Environmental optimism or wishful thinking?
by Jura Watchmaker, 20 November 2007
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.
Tuesday 20 November 2007 at 16:04
The RCP/Spiked line on science and the environment comes across to me as anti-naturalist.
It’s a kind of ass-backward “scientific marxism” that just knows in its little heart that history will cough up a cleaner car engine before the environment goes nonlinear.
Tuesday 20 November 2007 at 16:22
‘Technological determinism’ is the term you are looking for Drig. Vulgar vulgaris is the latin taxonomy for such-like. But I’m being too kind to Spikey nitwits with that.
Tuesday 20 November 2007 at 17:38
I think they still take seriously the maxim that mankind always sets itself only such tasks as it can solve. And what’s more, I suspect they still regard themselves as the only crew still faithful to Marx.
Tuesday 20 November 2007 at 19:48
I take Sedgemore’s counsel on the RCP (and thanks for the plug, Francis), and haven’t listened to O’Neill yet. Will do now.
For the time being, while I would agree on the importance of the rational and a humanist approach to “environmental” challenges, and a science-based debate, we need not be utterly bloodless and merely utilitarian, either. Rational or not, the human desire to be part of a flourishing, green and healthy world, filled an abundance and diversity of other forms of life, is part of what it means to be human, and we don’t have to apologize for that to anyone or anything. We’re entitled to a world like that. It’s our right.
Still, we have to get serious. We need genetically-modified food to feed the people of Africa (the recent UNEP Global Outlook report concludes that; I have no competence to question those scientists). We also need to get a firm grip on and grounding in climate science, for obvious reasons.
It’s not about whether we’ll survive as a species. It’s about how we will survive, and what kind of a world we want.
Tuesday 20 November 2007 at 22:46
You are all being far to kind to the many rumps of the RCP - frankly the fact that they passed off the Institute of Ideas (oxymoron) as something worthy of a seat at BBC discussion tables (Moral Maze, Question Time etc.) beggars belief. Constant “risk adverse society” mantras and endlessly pointlessly contrarian - utter waste of time.
And who pays for it all - even back in their TNS heyday they didn’t seem to have a membership able to fund their lavish art school publications but now how many of them are left to “tithe” the cash for this lot?
Tuesday 20 November 2007 at 23:00
You are all being far to kind to the many rumps of the RCP…
Humble apologies, and I won’t do it again. I honestly don’t know what came over me earlier today when I wrote this piece. Maybe it’s because O’Neill doesn’t sound like a lunatic. His comrade Claire Fox, on the other hand, is 100% guaranteed to have me throwing the wireless set across the room.
Terry is right. I don’t mean to come over all scient’ist. There is more to the environment than purely material reality, and as individuals and communities we have a right to a “flourishing, green and healthy world”, both physical and cultural.
We will almost certainly survive as a species for a few millennia at least, but we shouldn’t be complacent about this. A little humility is called for.
Tuesday 20 November 2007 at 23:04
This is going to be a long one.
I have to say I agree with O’Neill’s critique of environmentalism, to a great extent.
He does engage in some sleight-of-hand though, and it’s annoying.
Yes, we should be very cautious about elevating “science” to a status akin to religious authority, but I would have thought one wants the public will to be be informed by the best possible science.
Environmentalism is a betrayal of the left’s historic mission, he says, in that it abandons social and political analysis for a “naturalist” position. I’m largely with O’Neill here, too.
But Neil Denny did a good job catching O’Neill out on his occasional sleights of hand. In O’Neill’s argument that the challenge of climate change is not insurmountable, and shouldn’t be engaged as a moral crusade, there is a little bit of a trick at work. There really are moral dimensions to the challenge, so it’s not a case of one or the other. When he suggests that concerns about China’s huge contributions to greenhouse gas accumulations amount to a “new Yellow Peril,” he loses me. He loses me again when he presents as opposites the conception of climate change as a largely technical challenge we need to meet, and the notion that meeting the challenge will require a fairly thorough transformation of society. Both are likely to be true.
