Aaron Wildavsky, 1992
This chapter is dedicated to Keith Farnish, a deep ecologist whose ideological views couldn’t be further from my own, but without whose help this book might never have been written. You see, although I knew I wanted to write about Climategate in some way or another, what I couldn’t quite decide was how. But after a brief – and perfectly friendly – e-mail exchange with Farnish, I finally realised what needed to be done. I would set out to answer perhaps the most puzzling and fascinating questions about AGW: the ones to do with the underlying psychology.
Questions like:
‘But if AGW isn’t true, what would motivate people to make things up?’
and:
‘If greens so love nature, why aren’t they more bothered about carpeting unspoiled landscapes with wind farms?’
and:
‘Why is it that greenies, who are supposed to be all “peace and love”, so often sound uptight and angry and shrill?’
Some of my conclusions, I expect, will be offensive to people who consider themselves part of the green movement, amusing to people who loathe the green movement, and hopefully enlightening to people who aren’t sure exactly where they stand but would like to find out more. I’ve tried hard not to exaggerate for effect – except occasionally, just for fun. The suicidal, mankind-hating, technology-loathing, apocalyptic vision of the world I’m about to present to you is not something I’ve invented so as to present the green movement in the worst possible light. Rather, I show the green movement as it chooses to represent itself in books such as Time’s Up (2009) by our friend Keith Farnish, which describes (with unhealthy relish) the coming apocalypse – brought on, of course, by humanity’s selfishness and greed, nay, by its very existence:
I’m rarely afraid of stating the truth, but some truths are far harder to give than others; one of them is that people will die in huge numbers when civilisation collapses. Step outside of civilisation and you stand a pretty good chance of surviving the inevitable; stay inside and when the crash happens there may be nothing at all you can do to save yourself. The speed and intensity of the crash will depend an awful lot on the number of people who are caught up in it: greater numbers of people have more structural needs – such as food production, power generation and healthcare – which need to be provided by the collapsing civilisation; greater numbers of people create more social tension and more opportunity for extremism and violence; greater numbers of people create more sewage, more waste, more bodies – all of which cause further illness and death.
Luckily, Keith has a solution to the problem. It goes like this:
The only way to prevent global ecological collapse and thus ensure the survival of humanity is to rid the world of Industrial Civilisation.
Perhaps, he suggests, we might achieve this through a process he calls ‘unloading’. (Or, as you and I might call it: cutting off your nose to spite your face):
Unloading essentially means the removal of an existing burden: for instance, removing grazing domesticated animals, razing cities to the ground, blowing up dams and switching off the greenhouse gas emissions machine. The process of ecological unloading is an accumulation of many of the things I have already explained in this chapter, along with an (almost certainly necessary) element of sabotage.
Personally I found this a bit disconcerting. (Blowing up dams???) Call me old fashioned, but I remain strangely attached to the Industrial Civilisation that Keith Farnish is so keen to abolish. It has given me work, transport, entertainment, clean water, healthy children, a nice home, pleasant holidays and much more besides. I think I’d be quite loath to chuck in the towel just because some guy in a book says it’s the only way our planet will survive. And it worries me that there are people who read this stuff and agree wholeheartedly: ‘Yes. Yes. Exactly! This is just what we need to do.’
One of these people is a fellow named James Hansen, who wrote a puff for Farnish’s book:
Keith Farnish has it right: time has practically run out, and the ‘system’ is the problem. Governments are under the thumb of fossil fuel special interests – they will not look after our and the planet’s well-being until we force them to do so, and that is going to require enormous effort.
Unfortunately, this is not some random bloke who coincidentally shares his name with a well-known climate scientist. It is the same Dr James Hansen who – as head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) – happens to control one of the world’s four main climate data sets. The same Dr James Hansen whose supposedly ‘unbiased’ scientific authority has been instrumental in pushing global warming alarmism.
