Spiked Online editor Brendan O’Neill was interviewed recently by Richard Sanderson and Neil Denny for their Little Atoms show on London community radio station Resonance FM. You can listen to a recording of the half hour programme here.

Talk of the Revolutionary Communist Party/LM/Spiked/Institute of Ideas/Sense about Science/Science Media Centre/Blah is normally guaranteed to raise my hackles. Right now, however, I’m not in the mood, so I’ll be a tad more restrained than usual in my comments.

I go along with a little of O’Neill’s critique of environmentalism, but at the same time I cannot help thinking that what the Spiked editor is attacking is partly if not largely straw man. And a pretty insignificant straw man at that, as the über-Malthusians denounced by O’Neill barely register in the mainstream environmentalist movement. George Monbiot may be a bit of a sour puss, but that doesn’t make him an Earth First‘er.

The RCP/Spiked line on science and the environment comes across to me as anti-naturalist. It is certainly not “humanist”, as O’Neill would have us believe. Any workable humanist philosophy requires a rational understanding of human limits, but the RCP/Spiked appear to have an almost religious faith in the ability of humanity to overcome any problem it faces. The reality is that homo sapiens is an ingenious and resourceful species, but it is far from invincible.

Like the RCP/Spiked I am fairly optimistic (insert shameless plug for Terry Glavin’s new book) about the prospects for humanity, but I do so wish the RCP/Spiked would engage with the real world in all its chaos and messiness, and not go on endlessly about sociology in its most abstract and data-lite form. What we need is creative rather than wishful thinking, but I detect only the latter in the community formerly known as the Revolutionary Communist Party. They are pretty smart people, by and large, and could contribute something useful if they put their minds to it.

Via heedthebaaal