Flatten the Hierarchy, Flatten the Emissions – A Horizontal Approach to Climate Change

By Hatim Husainy, Sustainability

Climate change is a pretty simple problem, at its core. 

We cut down all the trees, drained all the swamps, dammed all the rivers, and then started burning oil. We cut out the earth’s lungs and got addicted to smoking.

Since the problem is seen as quite complicated, it should first be discussed why the problem is simple. Humans know how to live in harmony with nature. Rivers with consistent flooding, like the Nile, can be harnessed with agriculture that counted on the flood, by planting crops that would not be ripped away when the current accelerated and thrived in many depths (Kielmas 2022). By adjusting our way of living to the planet, we arrive at an uneasy truce with Mother Nature. But that truce was recently broken.

In his book, The Solutions are Already Here: Strategies for an Ecological Revolution from Below, Peter Gelderloos defines the contemporary climate crisis as an extension of the long-running tendency towards ecological crisis. He argues that the problem cannot simply be seen as an extension of the way science and technology have developed, but as an extension of and trend from colonialism. When a society relies on maintaining large military forces of control, the imperial state of extraction quickly uses up all available local resources, and the empire goes seeking more (Gelderloos 2022).

He argues that this trend was present before many of the technological breakthroughs that defined the industrial age and onward – that Athenian soil during its imperial era was dangerously overstretched, that the Romans chopped down all their trees to build their navy, and so they needed to find more lumber elsewhere. While we no longer live in the age of singular, unquestioned empires, the legacy of what came before and the potential of what comes after are both shaped by the dynamics and philosophies that Gelderloos describes. 

As an example, dams are often wielded as tools of oppression. When a river is dammed, it creates inundation: land once used for fishing, flood agriculture, and other practices becomes submerged under artificial lakes. The safety that dams promise is often an illusion. When floods inevitably come, they are far more destructive because the river can no longer regulate itself. What looks like a neutral engineering choice is in fact a political one. Less “useful” land is sacrificed for energy and calm, usually without real community consultation—and often at the expense of Indigenous lands and livelihoods (Johnson 2024). Dams and water management show how seemingly apolitical technologies carry deeply political consequences. Recognizing this is key to any meaningful climate response, because escaping the crisis will depend as much on justice and governance as on science and technology.

The Great Green Wall is an international initiative in the Sahel—the region to the south of the Sahara desert in Africa—to dig in and, through a number of strategic plantings, regenerative agriculture practices, and intelligent resource management, stop the Sahara from growing any further, and to provide a model of what anti-desertification can look like. (The Great Green Wall Initiative). In India, the Room for the River project seeks to improve flow and make space for the river, a process that can calm floods and lessen their human cost, but also open up a return to ways of existing alongside the rivers that may have been forgotten (Rethinking The Future 2019).

The Green Revolution was a series of scientific advancements in the field of agriculture that was largely adopted and refined after World War II.  The new technologies, such as new fertilizers, new watering systems, pesticides, and mechanisation at scale, have dramatically improved crop yields around the world. Growing yields fed a growing planet—as the human population of Earth grew, these practices made sure hunger was never an issue of supply. They were slowly killing the planet. Widespread use of pesticides and artificial fertilizers have had a number of downstream effects, from changing the chemical balance of local rivers to leaks that put all life in the area at risk. These new farming practices have been highly water-intensive and are focused on profit above all else, and so often disregard caloric efficiency in favor of monetary efficiency (Shiva 1991). A maintenance of some tech, like mechanisation, a building out of others, like genetically modified crops, and a rolling back of some, like over-fertilisation and flood-farming, can maintain these high crop yields in the long term (Charles 2013) (Kuhn 2025). A return to older, more holistic practices like fallow years—when sections of land are set aside to allow their soil to recover—and crop rotation will also play a critical part in shifting practices as core to our lives as the way our food is produced, toward practices that try to harness the environment rather than defy it.

Additionally, there are novel practices that are now coming up to the point of usefulness as climate mitigation techniques that provide many side benefits as well. For instance, the United States Department of Energy recently made significant progress in growing big kelp farms at scale (Eger et al. 2025). Kelp performs really well at carbon capture, but is also edible and even convertible to biofuel as necessary (Xu et al. 2023). On the slowly greening roofs of New York City, new ways of thinking about how farming and urban environment can interact with each other are being considered, with early experiments in urban beekeeping proving quite successful (Lewis 2021). Over time, perhaps greener cities would have been networks-integrated hives that serve to pollinate plants across the city and maintain genetic diversity.

The problem of climate change or ecological collapse should not be seen as a problem of technology. The problem is not that we have mastered nature—the achievement of that mastery was a neutral act. The problem is that, under the current way the state and economy are structured, the moment we were capable of bending nature to our will, we did so. Short-sighted politicians and CEOs alike focus on bending the land to their will without true democratic oversight or long-term vision. The technologies of dams and drills and those of reforestation and regenerative agriculture can be tools of oppression. They can also, with democratic planning and conscious engineering, be tools of liberation. Technology alone won’t save us. What matters is who controls it and whether decisions are made democratically. Only then can the tools we build serve liberation rather than domination. 

References

Charles, D. (2013, March 7). In a grain of Golden Rice, a world of controversy over GMO Foods. NPR. https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2013/03/07/173611461/in-a-grain-of-golden-rice-a-world-of-controversy-over-gmo-foods

Eger, A. M., Wood, G. V., & Byrnes, J. (2025). An environmental niche exploration tool for kelp forest management. Ecology and Evolution, 15(6). https://doi.org/10.1002/ece3.71459

Gelderloos, P. (2022). The solutions are already here: Strategies for ecological revolution from below. Pluto Press.

The Great Green Wall Initiative. Great Green Wall. (n.d.). https://thegreatgreenwall.org/about-great-green-wall

Johnson, G. (2024, June 18). The US acknowledges northwest dams have devastated the region’s native tribes. AP News. https://apnews.com/article/columbia-snake-river-dams-tribes-58f5c6737df3c3e141cbc8e1cd4926ca

Kielmas, M. (2022, March 24). What did ancient Egyptian farmers do while the Nile flooded?. Sciencing. https://www.sciencing.com/did-ancient-egyptian-farmers-nile-flooded-18466/

Kuhn, M. (2025, August 8). 10 cutting-edge technologies that could change how we fight climate change. Climate Cosmos. https://climatecosmos.com/renewable-energy/10-cutting-edge-technologies-that-could-change-how-we-fight-climate-change/

Lewis, P. (2021a, November 18). Rooftop beekeeping: Honey bees in the Sky. Backyard Beekeeping. https://backyardbeekeeping.iamcountryside.com/beekeeping-lifestyle-topics/rooftop-beekeeping-honey-bees-in-the-sky/

Lewis, P. (2021b, November 18). Rooftop beekeeping: Honey bees in the Sky. Backyard Beekeeping. https://backyardbeekeeping.iamcountryside.com/beekeeping-lifestyle-topics/rooftop-beekeeping-honey-bees-in-the-sky/

RTF. (2019). An in-depth understanding of the room for the river project. Rethinking The Future. https://www.re-thinkingthefuture.com/case-studies/a12200-an-in-depth-understanding-of-the-room-for-the-river-project/

Shiva, V. (1991). The violence of the Green Revolution: Ecological degredation and political conflict. Zed.

Xu, S., Yu, Z., Zhou, Y., Yue, S., Liang, J., & Zhang, X. (2023). The potential for large-scale kelp aquaculture to counteract marine eutrophication by nutrient removal. Marine Pollution Bulletin, 187, 114513. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.marpolbul.2022.114513