He’s right to observe the dangerous religious and apocalyptic undertones in climate-change alarums. But that doesn’t mean that we in the developed world don’t have to “rein in our ambitions,” as he put it. We do, as far as fossil-fuel consumption goes. And he’s wrong, too, to suggest that the choice we face is so simple as to be committed to development in the Third World, or condemn the poor to live in swamps.
I think we should go a bit easy on O’Neill because he was talking off the top of his head, not writing things down; I was on Little Atoms a couple of weeks ago myself, addressing much the same subject, and in retrospect I wouldn’t have been quite as flippant in the way I responded to at least one question.
But for the hell of it, here’s my critique of environmentalism, which may or may not accord with O’Neill’s, and I’m going to focus on terms:
By “environmentalism” I mean a worldview that tends to place culture outside of nature, separates the ethnosphere from the biosphere, and erects an impermeable (and largely imaginary) wall between the wild and the tamed. It’s largely a Euro-American phenomenon.
I object to environmentalism as a separate category of thought, uninformed by class analysis. I take particular exception to its misanthropic, anti-scientific, nature-worshipping tendencies, and the degree to which environmentalism remains where it began, as a subset of the ’60s counterculture that persists in a fall-from-grace metanarrative that situates “modern” people in pejorative terms and “pre-industrial” peoples as somehow vested with inherent “wisdom”, on the “wild” side of the wall - idealized neolithics, “spiritual” primitives, “Indians” and so on, who are similarly imaginary.
It also denies the great sophistication and wisdom of modern, industrial society, and also denies the care and affection with which “modern” people regard other forms of life.
We don’t need to be browbeaten into “caring” about “the earth”, or about other living things. We already do care. We’ve been naturally selected to care, as a species,and “modern” society has made great strides, besides. In the developed world, speaking generally, the air is cleaner, the water is cleaner, there are more birds, more trees, and life is measurably and spectacularly better than it was a century ago.
Persisting in the environmentalist metanarrative severely hinders the prospects for participating in and indeed forcing real, effective change for the majority of the world’s people, who want what we’ve got and deserve what we’ve got.
By “environmentalism” I mean a way of thinking and speaking that is corrosive to effective reconciliation between human needs (food, clothing, shelter, civilization) and the human desire for bird-filled skies, healthy forests, fish-rich seas, open spaces, and so on. It is that aspect of environmentalism that has also been immensely destructive to human cultures throughout the boreal belt of the northern hemisphere (the anti-fur campaign alone has caused untold misery), and among the marine-mammal hunting cultures of the world (sealers, small-scale whalers, etc.)
I similarly object to the language of environmentalism - its idioms, its terminologies, its argot. Here’s Doris Lessing on that: “It is one of the paradoxes of our time that ideas capable of transforming our societies, full of insights about how the human animal actually behaves and thinks, are often presented in unreadable language.”
This arises in part from the terminologies of the biological sciences, but there is also in environmentalism a silly tendency to neologism, which derives from the conceit that something fundamentally “new” emerged in our ideas with the environmentalism that erupted in the early 1970s. This is a function of the pervasive, hectoring, hippie piety that has caused such immense difficulty in engaging the masses of ordinary people, and opinion-makers and politicians, about challenges that we have for too long allowed to be set aside in a separate category of discussion and debate - which is to say “environmentalism.”
There. I feel better now.
Wednesday 21 November 2007 at 0:19
Terry — make that comment a post here.
For fuck’s sake. Do it now.
Wednesday 21 November 2007 at 0:34
Don’t forget that the RCP also have no problem with child fucking (aka pedophilia).
http://www.lobbywatch.org/p1temp.asp?pid=39&page=1
“Internet Freedom - no restrictions on paedophilia”
http://www.netfreedom.org/news.asp?item=30
Wednesday 21 November 2007 at 0:40
RCP stuff here as well
http://www.google.com/custom?hl=en&safe=off&cof=S%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.whatnextjournal.co.uk%3B&domains=whatnextjournal.co.uk&q=rcp+&btnG=Search&sitesearch=whatnextjournal.co.uk
Wednesday 21 November 2007 at 1:41
Terry - There is probably little more than a spliff skin between our views on this subject, but I have to question the influence of the kind of “environmentalism” you attack, and its relevance to the wider environmental debate.
