Post-Environmentalism- More than a Makeover

21 May, 2011 by Ben West

As I predicted in January, over the past few months we’ve seen some pretty seismic changes taking place in the global climate movement. Driven by Fukushima and the continuing reverberations from Copenhagen/Climategate/Deepwater Horizon, there’s a growing debate amongst climate concerned people about whether ‘environmentalism’, as currently conceived, is up to the job of dealing with climate change.

Although this ‘limits of environmentalism’ discussion has been going on for several years now in academic circles, over the past 6 months it’s starting to break through into activism, with growing numbers of groups discussing what a ‘post environmentalist’ agenda might mean in practical terms for their policy agenda, projects, communications and the way they work.

With that in mind, those of us who have adopted the label of ‘post-environmentalist’ have a real responsibility to define what we mean by it. Inevitably, some of that definition will involve us asserting our originality and defining ourselves against what has come before. Despite heated discussions otherwise, I think that’s perfectly legitimate. But it’s also crucial that we clearly outline what we are for, ensuring that the term means far more than a fashionable protest against the status quo.

Below, I’ve tried to outline the key things which I think define post-environmentalism, and which give it life and practical relevance.

  • Post environmentalism is about fundamentals
    Over the past couple of years, the movement has paid more and more attention about how it communicates its messages and how it is perceived by others. That’s a good thing. But it’s also important to recognise that communications tactics have their limits- remember the adage about putting lipstick on a pig?

    Post-environmentalists believe that in the wake of the setbacks of the past two years, climate advocacy doesn’t just need a facelift, it needs a fundamental re-think of the way we conceive the problems, and the way in which we construct solutions.

  • Post-environmentalism is expansive
    Rather than viewing climate change in a clearly-delimited, single-issue box marked ‘environment’, post-environmentalists conceive issue priorities such as climate, energy, transport, poverty and development as inseparable.A post-environmental coalition is more than a tick-box of interest groups, however.

    It is defined not by issues, but by shared values. Rather than asking others to see the world as we do, to care about ‘our’ issue, or by asking them to adopt ‘our’ policy aims, it works with them to define aims and policy objectives which fulfil the needs of all involved. Partnerships exist for the common and shared good, not just as a means to an end.

  • Post environmentalism is relentlessly populist
    In a democratic society, lasting political change relies upon building mass support. Far too often, climate activists have developed policy prescriptions and campaign asks in wilful isolation from popular and political context. The result has been policies which make intellectual sense, but which are unlikely to have mass appeal.

    Post-environmentalists are focused on crafting policy that is designed to coincide with the demands, priorities and worldview of the democratic majority. It is communicated in terms which are unambiguous, clear and relentlessly relevant. In a time-limited issue with millions of lives at stake, there’s no point in policy that doesn’t sell.

  • Post-environmentalism puts humanity at the centre
    Increasing attention to ‘green jobs’ and other economically-focused appeals are a great thing but, in many respects they miss the point. Appeals to human needs and human dignity need to be more than a hook with which to attract people to ‘our’ issue. Public transport matters because it improves people’s lives- not just because it reduces emissions.

    Post-environmentalists believe that human dignity and economic development must be at heart of our agenda for pragmatic as well as ethical reasons. Humanity is viewed as part of, rather than alongside or in opposition to the natural World.

    While they accept that there are legitimate critiques of our existing models of resource-intensive growth, Post-environmentalists also recognise that the human appetite for technological and economic ‘progress’ is a fundamental and legitimate part of our identity as a species. Post-environmental policies seek to channel, rather than challenge these impulses, viewing humanity’s creativity and ingenuity as resources to be harnessed rather than problems to be contained.

  • Post-environmentalism is self-critical and responsive
    A movement which defines itself against another is one which lacks durability and the ability to proactively shape an agenda of its own. ‘Post-environmentalists’ need to work hard to ensure that their agenda is shaped by more than their alienation from established environmentalism.

