Environmentalism

Environmentalism as Doctrine

Environmentalism has new clothes. Whereas previous heroes of environmentalism were the likes of agrarian conservationists like Wendell Berry (who strangely today is a hero of the localist right) who advocated for small-scale action of taking care of your local environment. Nineties children remember when they used to be encouraged to pick up litter or recycle. All activities could be undertaken both individually and locally. 

Today, environmentalism is almost solely and exclusively focused on climate change. A problem that is both global and totally beyond the field of influence of any one human.

This myopic focus on emissions has its doctrinal preachers. The first household name was Al Gore when the Inconvenient Truth was released. I was in High School at the time and in many subjects (from science and geography) the film was shown to us, students. The film warned that unless we cut our CO2 emissions we were heading for ecological catastrophe.

Global warming, along with the cutting and burning of forests and other critical habitats, is causing the loss of living species at a level comparable to the extinction event that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. That event was believed to have been caused by a giant asteroid. This time it is not an asteroid colliding with the Earth and wreaking havoc: it is us. Al Gore, An Inconvenient Truth: The Planetary Emergency of Global Warming and What We Can Do About It

Many of the claims made in the film haven’t come to fruition and others were outright debunked by the High Court in the UK that found that 9 scientific errors had been made by the film:

Mr Justice Barton yesterday said that while the film was "broadly accurate" in its presentation of climate change, he identified nine significant errors in the film, some of which, he said, had arisen in "the context of alarmism and exaggeration" to support the former US vice-president's views on climate change.

Today, the climate change doctrine has its Joan of Arc. It’s child saviour. In the form of teenager Greta Thunberg, which in many ways has a warning that is even direr than Al Gore.

I want you to act as if the house is on fire, because it is. Greta Thunberg at World Economic Forum, Davos, 24 January 2019, 

Her message is also, self-confessedly, black and white. She insists there is no more room to debate about what action should be taken. 

They keep saying that climate change is an existential threat and the most important issue of all. And yet they just carry on like before. If the emissions have to stop then we must stop the emissions. To me, that is black or white…. Some people say that I should study to become a climate scientist so that I can ”solve the climate crisis”. But the climate crisis has already been solved. We already have all the facts and solutions. All we have to do is to wake up and change. Greta Thunberg at Extinction Rebellion Rally, London, October 31, 2018

Greta Thunberg in the quote above lays out exactly - and without euphemism - what the modern environmentalist narrative or ideology is: unless we cut all emissions immediately we will face mass catastrophe. 

Notably, this speech was given to an institution - Extinction Rebellion - which provides that organisational structure that turns the climate change narrative preached by Al Gore and now Greta Thunberg into something that could fit the definition of religion.

Extinction Rebellion, The Church of Environmentalism

Extinction Rebellion (ER) is the organisation that gives effect to the doctrine of environmentalism. 

The vision of ER is probably the most obvious version of a highly constrained secular religion. 

The Malthusian roots of the environmentalist movement have been well documented. Malthus was a promulgator of a highly constrained vision of humanity. He believed that mankind was irredeemably flawed and no law can curb the vileness of human nature:

And yet in so short a period as fifty years, violence, oppression, falsehood, misery, every hateful vice and every form of distress, which degrade and sadden the present state of society, seem to have been generated by the most imperious circumstances, by laws inherent in the nature of man, and absolutely independent of all human regulations.

Modern environmentalism tends to see humans as a scourge on the planet as parodied by this attendee at a Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez town hall event who stood up and said “we need to eat the babies” to tackle climate change.

ER, like Malthus, believes that law and science have both failed to curb global warming so we are all going to die in 12 years:

Life on Earth is in crisis. Our climate is changing faster than scientists predicted and the stakes are high. Biodiversity loss. Crop failure. Social and ecological collapse. Mass extinction. We are running out of time, and our governments have failed to act.

This is why it goes beyond a constrained political vision. It doesn’t just say that we need to do everything to restrain human nature because it is so flawed, it speaks of complete annihilation and doom. This extreme vision of climate change goes well beyond what the IPCC predicted as the worst-case scenario. 

Whereas Malthus was merely intellectualising, ER has whole communities and codes of conduct to act out their belief in doom. 

ER claims to have groups in 75 countries where people can get in contact with each other. ER says:

Our local and national groups are the core of Extinction Rebellion.

Likewise joining ER is a 3 step process where you sign up to their newsletter, join their meetups and finally undergo training or “train up” so that you can be part of coordinated mass civil disobedience. 

It is no accident that this movement looks and sounds like a religion, to have it cut through today it must do. People are lacking meaning and community and that is something that those that want to battle the ‘culture wars’ ought to understand is that the appeal of joining something like ER goes beyond mere political interest. You gain a community and have the feeling of participating in something that has a higher purpose. 

The problem is that ER’s extremely constrained religious vision spills out into politics in ways that look like they rhyme with history but go far beyond. 

ER and the Unconstrained Political Vision of the Green New Deal 

The Green New Deal is the policy that is coming from extreme concern about climate change, and, unlike its religious roots, could not be more unconstrained. This highly constrained religious vision of ER giving rise to a highly unconstrained political vision is no accident. If the goal is to arrest mass extinction and doom everything is on the table. Why wouldn’t it be? 

The measures that were taken in response to COVID-19 were already extreme. Locking down entire populations with stay-at-home orders, shutting business, curbing all manner of civil liberties. If we are willing and even applaud governments for taking these measures for a comparatively minor threat compared to mass extinction, what will the policy response be if the entire planet is on the line?

Enter the “Green New Deal '' a policy that is designed to rhyme with history by evoking FDR's New Deal, his policy response to the Great Depression. 

There are many iterations or rather competing ideas of what a ‘Green New Deal’ should incorporate and each country's proposers have adopted slightly different scope and language (in Australia it is the ‘Green Plan’) but generally there is a convergence on the idea that the economic system should be rearranged in service of preventing catastrophic climate change.

The Green New Deal Group in the UK makes it clear in their opening statement that the ideas pushing for such a radical policy are the kind that spells catastrophe and doom:

The global economy faces multiple, linked crises. It is a combination of accelerating climate breakdown driven by fossil fuel use, corrosive inequality, and debt-fuelled over-consumption by a global minority pushing us beyond planetary ecological boundaries. These overlapping factors threaten to develop into a perfect storm making social collapse highly likely. To help prevent this from happening, and to lay the foundations of the economic systems of the future, we need a Green New Deal.

Modern environmentalism and its church, ER, are the most extreme version of a constrained secular religion, and its policy fallout, being an extreme version of an unconstrained political vision. But this is not the only example that can be drawn on. Many protest movements today have a similar line - such as anti-racism.