The danger is that we get sucked into an argument between a misanthropic, deep green extreme, and an equally ridiculous pseudo-libertarian position espoused by the likes of RCP/Spiked.
It is worth highlighting problems with the deep-green metanarrative, as you do here, but I do think it’s time we move on and retake control of the debate from the contrarians. You’ve contributed to this with your book, but shouldn’t we try and extend this to the blogosphere?
For a start, as journalists we ought to question the role of our trade in setting the terms of the environmental debate. Deep-green activism gets so much press as images of crusties in trees, and protest camps outside Heathrow Airport, are vivid. They command the attention of the public, and increase TV viewer numbers. But in giving so much attention to this faction of the environmental movement, and its detractors in the “Fuck the hippies, I’m gonna drive my Hummer!” brigade, we allow ourselves to become distracted.
Getting back to the O’Neill interview, I agree with you that this was handled very well by Neil Denny and Richard Sanderson. O’Neill is not the first RCPer they’ve had in the Little Atoms studio, and the interviewees are never given an easy ride. In beer-fueled conversation with me Neil and Richard have been highly critical of Furedism in its myriad forms.
Wednesday 21 November 2007 at 5:06
Hi Jura. Agreed on all that but one important thing.
I’m not talking about merely the strange ideas of deep-ecology greenists. I’m talking about significant, reactionary currents and tendencies that are quite at home within the worldview that dominates environmentalism (yes, dominates). I’m also talking about the sadly mainstream (not marginal) environmentalist fall-from-grace narrative, and the predominant (yes again) environmentalist view that places culture outside of nature. Plus I object to environmentalism itself, as a separate category of thought, uninformed by class analysis.
I defer to you entirely on the question of the RCP. I’m also interested in your thoughts on Nordhaus and Schellenberger (nevermind Teague’s forward), here:
http://tinyurl.com/e478l
It set off quite a rumpus. Don’t know if it changed much, though.
Wednesday 21 November 2007 at 9:42
‘Technological determinism’ is the term you are looking for Drig. Vulgar vulgaris is the latin taxonomy for such-like. But I’m being too kind to Spikey nitwits with that.
I’m not sure they are that sophisticated. Spiked need and therefore expect technology to make particular developments in order to sustain their lifestyles whereas Technological Determinism says that whatever technology produces determines society’s forms. The latter is a parody of History with the needs of technology producing people’s situations, the former is a lullaby.
Wednesday 21 November 2007 at 13:19
Terry - will do, but I have a copy deadline to meet, and that essay is rather long. /F
Wednesday 21 November 2007 at 17:30
Will is right. Terry’s comment is bloody good for a main post.
On general points:
1. RCP/Spiked are bonkers and professional contrarians. Ignore safely and issue health warning.
2. Environmentalism has several manifestations. Much of it is also bonkers, some is misanthropic and some is tied to sinister right-wing neo-feudalists as well. However, there is a strong strand of Anthropocentric environmental left thought. Historically, I know of the Anarchist strand through Kropotkin, Reclus and Geddes and, through indirect influences, they shaped the more contemporary work of Murray Bookchin, who was fiercely opposed to deep ecology and whose own roots were in the Labour movement. All made the point that human emancipation had an ecological dimension. I need to write at length about it all desperately, if only work would relent for just a second. So perhaps us historians also need to do more to expose the neologisms.
3. I am more sceptical on GM. The main emphasis of objectors has been on environmental or health grounds. The more substantive argument is that, whilst GM itself may raise production, it may have an adverse affect on distribution as a result of the social consequences of the technology. This involves the issues of land tenure, the displacement of productive small-scale agriculture, intellectual property, etc, all of which raises the costs of production and ruins the livelihood of the rural poor. The effectiveness of GM depends heavily on political economy otherwise it could simply raise food production and increase poverty, and hence hunger.