    Equally, however, post-environmentalists assert the distinctiveness of their agenda. They are open and frank about the loss of public confidence in existing climate policy, and about the limits of its appeal. Post-environmentalists should be open about their own failings and open to discussion and debate over their values and principles. There should be no sacred cows.

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Conservation as if People Mattered

16 May, 2011 by Matt Williams

Many will remember the way in which Britain’s conservation organisations came out firmly against a Severn Estuary barrage to turn tides into clean energy.

Similar opposition faces the country’s new high-speed rail link through the heart of the Chilterns. Conservation organisations can and often do seem backwards-looking, narrow-minded. They are unwilling to give an inch to development, even when that development would help combat climate change, they are opposed on the grounds of saving a particular, isolated habitat.

Now imagine yourself standing at Stonehenge, facing the immovable rocks, symbols for many of a closer relationship to natural cycles. But things are changing here more rapidly than the immutable stones might suggest. Britain’s conservation organisations are showing that they are far from monolithic and are switched on to the unique problems posed by climate change.

Stonehenge is at the heart of a colossal new area of nature conservation, a Royal Society for the Protection of Birds ‘Futurescape’. Landscape scale conservation, being introduced by the RSPB under the name Futurescapes and by the Wildlife Trusts under the brand ‘Living Landscapes’, is a radical departure from nature conservation as undertaken in Britain to date.

Conservation organisations have woken up and smelt the searing hot coffee of global warming. Unless something drastically different is done predicted changes in temperatures could undo many of the conservation successes of the last few decades. For me this shift is all about conservation organisations adopting a radical post-environmental approach to wildlife conservation.

Traditionally, nature conservation organisations have operated on a relatively small scale, slowly buying more land, or obtaining management agreements, and establishing nature reserves.  They have also tended to generally avoid interacting with the wider landscape, protecting areas from private or urban development. This bears all the hallmarks of something which Nordhaus and Shellenberger identify in their post-environmental book Breakthrough. They explain that often conservation organisations are at the root of NIMBYism, even when it comes to clean energy developments. Their view of nature is as something pristine, separate to human activity, and which can be protected in small, isolated patches cut off from the rest of society.

But on this scale, species won’t be able to adapt to climate change. As the climate changes, species are forced to move – their ‘climate envelope’ shifts. As soon as they are forced beyond the boundaries of a small parcel of land, a nature reserve, they encounter an inhospitable landscape. Nature reserves therefore become wildlife ghettoes.

Landscape scale conservation is all about managing habitat on a much larger scale (34 of the RSPB’s Futurescapes cover nearly 1 million hectares) so as species can deal with a changing climate. It also involves conservation organisations taking a radically different approach to those who they work with.

Take the Wiltshire Chalk Country project, with Stonehenge at its heart. At nearby Porton Down the RSPB is collaborating with the Ministry of Defence to give advice on how to manage their land more appropriately for wildlife and therefore deliver both defence and biodiversity targets for government. Farmers are given advice on taking advantage of public subsidies which reward them for improving conditions for wildlife on their farms. This is an example of increasing profit through conservation and connecting people with additional income streams.

Another RSPB Futurescape is the Thames Estuary project. This 1000 km2 project involves very close collaboration between the RSPB and the Port of London Authority. The RSPB proudly boasts that 300,000 migratory birds sit right alongside ‘a range of socio-economic activities’ and ’29 Yacht Clubs and over 70 wharves, terminals and port facilities… and offshore wind farms’. This is a conservation organisation positively advocating nature conservation stepping into the 21 century and sitting right alongside human use of the landscape for industrial, economic, recreational and clean energy purposes.

Landscape scale conservation is all about finding innovative ways of making conservation objectives tie into the much larger macroeconomic objectives of private and public landholders. Post-environmental conservation means leaving behind an ideological position which sees human activity as separate from an ecologically pure and valuable landscape.