Now, I suppose it’s possible that Hansen was too busy actually to have read and understood the book. But those slightly sinister phrases – ‘the system is the problem’ and ‘until we force them to do so’ – rather suggest he shares Farnish’s views on Industrial Civilisation, and agrees with the activist measures which Farnish recommends to destroy it. They are, in any case, consistent with Hansen’s behaviour elsewhere: his extravagant claim that coal-fired power stations are ‘death factories’ which should be closed, and his court testimony offered in defence of Greenpeace activists accused of criminally damaging Kingsnorth Power Station in southeast England. This rather invites the question: if this is the kind of stuff Hansen seriously believes, how can we trust him to give a reliable, honest, detached scientific view on anything?
Anyway, shortly after writing this story up on my blog, I had a nice e-mail from Keith Farnish. It said: ‘I am *genuinely* interested to know where your scepticism arises from – in my experience it is generally people not wanting to have to change how they live; money only comes into it in the most public cases.’
‘Too right, I am a person not wanting to change how I live,’ I was tempted to reply. But I realised that this would misrepresent my position. For Farnish it would merely confirm what he and his fellow greens have long suspected of people they label as ‘deniers’: that our actions and opinions are the result of a mixture of greed, selfishness, complacency and knee-jerk conservatism. It would simply never occur to them that the reason we choose not to change the way we live is because we’ve looked at the world, studied the facts and realised there’s absolutely no need to. And the reason it would never occur to them is that, like religious zealots everywhere, the greens believe they have a monopoly on revealed truth.
Now, I appreciate that this statement is pretty much guaranteed to raise the hackles of the more ‘fair-minded’ reader. I think, for instance, of my lawyer friend Helen down the road who doesn’t yet know what she thinks about climate change, but suspects there’s probably merit on both sides of the argument. ‘How can you possibly make the sweeping accusation that greens are religious zealots?’ I can just imagine her saying. ‘All they are is people who care about nature. And what’s so wrong with that?’
Hmm, well that’s an interesting point I’ve just put into your mouth there, Helen, and my reply is this: ‘There’s absolutely nothing wrong with caring about nature. Most of us do, me very much included. But the big problem with the green movement is that it doesn’t really love “nature”. It loves “Nature”, which is something else entirely. Let me explain…’
Nature with a small ‘n’ is the sort of thing you or I might enjoy when we go for a long country walk. We’ll climb a hill and admire the view. We’ll pick blackberries or – if we’re lucky and they’re in season – wild raspberries and strawberries. We’ll show our kids the galls made by wasps on oak leaves. We’ll pull out bracken, strip off the leaves and make swords or spears and have fights. We’ll spot a red squirrel and say, ‘Wow! That was amazing! I just saw a red squirrel.’ Or, depending on what country we’re in, a Fierce snake: ‘Jeez, mate. That was close. If he’d got your ankle you’d have been dead before you hit the ground.’ Or a grizzly bear: ‘Easy now. Don’t run. And if he comes any closer, play dead, and try to avoid having your face torn off by his claws…’
Nature – with a small
‘n’ – is something we drink in, admire, respond to, commune with, feel good in, seek solace in and thoroughly cherish. None of us, I feel sure, looks at a remote, pristine beach crawling with newborn turtles and thinks: ‘What that bastard needs is a juicy oil slick!’ We all believe in conservation. We’re all grateful for the natural wonders God – or the happy accident of Big Bang or however you prefer to rationalise it – has given us. We all like biodiversity. None of us wants the tree frogs to die.
For your serious green, however, the enjoyment you or I derive from nature is not just trivial but essentially wrong-headed, because it is grounded in selfishness and anthropocentricism. When you watch Chris Packham quivering with ecological righteousness on the BBC’s hugely popular nature series Springwatch and Autumnwatch, the distinct impression he gives as he treats you to yet more spectacular close-ups of feeding swallows and nesting otters is: ‘You don’t deserve to see this. These animals really would be better off if you weren’t here!’ Of course this could just be my imagination, based on my reading of his fervent advocacy of man-made global warming and his somewhat overzealous manner. But then again, when asked by the Radio Times which animal he wouldn’t mind seeing extinct, Packham did reply: ‘Human beings. No question. That’s the only one.’
