The road to hell, it seems, may really be paved with good intentions.
This is something we’ve looked at before, and it is a perennial issue for those trying to affect change through the voluntary sector.
Can you go too far in trying to ameliorate the conditions caused by the issue you are campaigning on so that you end up propping up the system that is causing the problems in the first place?
Do foodbanks inadvertently normalise food poverty? Does the very fact of the sector’s existence let the state off the hook in terms of what it should be providing?
The answer’s never simple, and neither should it or can it be. This is the very stuff of society, an interpenetrating, living thing pulsing with historical drag, contradictions, backwards and forwards lurches and dialectical jumps.
So answers must be just as multifaceted as the questions. And connection with reality can help to clarify things. It really is academic whether foodbanks normalise poverty when you have to rely on them to feed your family. Likewise the sector’s provision of vital services.
When you deal with reality, you cannot be too ultra. Even a statement which is formally correct – charities shouldn’t have to step in where the state fails – actually becomes its opposite, and in fact dangerous, when it collides with reality. No, the sector shouldn’t have to step in, but people would die if it didn’t.
As an old saying has it, you may hate the state, but when you get mugged you call the police, not an anarchist.
This contradiction – reform or revolution – is at the heart of what we are looking at in this month’s magazine. Does the provision of carbon offsetting by charities just provide a greenwash for the very companies and system which may well condemn us all to extinction in a generation?
Even if we accept there are greenwashing elements to this, is it better to engage and at least blunt the edge of what these apocalyptic horsemen are up to? Or are we just making life more pleasant for them and more noxious (literally) for us?
An interesting part of this, and you can read Niall Christie’s excellent investigation into it starting on page 12, is the light it sheds on one of Scotland’s most pressing but least explored issues: land use and ownership.
It takes a huge amount of land to offset polluters’ carbon. Put aside whether this is a good idea or not, who owns this land, who decides where things should go? What about communities?
Answers? Who knows. Personally, I think we need a bit of reform and revolution, the former building to the latter. The problems we face are such that we can’t be purest or purely condemnatory. We need to get involved.
But we should use our vital role in combatting the ills of the system as evidence for why it must be changed.
Graham Martin is editor of TFN.