Nordhaus and Shellenberger write about Robert Kennedy Jr, a seasoned environmental campaigner who opposes the world’s largest offshore wind development in Cape Cod near his own home. Nordhaus and Shellenberger’s Breakthrough describes how environmentalists are themselves often responsible for a NIMBY attitude that can lead to a lack of overall progress, on this occasion preventing a massive clean energy development. They advocate a pragmatic viewpoint which accommodates good development and accepts that nature is not separate from humans but must be shaped and changed by people. They say that even the most ardent conservationist must come to terms with good development as a necessary part of a changing countryside.

Landscape scale conservation is a post-environmental era project. The realities of a changing climate are forcing conservation organisations to think again and realize that so as not to lose the gains of the past few decades they must abandon traditional environmental positions. Rather, they are recognizing that conserving habitat and wildlife is part and parcel of changing the landscape for the agricultural, industrial and urban requirements of society.

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Life after Fukushima

15 March, 2011 by Ben West

I’ve seen first-hand what nuclear disaster looks like. Several years ago, I had the opportunity to spend a day within the 30km exclusion zone surrounding the remains of Chernobyl nuclear reactor disaster.

It both a shocking and a moving experience. Most of us have seen the photos- outlines of long-abandoned houses visible through the woodland from the roadside, now being slowly choked by trees. Coats and school bags still hanging on their named pegs in Pripyat’s school, and rooms strewn with books in what was once a library.

Just a couple of hundred metres from the shell of the stricken reactor itself, men in protective suits could be seen on the roof. They were working, we were told matter-of-factly, to prevent the structure from collapsing, and had to be rotated on fortnightly shifts to prevent a potentially lethal dose of radiation.

However haunting, my day in the ‘Zone of Alienation‘  is a walk in the park compared to those forced to pack up and leave their lives behind when forced to evacuate, or the dozens of fire-fighters who gave their lives or health fighting the fire that day.

Perhaps it sounds crass though, but on balance, I left that day reluctantly believing that nuclear is our least bad option. We live in the shadow of a perfect storm: Our societies are faced with the need to de-carbonise energy supplies in no more than a couple of decades, whilst at the same time contending with soaring demand for the World’s remaining fossil fuel resources.

To meet these challenges, investment – both in deployment and research – in wind, tidal and solar needs to increase exponentially, on scales not seen since the  Space Race. But even then, there’s no realistic way that renewables alone can meet existing energy demand, let alone projected growth from China, India, Brazil, Nigeria and others.

In an era of increased fuel competition, improved efficiency will be an economic no-brainer. But we would be naive to think that societies as a whole will willingly accept the kinds of wholesale lifestyle changes being promoted by some (usually affluent) Western environmentalists. China is not asking for our permission to build or consume- the question is not if, but how.

It would be unwise to speculate on the situation in Fukushima, because it is changing by the day, and I’m no nuclear engineer. It may be that we’ve experienced a meltdown, though even that would be far less serious than the fire at Chernobyl 25 years ago. Even so,  Japanese authorities are quite rightly preparing for a worst case scenario.

But amidst the media hysteria, it’s worth putting things into perspective. The risks associated with our current fossil fuel-based system are far greater- many of us take for granted the 100,000 coal miners who have been killed in accidents over the past century or the 1100 cases of Black Lung Disease reported each year in the US alone. Whilst radioactive particles in the air may attract headlines, nobody bats an eyelid at the 180000 global deaths per year from asthma- the majority caused by chemical pollution in the air.

Like any technology, nuclear will go wrong and there will be accidents. Don’t believe any salesman who tells you the technology is now foolproof- though it’s certainly improved by leaps and bounds since ageing plants like Chernobyl and Fukushima were built.

But like so many risks associated with our modern world- from riding a car to invasive surgery- it is a risk that can be managed, minimised and, as citizens of France, Japan and other nations whose prosperity for the past 30 years has been built on nuclear know- lived with. Just as Tokyo exists in the shadow of the active volcano Mount Fuji, and San Francisco on the San Andreas faultline and New Orleans in a giant bowl below sea level, calculated risks are the price we pay for the lifestyles we choose to adopt.

