hard to see humans have sense enough to transit from fossil fuels that are setting the planet on fire; rather than insisting we must squeeze out the last drop before contemplating such a basic common sense step? Why don’t we agree that the Stone Age did not end because stones had been exhausted?
There are yet other questions: what exactly are we transitioning to? Are we moving from one form of extraction to another? Are we moving from oil wells to lithium mines, from pipelines to massive energy infrastructures, from one set of sacrifice zones to another? Are we changing the source of energy while leaving the same concentration of ownership and decision-making intact? If communities remain displaced, if land remains enclosed, if water remains commodified, if forests remain treated as carbon assets, and if people remain excluded from decisions about the resources that sustain their lives, can we truly call that a transition?
The crisis before us is not simply a crisis of energy. It is a crisis of relationships. It is a crisis of how we have come to see land as property, water as a commodity, forests as timber, seeds as intellectual property, minerals as deposits waiting to be extracted, and communities as obstacles standing in the way of investment.
The commons remind us that life has never been sustained by markets alone. People have always created ways of sharing, caring, governing, and defending the things that make collective life possible. Rivers, forests, grazing lands, fishing grounds, seeds, knowledge, culture, and community spaces have been held through relationships and responsibilities that cannot be reduced to price tags.
When these relationships are broken, something greater than ownership is lost. We lose memory. We lose knowledge. We lose the ability to decide together. We lose the social bonds that enable communities to protect what sustains them. And when communities lose the power to govern the conditions of their own survival, extraction finds an open door and invites ecocide.
So, the question before the energy transition is not merely how quickly we can replace oil, gas, and coal with other sources of energy. It is whether we can replace the logic that has allowed a few to control the conditions of life for the many. Can we imagine an energy transition in which communities are not simply consumers of energy, but participants in deciding how energy is produced, distributed, and used? Can we imagine systems where energy serves life rather than endless accumulation? Can we imagine culture, food, livelihood, and memory rooted in our soil rather than our lands being reduced to sites for speculation and sundry investment projects?
The transition we need, therefore, cannot simply be a transition of technologies. It must be a transition of power. It must move us from extraction to regeneration, from enclosure to shared stewardship, from concentration to democratic control, from commodification to relationship, and from decisions made over people to decisions made by the people. Otherwise, we risk arriving at a future where the machines are cleaner, but the politics remain dirty; where the energy is called renewable, but the relationships remain extractive; where the language has changed but we remain on the treadmill, going nowhere. Socio-ecological transformation demands that we step off that treadmill. It demands that we recover the wisdom that tells us that what sustains life cannot be treated merely as merchandise, that care is not an invisible service but the foundation of society, and that communities must have power over the systems that shape their lives.
We hope that responding to these and similar questions will bring us to the conclusion that our future will not be built on competition and destruction but on cooperation and solidarity. We hope that we can work to build systems of energy and re-source democracy; reparative and restorative justice; regenerative economy and agroecology; stewardship and equitable redistribution of power. Together we can build a much needed post extractivist future.
…Dr Nnimmo Bassey is the Executive Director of HOMEF