Wednesday 21 November 2007 at 18:56
We definitely need more Peter Ryley on this subject and less Frank Furedi. I argued for cutting O’Neill slack because he was just giving out of himself on Little Atoms. But as it happens, Spiked has just now presented the party line on environmentalism in the form of a Furedi essay that sets out the case O’Neill was making. I’m being charitable in saying it is deeply unsatisfying.
Which see:
http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/3817
He begins with the argument that environmentalism represents a resurfacing of an old and reactionary case for moral restraint and a new bottle for the old wine that holds a disregard for moral limits as a precursor to calamitous excess of natural limits. Fair enough. But he conflates sensible and logical concern for environmental “restraints” – they actually exist - with such triviality as hotels encouraging guests to re-use towels “instead of leaving them to be washed in electricity-using washing machines.” That’s actually not about “green” moralism. It’s a private company exploiting the public’s concern about ecological deterioration in order to save money on its laundry bills.
When he poses the question: “How have the traditional values of prudence, restraint and conservation made a comeback as powerfully influential green virtues?” he doesn’t answer it by reference to any objective conditions in the real world. Instead, he proceeds with an argument that twists logic, thus: 1. Daniel Bell (”The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism”) sees a Malthusian basis for “prudence in a world of scarcity” 2. This argument for prudence should be understood as an environmentalist “green” virtue 3. Therefore environmentalism is Malthusian and bad.
Once that error in logic (there’s a fancy word for this but I’ve forgotten it at the moment)is made, Furedi then proceeds to dismiss the Club of Rome’s 1972 “The Limits to Growth” as the modern equivalent of conservative objections to the Poor Laws (for which he cites himself in some 1997 paper he wrote), and he is forced to engage in increasingly contorted circumlocutions to maintain this line, as in: “They claimed that humanity must abandon the idea of steady progress because of its destructive impact on the natural foundations of life.” You can see where this is leading, can’t you? Concern for the depletion of natural resources is therefore, at its basis, reactionary and anti-progressive, and “the moral critique of hedonism has become indistinguishable from the denunciation of the reckless depletion of nature by an apparently irresponsible species: humanity.”
Well, no it isn’t. It’s indistinguishable only if you ignore the contradictions that get in the way of your argument.
Much of what he says about the moralistic basis of environmentalism is true, and in some cases it’s dead right: “The cumulative impact of all these arguments is to reinforce the belief that a contented life is one that knows its limits.” But then: “This focus on limits is driven by a new project: to encourage a cultural shift away from the valuation of ‘raising expectations’ towards the celebration of ‘lowering expectations’.”
This has a whiff of conspiracy-mongering about it, but it also fails to acknowledge that there really are objective “environmental” limits that can be exceeded to ill effect. The evidence for those limits is overwhelming because they have been exceeded, to ill-effect, the world round. It’s what environmentalists usually call “ecological destruction.” It comes in the form of deforestation, soil erosion, crop failure, overfishing, the collapse of water tables, and air you can’t breathe without getting sick. And working people usually shoulder almost all the burden of that excess, after having shared only marginally in the “progress” that has produced these calamities.
In the end, Furedi ends up having to caricature and to a great extent simply misread the “environmentalist” critique of consumerism, and then he reiterates it in a more reasonable critique that he claims as his own, concluding that “instead of lowering expectations, we need to raise them – that is how we find meaning through our work and achievement,” contrasting a straw-man version of the “environmentalist” critique of consumerism – “the deeply held prejudice that we should slow down and live within our means” – with an optimistic admonition to engage in the business of “testing our limits, rather than respecting or bowing to them,” so that humanity might embrace progress, and “realise our very humanity through making and remaking our world.”
I’m not going to engage in the pretence that his critique has no moral dimension, or that it adds anything especially useful. Tarting it up with references to Hannah Arendt and Jurgen Habermas doesn’t make it any more helpful.
By the way, Gadgie, I’m largely with you on the GM analysis. But if it’s publicly controlled, rather than patented and private, we’d be well ahead of the game.