tenv 11th Hour

The Poverty of Environmentalism

By John Taylor; 2008 Apr 20, 11 Jalal, 165 BE

 

I am calling this essay "The Poverty of Environmentalism" in memory of the late, great philosopher Karl Popper's famous attack on quasi-religious politics, "The Poverty of Historicism." Popper pointed out there that although communism had a pretense of being scientific, this was belied by its core belief that history would reach a tipping point all by itself and that a worker's paradise would come about on its own as the result of inevitable, ineluctable historical forces. This, Popper proved, is not a logical deduction based on evidence. It is an irrational assertion based on blind faith, not subject to refutation. Anything that cannot be proven wrong constitutes "not nonsense, but non-science."

 

The same applies to the environmental movement. Like all "isms," environmentalism is non-science. It notes that our world is deteriorating, but when it comes to actually solving the problem, the only answer is silence. Environmentalism produces what Nabokov called doughnut truth, "The truth, nothing else but the truth, but with a big hole in the middle." What is the hole? The means to the end.

 

Last night I rented the DVD of last year's environmental feature documentary film, "Leonardo DiCaprio's The 11th Hour." This is, according to the blurb, a "look at the state of the global environment including visionary and practical solutions for restoring the planet's ecosystems." In other words, it is intended to be An Inconvenient Truth, II, without the jokes or the PowerPoint slides, but with more recent, and therefore more dire, information. Wikipedia has a brief review at:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_11th_Hour_(film)>

And the Internet Movie Database has a few more details, at:

<http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0492931/>

 

This movie consists of stock footage, some of it quite impressive, supplementing points made by what one reviewer calls a "never-ending parade of speakers about the need to address the environmental collapse that threatens to destroy our way of life, and indeed our very lives." They are undoubtedly a lineup of the best thinkers on the environmental problem that mankind has to offer. Our Canadian saint, David Suzuki was in that number. But what they all are saying seems so hackneyed, so utterly inadequate, especially the religious leaders. The movie starts off pointing out how wonderful humans are, how amplified our powers are by science and industry. Okay. Then it contradicts itself. We are not so wonderful, because we are fouling our nest. All agree at great length that we are killing the planet because, vaguely, we have lost touch with nature. So what? Is adopting a more natural philosophy going to turn global warming around? They all seem to think that this is saying something. It is like a detective going to a murder scene and saying, “Yes, look at all this blood; the killer, if there was one, was certainly out of touch with the pain of others.” Is saying that going to solve the mystery? All it does is say that maybe we need a new detective.

 

Then, finally, the film comes at long last to the kicker, the hopeful solutions to the problem. Talk about bathos, baby! You have to multi-task to even grasp it, since somebody is talking even as they flash unrelated footage about green projects onto the screen, labeled in tiny print. Insofar as I got them, some are good ideas.

 

But the question remains, what is going to save us?

 

Surely, I keep thinking, the solution is not just a holistic attitude. It has to start with radical political and legal change, not just technological tweaking. When finally they do feature a couple of lawyers and political specialists, what do they suggest? Let us make the American constitution a little more flexible. Update it every few centuries. Is that it? Is that all you got? The world is about to be burned, baked, poisoned and drowned, and all you dare suggest is to lobby the powers that be to tweak a document that is over two centuries old in a stinking rotten, obsolete political entity? Let me talk about other things while I calm down.

 

I was surprised when 8-year-old Tomaso sat down and watched the entire film with me. I would have thought that three hours would be way beyond his attention span. I guess it was the fact that we had been playing a 1993 board game (that I had picked up at St. Vincent de Paul's for a quarter) earlier that day called "Environmental Warriors." The quizzes and lessons of the game jibed with the film serendipitously. The litany of problems laid out in "11th Hour" goes on for about three quarters of the film, at least half an hour longer than it should. I was finding it pretty depressing myself at times, so I hit the pause button frequently and talked it over to be sure that my little guy was not losing hope in our collective future. I sure was, so I had to pretend to be more optimistic than I felt at the time. Thirteen year old Silvie watched a little but found some images "disturbing," and missed the humor in An Inconvenient Truth, "We watched Inconvenient Truth at our school recently, and the segment from "Futurama" was the only part where the entire school laughed."

 

Okay, my heart is beating slower, so I will return to the documentary itself.

