Know Your Place
Thursday, February 12
Why I am a planet-raping fascist
It's not often you get to provoke extreme reactions, especially from otherwise reasonable people. But these 800 words have led to me being dismissed as a 'romantic' and a 'nimby', called an anti-human snob, an elitist, a fascist and - surely worse even than fascism - a member of the middle class. I have been accused of putting humanity and the global environment at risk, helping fossil fuel companies in their quest to build more power stations and undermining the the global quest to Save the World from the terrors of climate change. Not bad for a day's work.
What could lead to such a torrent of extreme abuse - abuse which is all the more remarkable because, though some of it was from the kind of nutters who enjoy leaving abusive comments under articles on the web, much of it was from environmentalists like me? Had I come out in favour of mass species extinction? Was I advocating the enforced culling of the human population? Had I joined the Labour party?
Well, no. What I had done was written what I thought was a fairly measured piece, which made three main points:
1. Renewable energy technologies are not, despite some green claims to the contrary, always harmless. Some - those which are carried on on a massive scale - can actually be harmful. The harm is of a different measure to that caused by fossil-fuel burning; it's harm to the wild landscape. But it's harm nonetheless, and we should acknowledge that.
2. Wild places and the non-human world are important both for the biosphere as a whole and for human wellbeing. They should not be ravaged by human industrial intrusion. This goes both for motorways and inappropriately-sited windfarms.
3. Environmentalists should be able to talk about crucial but intangible things - like beauty, wildness, stillness, the soul-lifting power of mountains and forests - without feeling ashamed. They should talk less like economists and more like poets, because if they don't, the economists have won. And then we're really in trouble.
I won't be disingenous and say that I am surprised by some peoples' violent objections. I did write this piece to provoke a reaction, but I didn't do so for fun, or because I like being contrarian (actually, I quite like the quiet life). I did it because I felt, as an environmentalist, that some (though not all) strains of environmentalism were in danger of being almost entirely co-opted by the establishment.
I'm not going to repeat the arguments I made in the piece, but I do want to clear some things up. Some people have reacted to what I wrote by sending me angry emails asking why I have come out against renewable energy or wind turbines. I reply by telling them to go and read it again, and this time to pay attention to what I actually wrote rather than what they think I wrote. I am not against renewable energy. I like it. I think it's the way of the future. I run my house on it, and I would like, in the future, to be entirely off-grid; sun- and wind- and maybe even ground-powered.
What I am against is the raping of wild places with massive energy mega-projects like the Severn Barrage. And what I am intensely, grindingly, frustrated by, is that people who call themselves environmentalists are simply, in many cases, unable to engage in discussions about the actual, physical, real environment - and our personal relationship with it.
Here is the excellent Robert MacFarlane, writing a few years ago about the now thankfully rejected Lewis windfarm, a vast mega-project which would have destroyed the peat wilderness of Lewis in the Hebrides:
The Lewis project is a salutary case study. It reveals that an American-Puritan error - that wild land is waste land, there to be put to industrial use - is rearing its head. Wild places, it has come to be understood, are the "uplands" of civilisation: landscapes that can renew, console, and lift us in unique ways.
Lewis's situation also reminds us of the spiritual, aesthetic, historical and ecological values that are put at risk when extraordinary landscapes are industrially menaced. These values are harder to measure, and harder to articulate than the hard numerical wattage of the turbines. But they are, unlike the wattage, non-transferable.
The green movement today is in danger of committing that 'American-Puritan error' on a large scale. Greens as a whole now have one focus and one alone: stopping climate change. This is entirely understandable. There is nothing wrong with it. Getting rid of coal and oil is urgent and important. Renewable energy is a much better idea. But if a single-minded focus on 'emissions' overwhelms every other urge that made us green to begin with, we are in troubled waters, and when we find ourselves pushing to destroy nature in order to save nature, then we need to stop, step back and take a deep breath. When we, as greens, find ourselves attacking our opponents as 'nimbies', dismissing arguments about landscape value and the non-human wilderness and smearing those who disagree with us as 'fascists' or 'deniers', then we need to ask ourselves some hard questions: how did we get here? Where are we going? And what are we for?