Unlike natural disasters, the risks of nuclear can be managed. Proliferation risks can be dealt with by robust systems of international inspection and oversight. Construction costs and safety risks can be minimised by greater sharing of expertise and technology, particularly amongst groups of friends such as the EU. Disasters can be avoided by replacing outdated plants with new ones rather than placating nuclear energy’s opponents by prolonging the lives of obsolete ones indefinitely.

A 30km exclusion zone is a terrible thing. But in comparison to an unstoppable wall of water it seems positively orderly. Evacuations can be carried out, situations can be monitored, lives can be saved, damage can be minimised. While Japan’s Earthquakes and tsunamis are themselves unlinked to climate change, they nonetheless provide a taste of the power, scale and unpredictability of the natural disasters that will be inflicted on places such as Bangladesh by the heating of the Earth’s systems.

Back at Chernobyl – which remains so far the worst-case scenario- it’s possible 25 years later to safely stand in the vicinity of the reactor for up to 2 weeks. 100km away in Kiev, life has gone on more or less unaffected. Natural life has proven remarkably resilient, with natural selection playing its part in limiting genetic damage. In theory, resettlement of the outlying 10km of the exclusion zone is possible. I fed the fish in Chernobyl’s cooling ponds. However strangely, life and ecosystems at Chernobyl go on.

A World of climate change and limited fossil fuel supplies presents us with difficult choices that politicians and environmentalists alike struggle to face up to. There is no magic bullet- the time for ideal solutions passed several decades ago. It is no longer a question of good or bad, but a question of what our priorities are, the kind of societies we wish to live in and of acceptable and unacceptable risks.

Each society will have to make its own choices about how it deals with those risks and priorities. Any wise strategy will maximise the contribution made by renewables whilst recognising their technological and political limitations. In places such as Germany and the US, environmentalists have opposed nuclear and ended up with new coal.

Ultimately though, given the choice between the systemic threat of climate change and the manageable risks of nuclear, it’s a risk we can’t afford not to take.

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An ‘Innovationeer’ Responds

3 February, 2011 by Ben West

Response to ‘No, clean energy is not a substitute for climate change

Shepard Fairey- the creator of the famous Obama poster- takes on clean energy

The author is quite right to point out that the sort of a clean energy approach advocated by Obama last week is very likely to be interpreted as part of a left-wing agenda- it would be quite naive to pretend that a programme of massive government investment in research & design and infrastructure is going to be interpreted as anything else.

Crucially, however, it is an agenda which can bridge the divide between materialist and post-materialist left-wingers. To put it within the context of UK politics, it is a strategy capable of appealing to both the ‘New’ and ‘Old’ Left.

Environmentalists are, according to the World Values Survey overwhelmingly post-materialists. Being materially and physically secure themselves, their primary motivations are the kinds of non-material values that the much-discussed Common Cause Report spends a great deal of time talking about- the advocacy of concepts such as global and intergenerational justice and equality in the abstract sense, and on behalf of others far away from ourselves.

It seems clear that too often the language and approach of these post-material environmentalists leaves the materialist Left far behind. The materialists tend to be kept awake at night much more by ‘bread and butter’ issues and concerns over things like job security, fuel prices and access to public services and education. They’re also often slightly more socially conservative.

At the heart of left-wing failures over the past 35 years has been the division between ‘Old’ and ‘New’ left. As has been often noted, Thatcher and Reagan’s success in the 1980s owed a great deal to their successful capture of the ‘Essex man’ and ‘Reagan Democrat’ respectively – materialist, aspirational members of the working class who had been alienated by the social liberalism of the New Left.

The New Labour coalition was initially very successful at reuniting these two progressive groups, before losing many post-materialists to the Liberal Democrats over issues such as Iraq and control orders and materialists over immigration and the abolition of the 10% tax band.

