About Environment 2: Puritans, New Agers and Shouters

Followers of the BBC soap, The Archers, will be familiar with the posh yurt-building hippy traveler new age vegan protester-brat, Kate Archer. (She is boring on as I write in fact - something about how strawberry plants will yield better if they are happy and respected.) Another resident environmentalist on the programme is Linda, the politically correct, knows-nothing-about-rural-reality, home counties incomer. Such tropes lead us to the next obstacle in the way of rational thinking about environment.

I sometimes think that, when I say anything about the environment, a picture is projected on to me, overlaying my short hair with wispy dreadlocks and my smart casuals with a baggy species of home knitting - probably stained with green stuff from hugging trees - and my shoes with sandals. At least that's the kind of person the listeners seem to be talking to when they respond.

Stereotypes can have at their core a grain of truth. And one such is provided by certain active supporters of environmentalism. For years the issue has been regarded as their own turf by puritan, hippy and new-agey types. The claim is that we need to abandon our gross behaviour and return to a simpler life, growing our own stuff, making our own clothes and communing with earth spirits. Recently, someone told me, in all seriousness, that we 60 million or so inhabitants of the UK could support ourselves by growing our own organic food on allotments.

Go to a gathering of people concerned about the environment and, as well as interesting new technology and thoughtful discussion, you might find a 'Healing Area' peddling such stuff as aroma therapy and 'laughter yoga', and a 'circle of stones [providing] a focal point for mystics and imagineers' and where the 'first port of call for those in need of medical care is the Medical Herbalists caravan'. (These at the Newcastle Community Green Festival.) You'll be pleased to know that the witches at 'Sensory Solutions' are also trained herbal practitioners. There's an old oak which is pretty wise too. (Green Gathering publicity.)

Trouble is, this nuttiness is a gift to the shouters who regard opposition to 'greenness', in particular climate science, as their own turf. It provides the context into which Owen Patterson could feed his 'green blob' rant last year, enabling him to come up with the sentence 'Back to the stone age … but Glastonbury style.'  

 Here's Patterson:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/10978678/Owen-Paterson-Im-proud-of-standing-up-to-the-green-lobby.html

And here's not-Patterson:

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/damian-carrington-blog/2014/jul/21/paterson-green-blog-right-climate-change

Oh - I've just thought: you won't have to read them. Look, the Patterson thing is in the Telegraph and the case against him is in the Guardian. Well, what would you expect from a bunch of old retired colonels/hippy Guardian readers? Circle according to tribal preference.

You see tribalists all over Facebook – shouting to each other, the already converted – reinforcing ideas already adopted, feeling a sense of community and righteousness. It's usual at this point to say that this is not rational argument, and I am not going to be an exception. But I want to put it more strongly – it's not an argument at all. It convinces no one who is not convinced already, and irritates the fuck out of the rest of us. It drives out getting properly to grips with the world (see earlier posts).

A sad consequence of all this stuff is that we, whose political and consumer choices need to be informed by reality, are prevented from getting sight of that reality. An example of this is the controversy some years ago about the use of GM crops. Both sides were avoiding the real point. GM foods may or may not be environmentally dodgy, may or may not improve food production – that’s to be found out. What was really dodgy back then was that one corporation, Monsanto, a herbicide manufacturer, wanted to use one of the many possible forms of GM, herbicide resistance, to control the markets. They dressed this up as a humanitarian mission to save the world; hapless Government, ill advised, ill informed and thinking on its feet, chose to buy that line. The opposition conformed to stereotype, indulging in vandalism and predicting Armageddon. So a realistic debate about the possible benefits or otherwise of this technique never got aired. The media, whose job should be to open up such issues for us and help us to understand them, gave us instead the soap opera they love, entitled 'Frankenstein Foods'.

When I am Dictator, I will make all the puritans hippies and new-agers drink Fosters lager while watching The Only Way is Essex for as long as I see fit. And I will make the shouty buffoons wear white-boy dreadlocks and listen to recordings of singing whales until I see fit. Or maybe I'll force them all to live together in one great compound where they can carry on their stupid tribal wars while the rest of us try to get to grips with the serious problems that we face. And there'll be a Medical Herbalist's caravan to treat the injured.