The really inconvenient truth - part II

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.