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The really inconvenient truth - part II

By Michael Fendley - posted Friday, 10 August 2007


With ever-increasing attention to environmental crises, be they climate change, habitat destruction or drought, what has been our response? What have we done or failed to do? Why? Have we done anything meaningful? What should we do? This article - divided into two parts - seeks to answer these questions, seeks to look at the big picture - across time, cultures and ideas - of our relationship with nature in an attempt to gain some perspective on where we are and where we are heading.

Part One began with a snapshot of our current situation and went on to explore why we are struggling to achieve a good relationship with the natural world, with a particular emphasis on the difficulties posed by our biological traits and physical circumstances. Part Two - printed here - continues this search but shifts emphasis to the dominant ideas and systems governing our lives and finishes with suggestions as to how we might live better on and with this earth.

Racism

Human expansion has, of course, often been culturally as well as evolutionarily rewarding. The empires of Rome, Britain and the USA are stark examples. This appropriation of natural and human capital leads to the next major hurdle in dealing with growth: equity between cultures and the spectre of racism.

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Nothing is more likely to silence the enthusiastic environmentalist than being called racist by questioning the growth and consumption of other, sometimes poorer, countries. The cry, in part justified, is that wealthy nations have done just this and benefited greatly, so why can’t the rest of humanity?

What is lost in this simple equation of two plus two equals four is that yes, Western nations have, in part, benefited from this expansion, but they have also suffered from the commensurate environmental degradation (as indeed, the entire globe has) so to repeat this behaviour would be like a son insisting on smoking because his father did.

Of course poorer nations should be able to improve their standard of living within reason, just as wealthier nations should assist with genuine redistribution of wealth and resources, but it will benefit no one simply to play a “me-too” game of expansion, consumption and ever-increasing withdrawal from an already overdrawn environmental account.

Technological fix

Proponents of ever-increasing growth and consumption claim that it is a false correlation between growth and environmental degradation, that it is an outdated 1960s and ’70s understanding and that the one can be “de-coupled” from the other. Again, the partial truth of this statement blinds us to its ultimate dishonesty: certain forms of growth and consumption are less damaging and degrading than others, both at the small scale of individual activities and efficiencies, and at the large scale of industry sectors and whole economies.

Many developed nations have smaller primary industry and manufacturing sectors - traditionally causes of significant environmental degradation - and large service and tertiary sectors (e.g. IT or entertainment industries) which can be much less taxing on resources.

Similarly, single activities or inventions can reduce our impact: engines that run on unleaded fuel and remove this dangerous pollutant; the solar cell that gives the potential to reduce non-renewable energy use; and the banning of feather plumes in hats that has saved hundreds of thousands of birds from being shot.

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There are hundreds of such actions and advances, many of them ingenious, but they cannot do magic, perform a sort of sustainability alchemy whereby raw growth and consumption as basically understood, promoted and practised, does not take from the environment. To do otherwise would be to deny the fundamental laws of physics; more of us appropriating more from the environment and disposing more wastes into it means less for other creatures and greater disruption of natural cycles - full stop.

Trivialisation

Partly as reaction to the huge scale of natural cycles, and partly due to clever political displacement of the profound nature and size of environmental problems, is the modern trend to trivialise, individualise and urbanise these problems.

The average Melburnian would be forgiven for thinking that if they only put a bucket in the shower, turned off the DVD or no longer washed the car then the problems confronting us would go away. These actions are all very well to garner collective support and momentum for larger, structural and meaningful initiatives, but a dreadful deception and betrayal if used to avoid difficult but vital actions that will really help.

In the given examples, our water problems are going to be solved only with a frank assessment of the balance and appropriateness of our agricultural activities, and as for energy, with honest examination of our coal-fired electricity generation. These are difficult, challenging issues that should not be trivialised by cute, distracting activities of little importance.

Anti-people

There is a notion, curiously favoured by some from both the right and the left of politics, that a concern for humans and nature is in fact not an equation of addition, but one of subtraction, of subordination of the human and its wants. This view was crystallised in the UK’s left-wing Guardian newspaper several years back in an opinion piece railing against the establishment of national parks in Africa which shrieked: “Who runs this planet?”