I detect a similar puritanical intensity in my old sparring partner George Monbiot. When Monbiot and I debated in public for the first time, shortly after Climategate, I approached him in trepidation to shake his hand and to try to establish that, for all our disagreements, we did at least have something in common. What I settled on is the fact that we both adore the mid-Welsh countryside. Monbiot lives in a rural town called Machynlleth. Every year, I rent a holiday cottage with my family not too far from there. We’re simply never happier than when striding across the near-deserted hills, foraging for bilberries, looking for adders, gawping at the unspoiled views towards the Brecon Beacons and the Black Mountains and thinking: ‘God! How lucky we are to have all this!’
Though I know that Monbiot is capable of responding to the natural world with similar fervour, there remains a vast gulf between our understandings of it, guaranteeing we shall always be at loggerheads. That gulf, essentially, is the product of our diametrically opposed views on the role of man within nature. I take the positive line that, for all our myriad faults, we humans have created much that is beautiful and good on our planet, and that as we grow richer and more technologically advanced, we’ll continue to achieve more good. Monbiot seems to embrace a more pessimistic view of humanity, technology and ‘progress’, seeing our presence on Earth as deleterious to the planet’s interests.
I think this may be why greenies are able to gaze on the same beautiful Welsh views that I love, and yet not be horrified at the idea of ruining so glorious a prospect with fields of ugly white wind turbines. It’s because, in their puritanical eyes, the concept of ‘a nice view’ is an entirely human construct, dependent on aesthetic judgments which no other members of the animal kingdom would or could make. Nature – real Nature, with a capital N – is ‘red in tooth and claw’ – it doesn’t care whether a view is pretty or not. All that matters is the bigger picture: the balance of the eco-system. And it’s this balance, greens believe, that the human species threatens to destroy at any moment.
It’s surely no coincidence that some of the most ardent naturalists are often quite violently misanthropic. Consider this statement from the late professional 1960s gambler-turned-zookeeper John Aspinall:
Some of us are now drawn to believe that a demo-catastrophe will be an eco-bonanza. In other words, a population readjustment on a planetary scale from 4,000 million to something in the nature of 200 million would be the only possible solution for the survival of the eco-system or systems that nurtured us.
Aspinall loved his capuchin monkeys, his Himalayan brown bears and his tigers – which killed three of his keepers, with another two killed by elephants – but was decidedly less enamoured of his own kind.
The same is true – if to a lesser degree – of that nice fellow David Attenborough, doyen of nature documentary presenters. With his whispery, caressing voice and gentle manner, Attenborough exudes kindness, sympathy and grandpaternal warmth. But that’s because when we see him on TV he’s usually communing with gorillas and the like, which he obviously adores. Yet his views on his own species we can infer from his position as a trustee for the Optimum Population Trust – an organisation which, up until 2011, argued on its website that the world’s 6.8 billion population must, at the very minimum, be reduced to a more ‘sustainable’ 5.1 billion. Attenborough tacitly endorses the view, in other words, that there are at least 1.7 billion of us on this planet who just shouldn’t be here.
I was first alerted to the green movement’s curious psychopathology during a live discussion with environmentalist the Hon. Sir Jonathon Porritt on BBC Radio 4’s topical news debate program Any Questions. Until you meet him, he’s the sort of chap you imagine will be disarmingly nice. And though at dinner beforehand he was perfectly cordial, if a bit grand and diffident, in the debate itself he rather lost his cool.
What really seemed to get his goat was when I had a dig at his enthusiasm for a proposed scheme to build a tidal barrier across the River Severn, which flows through Wales and Western England and finally empties into the sea in the Bristol Channel. Not only would this be a massive waste of money – at least £30bn to produce an average of perhaps 1.9 gigawatts of electricity, about the same as a single, considerably cheaper coal-fired power station – but its effects on Britain’s historic landscape would be devastating. It would deprive Britain of one of its most remarkable natural phenomena – the annual Severn Bore tidal wave, which enables surfers to surf miles up the river – but would also flood the mud flats which provide the habitat for millions of wading birds.