The new windfarm on the once-desolate moors at Rochdale, near Manchester,
is being touted by the Green Party as a triumph. Laugh or cry? You decide.
Well. I have written here before about my problems with the current climate change narrative. If we really have 100 months to save the world, then the world is already doomed. But we don't: in reality, the narrative is not about the planet; it's about human civilisation. Start this discussion with anyone and this soon becomes clear. What we are really talking about when we talk about rapidly creating a carbon-free economy is the desire to maintain human civilisation at its current level of comfort. If that requires us to carpet wild landscapes with industrial superstructures, then that is, apparently, a price worth paying.
I am all in favour of moving rapidly away from fossil fuels, and towards renewables. But we need to get real. The frantic scrabble to save our current lifestyles from the eco-crunch is like the scrabble to save the banks from the credit crunch: pointless, and too late. The crunch is already here. Now we have to learn to live with it. There is no technology, or group of technologies that can keep us in the fossil-fuelled style to which we have become accustomed. The best way to at least ameliorate the worst effects of climate change - it's too late to stop it now - is for society to scale back, scale down, get back into contact with real, actual, everyday nature, and rethink its values. Environmentalists ought to be thinking about ways to do this, not working on ever more intricate ways to help capitalism rejuvenate itself once again, only to begin anew the ravaging of the Earth.
I'm not suggesting this is easy. Hell, maybe it's not even realistic - in the climate change debate, very little is. But it is right. We are overstretching ourselves, and it seems to me that we are still in some denial about to what extent things are going to change. Nature is calling in a debt and the landing is going to be hard.
The root cause, in my view, of the environmental crisis is not technological or economic: it is imaginative. We imagine that we are separate from something called 'nature' - an optional accessory which we may like or not like, but do not really need. When environmentalists dismiss reactions like mine or MacFarlane's, they are as complicit in that error as any banker or oil company boss. They are missing the point, because they want to miss the point, because the alternative seems so much harder to contemplate. But contemplate it we must. It's something that has to be faced.
Civilisation as we know it is over. The question now is what comes next.
Posted by Paul at 9:41 AM 
9 Comments
Paul.
I commented on your CiF article. Hopefully I tried to be calm and measured in what I said.
At first, you were right. I didn't really get your point. But we did come to the conclusion that this is a discussion about aims/values rather than means.
However, I still disagree with you,and don't think that aims can be completely seperated from means.
First you are right about somethings.
Namely
"There is no technology, or group of technologies that can keep us in the fossil-fuelled style to which we have become accustomed."
"in reality, the narrative is not about the planet; it's about human civilisation"
and
"Civilisation as we know it is over. The question now is what comes next."
I think the problem I have with your analysis is that I don't think you are realisic, even about your own aims.
You claimed that we needed to move away form an analysis that said, we need x amount of energy, now what is necessary to achieve this. In its place we should have a analysis that said, we are prepared to do x, what is the best we can achieve with this. But I don't believe it is possible to completely put the intersts of nature as a whole (including humanity) over those of humanity alone. At base, there is a minimum standard of human life that people will accept. No one, not even you, is advocating a solution where people are deliberately made to die of starvation or hypothermia. Even the hippy living in a bender takes wood from nature and lights a fire to keep warm at night.
Given our current population, a certain amount of concreting wild landscapes is required, just to keep people alive. Or at least to keep them alive with a standard of living that even you wouldn't be able to live below.
Ideally we need a small population, but there isn't time to peacefully reduce our population. Yes, the whole 100 months to save the world, thing is bogus. But the point is, we have a limited amount of time (whatever that is) before our civilisation becomes infeasible. If we change before that we get some degree of choice in how society changes. But if we don't do things in time then the change will not be of our choosing. It will be nasty and brutal, and I doubt that the resulting society will have the values you desire.
Paul,
One relevant point I'd like to highlight...
You run your house on renewable energy - you support it. We need to find a way to supply everybody with renewable energy. One way is via mega projects. Another way is via small scale sites.