There is a sad alienation in this cry, an angry toddler’s voice that feels keenly even the slightest restraint or responsibility and will lash out like a vandal at any natural beauty remaining.

For such people, there really is no natural world per se, rather direct human uses of the natural world, such as for wood, for paper or for firewood, and it is to be used and exploited as we see fit as it is merely an extension of us. There is no understanding of uses other than those of direct consumption, and most certainly not of any sort of intrinsic value of nature that might exist beyond ourselves.

Such aggressive, oppositional and dichotomous positioning does not allow for a realisation that what might be good for nature might also be good for humans too, and that sometimes responsibility and restraint can yield as much for humans as unfettered consumption and indulgence. This stance is profoundly pro-people, for an existence of true quality and potential in perpetuity, not otherwise.

Capitalism and communism

Just as the left and right of politics can unite to handicap the establishment of a more sustainable relationship between man and nature, so too can the two great belief systems: capitalism and communism. Examples of environmental degradation abound in countries of all political colours: be it the polluting and shrinking by 80 per cent of what was the world’s fourth-largest lake - the Aral Sea - in the old USSR, to the destruction of the Three Gorges Dam in China, to the endless damming and diversion of the Colorado River in the USA so that it no longer reaches the sea.

Despite manifest differences between these two world systems, they have a common blindness in regard to the environment, making their contribution to the problem more a sin of omission or neglect, rather than deliberate destruction.

The free market, the hub around which capitalism revolves, cannot adequately capture environmental values and thus properly account for the natural world, and as such the environment constantly misses out in contests with other uses or values (usually tangible, monetary values), or is ignored altogether.

This is problem enough for the environment, but at least until relatively recently the capitalist system existed within, or contested with, other value systems, such as religion or various cultural norms, that had the potential to flesh out society’s total value system and properly account for and care for nature. This is no longer the case, with capitalism’s endless restlessness and aggression driving out other values and ideas and the “religion” of growth and consumption becoming the entire value system and centre-piece of culture in much of the modern world.

Communism also has only a rudimentary acknowledgement of nature, it being accorded an inconsequential role alongside the struggles of class and the narrowly mechanistic and consumerist “means of production”. If this is applied crudely, it has the capacity grossly to devalue the human condition and the wonders of the planet in much the same way as capitalism can and which it so trenchantly criticises.

Even one of the Communist Manifesto’s “ten commandments” is for the “bringing into cultivation of waste lands”, firmly placing communism within its 19th century, conquest-of-nature context.

Religion

The great religious systems of the world yield similarly mixed messages. Mark Kurlansky’s brilliant book Cod charts the remorseless discovery, exploitation and decline of Cod fisheries around the world and through the ages, and it seems that Cod was as enthusiastically depleted by the Catholic Spanish in the Middle Ages as by the Protestant New Foundlanders in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Similarly, Hindu-Buddhist Nepal has terrible deforestation (71 per cent cleared) and erosion problems; animist Maori New Zealand had a distressing record of species extinctions (e.g. all 11 Moa species exterminated); and Muslim Iraq drained its southern Marshes region, a priceless wildlife and cultural refuge.

Christianity has been portrayed as being particularly unhelpful in caring for nature, with justifiable reference made to its calls to multiply, subdue and exert dominion over the earth. These damaging exhortations, though, have been balanced, at least to an extent, by Christianity’s nurturing of the concept of stewardship for the planet and of “nature” clerics, such as St Francis of Assisi and the Victorian minister-naturalists of Europe that took unbridled delight in God’s creation - the natural world, and sought to care for it.

What, then, to do? With so many inherited and learned behaviours acting so strongly against our long-term interests and the interests of all life on earth, it will require a different way of thinking about ourselves, of how we are to live; continuation of old patterns will deliver a depauperate world for all.

It is beyond the scope of this article to go into the detail of the processes by which we will need to turn things around, but space allows suggestion of some basic principles and orientations.

