Petro-Ambiguity: Environment, Energy, Culture

I was recently reminded of a research idea I had while brainstorming next projects. I never had the chance to delve deeply into the subject, but parts of it managed to seep through the Petro-Ambiguity project I ultimately chose.

As always, the title came quickly: ‘What Does it Mean to be Green? Environmental and Climate Solutions in Brunei’. I had been thinking about local green solutions, what counts as “green”, what gets left out, who gets to decide, what factors shaped local perceptions of greenness and so on.

The green solutions that get the most publicity (or have the resources to generate nationwide publicity), unsurprisingly come from prominent, dominant and multinational fossil fuel companies. This includes the much-talked-about solar plants, “whole-of-nation” energy transition plans, tree-planting initiatives as carbon offsetting methods, youth eco-groups, and much more.

There’s no denying that these solutions do much to bring awareness to the climate and environmental crises. However, they also heavily skew the public’s perceptions of what counts as valuable solutions towards Global North-based approaches that may exacerbate, even induce, social, cultural, environmental and climate inequalities and injustices. Think: technocratic, flashy, large-scale, investment-heavy solutions.

Caveat: Yes, I do think we need these solutions in the short-term, but we need equivalent investment in long-term, systems-level, community-led solutions, too.

Among the problems with these solutions are:

• Focusing only on the short-term – while they are scientifically proven to reduce or counter GHGs, they don’t do much to reduce the emissions of these gases in the first place (I don’t include cutting industrial emissions here, given that reduction in total production is largely ignored). In fact, they may even give license to fossil fuel companies to produce and emit more while allowing them to claim that they’re also offsetting these emissions (even if disproportionately and insufficiently), otherwise known as greenwashing.

• They are top-down solutions – most often, decisions in these spaces are made by high-level policymakers, government ministers and officials, researchers, foreign consultancies, and leaders of energy (read: fossil fuel) companies. Communities are largely left out of decision-making processes, even though these projects will likely involve areas that cover their homes, farms, crops, and land that they more intimately know. If community-based or community-led approaches were truly valued, we’d be seeing developments and investment in initiatives such as Sumbiling Eco Village and Eco Ponies Garden. While these were, at one point, high on the hype cycle, they’ve sadly fallen off most people’s radars.

• Exclusive focus on larger scales – the “whole-of-nation” approach only sticks to the national and institutional levels, disconnected from the dynamic social spaces of smaller communities, kampungs, families, and individuals. The Brunei Climate Change Office (BCCO) also only provides information on ‘Regional’ and ‘International’ climate actions, effectively leaving out smaller-scale efforts. While this large-scale approach may have made sense when the office was first established, a number of years have now passed and investments in smaller-scale initiatives still leave much to be desired.

My main issue, being a literary and cultural researcher, is that the language around green (and blue) solutions or climate action in Brunei remains in corporate or academic English, reflecting the Global North origins of the ideas themselves. Along with the above issues, this has the effect of intellectually and emotionally distancing the majority of the population from issues that actually directly affect their livelihoods and futures.

Whenever news reports or media attention covers climate-related topics in Brunei, the language that is used to cover them – think of “carbon markets”, “offsets”, “emissions”, etc. – makes it seem as if these are issues that the general population needn’t worry about, that the government leaders and policymakers will take care of it for them.

Ultimately, “greenness” or even anything related to “climate” is sequestered in the general population’s mind as being a “high-level issue” unrelated to their everyday well-being.

But what if we “Bruneianized” climate and green-blue issues and solutions? What solutions would emerge from localized, diversified, community-level, family-level, individual-level spaces? What actions can be materialized when communities are encouraged to co-produce and co-design solutions with national and institutional leaders? What would the green-blue and climate solutions look like when serious investment goes into other, less visible scales, particularly long-term solutions such as transitioning to regenerative, well-being, degrowth-based, decolonial models of economy?

To get to this stage, however, there needs to be a transformation in the way that climate and environmental issues are being translated and communicated. It is most certainly not enough to translate these issues into formal or standard Malay, which equally alienates much of the general public. I think successful communication entails connecting the seemingly abstract, theoretical, and distant ideas of climate change to the tangible, firsthand, material, social and affective effects of climate change (and the structural and systemic forces that drove us to the polycrisis) experienced by the Bruneian individual or family or community.

To me, this means connecting the high rate of youth unemployment to the stronghold of the fossil fuel industry on the labor market. It means linking the deteriorating economic conditions, felt in sharply rising cost-of-living rates, to wider instabilities in the oil market. It means identifying the increasing sense of dissatisfaction of living in a stagnant economy dictated by fossil fuels. It means drawing a line from declining mental health to, among others, the disconnect from the environment, driven by human-caused heatwaves that keep people indoors for their own safety. It means relating the systematic devaluing of the creative and cultural industries, knowledges and practices to the historical colonizing of epistemic production and valuation by the Global North and fossil fuel industries.

It means dismantling the co-optation of greenness by the (Western, white, corporate, elitist) one percent.

It means decolonizing our view of greenness and including in our definition regenerative, ecological, traditional practices that have always been practiced by our communities. This includes traditional ecological knowledges that have long been held in folktales, myths, proverbs, old sayings or what we now think of as “superstitions”. This includes learning from those who have learnt to live within the limits of their resources so that we can better manage those resources for a more equitable society and a more just future for all.

Only then will we truly have a “whole-of-nation” approach.