But does the tidal barrage cause more environmental impact than the cumulative impact of thousands of smaller sites producing the same amount of power? The barrage could generate 8.6 GW, which is equivalent to maybe 7,500 wind turbines.
One wind turbine on a concrete base might not affect the environment much, but add up 7500 around the UK, and you do find a significant impact.
This highlights that, cumulatively, small scale is not necessarily better.
"The root cause, in my view, of the environmental crisis is not technological or economic: it is imaginative." Yes, and what is the discipline that forms imagination? Theology. (Not the post-medieval pseudo-scientific stuff, but the original)
I agree with Ian. In the abstract you are absolutely correct. Sadly we're in a situation where unless we do everything we can to provide alternative energy sources we will be condemning much of our population to unpleasant death. The one thing I would add is that nothing lasts forever. Even if they did manage to create a Severn barrage I'd lay good odds that it would be gone in a century or two.
Posted by: 
Sam Norton at 5:32 PM
I hardly think young can say that theology 'forms imagination' Sam. Imagination is inherent in man. Of course, you believe God put it there whereas I'm not sure (there are many things I'm not sure about...!) But theology is the study of religions, and like any other discipline it's just as often used to shut down imaginations as to open them up.
But true, like anything else the barrage would not last forever. Neither will we, fortunately.
Imagination is inherent in man, and so is the reflection on the products of the imagination. When you're writing your poetry is it purely a stream of consciousness being channelled through you, or do you reflect and critique as you go along?
It's all about the power of words, and how to shape words to change how people think, so that they can discover that some things are possible that they never believed were possible, that, to use the cliche, it doesn't have to be like this. Perhaps I shouldn't have used the word 'theology' because it carries too much baggage these days (even though I'm technically correct). I recommend a very short book which will flesh out what I'm describing, and which would tie in very strongly with your campaigning stance elsewhere: The Prophetic Imagination, by Walter Brueggemann. (For a taster you can read what I put on my blog here).
Posted by: Sam Norton at 7:29 AM
while I have some differences with you, although I would point out the Green Party is opposed to a Severn barrage...I think the problem is not the disagreement of other greens but the nature of CIF, having written for it I got sick of loads of mad and aggressive comments, it is famed for it.
The root cause of the crisis is capitalism and the alternative in my view is commons regime property rights both the corner house and Elinor Ostrom have developed the idea in some detail.
Indigenous people especially in Latin America are making great progess in defending the planet, they are my great hope.
Have you thought about blogging about Hugo Blanco?
Posted by: Derek Wall at 6:05 PM
Sam - thanks, looks interesting.
Derek - I wasn't so bothered by the CiF comments, which, as you say, are par for the course (what do these people do all day?). But I've had a fair bit of negative feedback from 'working' greens - people in NGOs, other writers, etc. Though interestingly, I've had more contact from greens who supported that piece than from those who opposed it. Ultimately, I think this is something you either get or you don't. It's a gut reaction, and however much you analyse it, if it's not there, it's not there. If nature is nothing more than a 'resource' to you, then you're never going to get it.
I agree that capitalism is a root cause of the crisis, but I wouldn't put all your eggs in one basket. Capitalism is a major problem, but human greed plus the concept of the man/nature split has wreaked havoc in the non-capitalist world too. I don't think it's just about systems; it's about who we are, and why those systems are successful.
Well we have a system of highly organised greed and we need to construct alternatives, that to be is pretty much it.
The technical stuff on alternative economic systems is well covered by the 'Whose Common Future' document originally from the Ecologist.
The indigenous particularly in Latin America are steadily defending and extending this kind of vision...take a look at the work of my friend Hugo Blanco.
Over here in the UK, I have been very impressed the green policies being put forward by Jerry Hicks in his bid to become General Secretary of the second largest union Amicus/Unite.
The 'C' word is the one we have to over come...
Posted by: Derek Wall at 10:34 PM
Hooray for Mr Kingsnorth, and bloody right too. Sod the civilization salvage machine, and embrace real life - we won't have a choice soon.
Cheers
Keith
Posted by: Keith Farnish at 11:07 PM