At my invocation of the mud flats, Porritt flew off the handle, with a long, spluttering diatribe about rising sea levels (as high as seven metres, Porritt claimed, though on what evidence he never made clear) and about ‘a very grim future for mankind’ unless we reduce carbon emissions by 80 per cent by 2050. ‘Wonderful that James is such an ardent defender of the mud flats,’ he sneered, in a tone that made Alan Rickman’s Professor Snape in the Harry Potter movies sound more like Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music. ‘At last he’s found a cause worth defending.’
I must say I was taken aback. You might not give much of a damn about the biodiversity of mud flats if you were the executive of an oil company working in the Niger Delta. Or if you were some aggressively conservative, cigar-chomping capitalist father who just learned from his precious daughter’s new idiot leftie boyfriend that he was president of his uni’s Mud Flats Preservation Group. But surely one might expect better from an individual who has spent his whole career speaking up for environmental causes, whether as an advisor to the Prince of Wales, leader of the Green Party or chairman of the Sustainable Development Commission? You know – holism, butterflies beating their wings in the Amazon rainforest and all that. Since when did spoonbills and plovers and curlews digging for food in the Bristol Channel get to be ruled as ineligible?
What I witnessed in Porritt is an attitude surprisingly common among hardcore greenies. It’s what I call the ‘in order to save the City we have to destroy it’ mentality. Or, if you like, the ‘Nature trumps nature’ orthodoxy. Or – if you prefer to invoke Lenin, which I’m sure we quite reasonably can, given the authoritarian tendency of so many greens – the ‘You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs’ stratagem. And if I’m making it sound scary, that’s probably because it is scary. The more closely you examine the core tenets of its faith, the more you realise that there is nothing cuddly, fluffy or bunny-hugging about the green religion. In fact, you might not unreasonably describe it as a pagan death cult, rooted in hatred of the human species, hell-bent on destroying almost everything man has achieved, slavishly, weirdly, insanely devoted to a heartless goddess who offers nothing in return, save cold indifference
.
Does that sound mad and extreme? Of course it does. I’ve lost count of how many friends – even normal, sentient, vaguely conservative-leaning friends – who’ve said to me before an election: ‘You know what? I think I’m going to vote Green this time.’ And the point they’re trying to make is not to show how radical and loony they are – it’s not like saying ‘I’m voting for the BNP or the Monster Raving Loony Party’ – but to indicate that, rather than continue to play the tired, adversarial game between left and right, they’ve decided to opt for the caring, innocuous middle ground.
So let’s have a closer look at what these watermelons – green on the outside, red on the inside – really believe. A good place to start is Rachel Carson’s 1962 bestseller Silent Spring. ‘Without this book, the environmental movement might have been long delayed or never have developed at all,’ wrote Al Gore in an introduction to a 1994 reprint of the book. Gore went on to claim that Carson had an equally transformative effect on US environment policy as Harriet Beecher Stowe had on slavery. Except, Gore argued, Carson was probably even more significant because while Stowe ‘characterised an issue that was already on everyone’s mind’, Carson warned of a ‘danger that hardly anyone saw’.
Carson’s book shook an entire generation’s faith in the very notion of scientific progress. Hiroshima and Nagasaki had sown the seeds of doubt and neurosis seventeen years earlier; now Carson had the scientific proof: technology was going to kill us all. She argued that the main danger lay in wanton use of the pesticide DDT. This would cause a cancer epidemic that would hit ‘practically 100 per cent’ of the human population. It would also wreak almost unimaginable havoc on the Earth’s fragile eco-system by wiping out bird life – leading to Carson’s titular ‘silent spring’.
Watermelons: How Environmentalists Are Killing the Planet, Destroying the Economy and Stealing Your Children's Future Page 15