 

The highlight of the film for me was Janine Benyus, whom I have already discussed on this blog ("Wallace to Benyus," 2007 Aug 07 <http://badiblog.blogspot.com/2007/08/wallace-to-benyus.html>). She promotes what she calls biomimicry, "the conscious imitation of life's genius." Although what she says is undoubtedly innovative, exiting and hopeful, it would be absurd to pretend that bio-engineering, however effective it may be in the long run, going to do anything to solve the shrieking crisis of global warming. Biomimicry is not going to slow those relentlessly belching coal plants anytime soon. To put faith in a techno-fix like that is non-science, not even faith, it is spitting at the moon.

 

The interview with a former head of the CIA is the low point. Environment and global warming are so threatening that spies are sitting up and taking notice. Glory be, a security threat! Florida and Manhattan will be inundated, and without a shot fired or bomb dropped. Well, their concern may be a sign of how bad it is getting, but dredging up secret agents of a long-dead nationalist order (they are called spooks for a reason) and looking to them for answers, well, that is just sad.

 

Watching this film I was reminded of every final examination I ever failed -- and believe me, I am a world-class expert on that. When you have filled three quarters of the allotted space and you look up at the question and realize that all you have done is rephrase the problem, well, that is a good sign that you are not going to get full marks. Same way, environment experts that spend most of the time persuading us that the environment is our hope for survival – they are never going to get full marks from posterity. I am not saying that when people decades from now watch this film they will get nothing out of it. In fact they are very likely to say, "Ah, now I see why nothing was done to keep the Greenland ice sheet from turning into the world's biggest ice cube. The leaders of thought did not think. They did not dare break out of the nationalist box that bred them."

 

After the film was over I was lucky to have on hand a Macleans Magazine article that I had not read yet, "What it will really take to stop global warming," by Colin Campbell. I grabbed and devoured it with vim. This at least recognizes the fact that changing a few light bulbs is never going to stop the most enormous problem humanity has ever faced. The article points out that the environmental movement, having been on the fringe and shut out of mainstream policy-making for so long, is geared up only for grassroots approaches. (I would add that the religious thinkers are geared down to individualistic guilt tripping instead of reconciliation and collective action) As far as environmentalists are concerned, world government might as well be a project like what Tomaso suggested, unifying the Milky Way galaxy, or our local galactic cluster. It is just out of their sights, a fantasy. The word “world government” not in their vocabulary. Easier to think in old nationalist ways, break up and fight over it. Let the poor point fingers at the rich, and vice versa. And this article does its share,

 

"In the developing world there is very little understanding of why they should cut their living standards and deny their kids better health care or schools or things that we take for granted to avoid a problem in 50 or a hundred years." (Macleans, April 7, 2008, p. 45)

 

Yes, there are saints working for a better earth in localities around the world. But there is no instrument for accomplishing their goals. Helpful as localism may be in slowing growth, it is just not going to cut it. That at last is being recognized, especially by economists. They are realizing that as long as solar panels cost ten times more than coal plants, the rules of economics will keep coal king, especially in China and the United States.

 

"The only thing that may be able to spark the kind of radical transformation that is needed, say many in the new environmental movement, is a huge boost in public spending on energy research and development -- something on the magnitude of the spending that fueled the U.S. space program. `We should not pretend that all these technologies exist and we just need to scale them up or that a modest price for carbon will accomplish anything like that.' says the Breakthrough Institute's Shellenberger. Things like wind, biomass, and solar power do not yet exist in forms that could fuel the world's energy needs. Shellenberger likes to cite Al Gore's conclusion to his "An Inconvenient Truth" documentary that "we already know everything we need to know to effectively address this problem." Gore has since revised that, stating that we have everything we need to *start* fixing the climate problem. But this, says Shellenberger, is a bit like saying that we now have everything we need to start traveling at the speed of light." (Ibid.)

 

Will an effort on the scale of the race to the moon make solar and other energy sources cheaper than coal? It is certainly an appealing idea. Whereas the moon race was done out of nationalist pride, this race would be for our collective survival.

 

But one thing is missing.

 

The United States long ago had to swallow its nationalist pride and seek funding and technical help from other nations in maintaining the International Space Station. And even with help, the ISS is limping along. And even if by some miracle cheap fusion power were discovered soon enough to make a difference, how would unlimited energy alone solve the dozens of environmental disasters that are fighting to destroy us first? How cheap would cheap power have to be to replace an already working power plant?

 

Someday, somebody in the environmental movement must tweak to the fact that in order to run an entire planet there must be planetary government. In order for democracy to be worthy of the name, all must agitate for the sacred right to an equal, proportionate vote in a world federation. Nothing less than an elected world polity would have the moral authority to make laws to protect the oceans and other natural areas that all, rich and poor, will have to obey. As the Hidden Word says, ends are dependent upon means. Anything less than addressing the means to the end is nothing but blind, stupid dreaming.