First, we must re-establish context and connection. Our individualised, post-modern world is splintered and fractured into a million parts, each demanding identity, recognition and rights. This is supported and even created by a media that seeks to highlight individual actions, events and people but is loath ever to establish any context or connection between these entities. Everything is reported as being one-off, without a history and certainly without any form of context or perspective.

This ensures that we cannot establish proportion or significance, cannot see effects over space and time; in effect, we cannot learn because this sort of world and how it is communicated is one without patterns, one without any sort of framework of understanding.

A world and people without connections is, of course, anathema to environmental protection because it effectively denies the environment’s existence as the context for all our lives, just as it alienates us from it. We cannot hope to make broader, wiser, more balanced decisions about the globe if we have as our only reference point ourselves and the here and now. The simple adoption of reasonable temporal and spatial scales for our decisions, and the acknowledgement of others, human and non-human, will go far towards ensuring actions of enduring benefit.

Second, we need to acknowledge the concept and truth of the word “finite”. Some things are finite, some things are limited, sometimes there is no more, no matter how petulantly we may rail against this. There is only one earth, with only so much space and resources, and though there are a million and one clever and not-so-clever ways we can live within this equation, the answer is still the same: it’s finite.

Third, and closely related to the second point, we need to replace the “god” of growth with a god of quality. We will, in various ways, continue to grow and decline or be in some sort of equilibrium, but growth per se must come to be seen as a valueless concept, as merely a description of a change in state that can be good, bad or neither. Growth of an embryo is a good thing, growth of cancer cells a very bad thing, and growth of hair neither. This analogy can and should be extended to the scale of society and the entire globe.

In the space left by the mindless worship of growth we will need to establish a true concern and desire for quality, develop a concept that measures far better the true value of our actions than the infantile “bigger is better”. In this future it will be the quality of our society, the quality of our goods, the quality of our actions that will matter, not how many we are, how many we produce and how much we consume; we are not bacteria, after all.

Fourth, we must be more honest with ourselves. We have to stop trivialising and exempting ourselves from the simple realities of physics and the ultimately finite nature of the globe. We are like obese persons who insist that they can still eat cream buns all day so long as they walk to the letterbox in the morning and take a diet pill at night. If we keep on “eating” the environment the way we have, then it will be and is degrading and this will cause us and other creatures severe problems. This is the really inconvenient truth, one we have to fundamentally address, not just make partial, technical changes to how we generate power or dispose of pollutants, like CO2.

Fifth, and most important, we need actively to engage with the challenge that consciousness presents us, with the gap that it creates between ourselves and the natural world. We can never be, nor should be, an unconscious creature of nature and it is silly to think of us as such. But this said, we can strive to be more a part of the natural world, more aware of its workings and subtleties, more emotionally tied to its richness and health.

There are many, many paths that can help deliver this, from scientific enquiry to childhood experiences, to religious insights or educational opportunities, but it is perhaps through a much greater appreciation of, and involvement in, the arts that most ground can be gained. Perhaps this will help us, as Tim Winton says, find a sort of grace in nature, without which we can never hope to achieve some sort of equilibrium on this earth.

Embracing these values will be as enjoyable as it is necessary. Far from diminishing the human experience, it will nurture and enrich it in the widest sense; it will structure and encourage a life of true quality in connection with others and the great stream of life. Life will be enjoyed, not at the expense of the natural world, but because of and with nature. Then we will truly be engaging in Mill’s “art of living”.

Read The really inconvenient truth - part I.

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About the Author

Michael Fendley has worked on environmental matters all his life and currently manages education programs and consultancies for Monash University’s Sustainability Institute. In the past he has worked for local, state and Federal governments on local conservation strategies, coastal conservation and endangered species programs respectively, taught HSC-VCE for six years, been Conservation Manager for Birds Australia, CEO of the Victorian National Parks Association, and a consultant to organisations such as Parks Victoria, Deakin University and the Murray Darling Basin Commission.

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