The clean energy agenda offers us a once in a generation opportunity to harness the energies and motivations of both the New and the Old Left. Like any good coalition, it includes people pushing in the same direction but for a multitude of different reasons.

The Common Cause Report has some good ideas about how the left can be more assertive and better organised at asserting its values. As a long-term project, it is the kind of deep framing that the Right began working on decades ago and which has the Left desperately trailing behind. However, the report’s authors seem to be writing very much as post-materialists working on the assumption that language is the only thing that prevents others from thinking as they do.

Unless its proponents focus simultaneously on policies that improve material and physical security of those they’re trying to reach out to (increasing the numbers of post-materialists over the long term) Common Cause is simply a recipe for preaching to the converted.

There appears to be a growing divide within the Environmental movement between those who view climate change as an issue which must be dealt as quickly as possible with any means available to us, and those who want to use it as a battering ram through which to push through a much more fundamental political agenda. I can broadly sympathise with their thinking- after all, it is no secret that conservatives have been using ‘slippery slope’ issues to open the door to their wider moral agenda for decades now.

But with climate change, there simply isn’t the time to play such a long game. Based on the science, environmentalists seem to be in one breath arguing that climate change needs strategies that fit into a 5-15 year time-frame, whilst at the same time arguing for the kind of generational value change that, by definition evolves over decades.

The truth is, climate change is too big and too urgent to be left to the post-materialist environmentalists alone. Those of us who believe in solutions have to be pragmatic and if we want to build political consensus, we have got to appeal to both intrinsic and extrinsic values, deal with the World as we find it, and build coalitions that reach out to all kinds of people without being too precious about the purity of their motives.

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It is Time For a Politics of Possibility

21 January, 2011 by Ben West

Spaceship Under Attack ! (at Liege Guilemins)
Creative Commons License photo credit: Gilderic
From a discussion ‘What’s Next for the Environmental Movement in 2011′ at Oxford University 19/01/2011

There’s a good chance that 2010 will go down as the year people stopped caring about climate change.

The statistics on the numbers of people who believe the science are down, Copenhagen was a disaster and, let’s admit it, Cancun a bit of a damp squib. Did anybody see the article in the Guardian last week showing that there’s essentially been a media blackout on climate change related stories?

So nobody cares about climate change, and it’s the economy that’s the big story. People are too busy worrying about their jobs, the cost of living, whether they’re going to be able to afford to finish college or even go to university. They’re concerned about their bus passes, and worried about the NHS.

I actually got an email from a colleague earlier today- there’s a new poll of young people and their political attitudes recently out. The big headline was that the young people polled don’t care about climate change nearly as much as we thought they did.

While that might be shocking, the thing is, there’s not a lot of evidence that climate change was that high on ordinary people’s agendas to begin with. I’ve spent the past couple of months looking at public opinion research over the past 35 years for my thesis and the results are quite interesting. When you look at a list of the issues people say are ‘the most important facing this country’, not once are ‘climate change’ or ‘the environment’ anywhere near the top 5 at any point over the past 35 years.

It’s usually in there somewhere- people say that they care about the environment in the same way that they care about puppies. The fact is, though bird flu has been at #1 on several occasions whilst neither climate change nor the environment ever have. Support for action on climate change is widespread, but it’s soft as hell. It’s a back of the mind priority, one that’s there, but which doesn’t routinely connect with most people’s attitudes, priorities and behaviour.

That’s even more true at the international level. A World away from our meetings, our campaigns, our middle class guilt, direct action and all the other things we do as environmentalists, the rest of the World is building on a scale bigger than we can possibly imagine.

New coal power stations go online every week, there are cities in China bigger than London whose names we haven’t even heard of. That country as a whole doubled the amount of energy it consumed between 2000 and 2009, and that’s set to grow by another 75 percent by 2035.

Of course these countries are also investing in renewables, and at a far higher rate than any of the West and that’s definitely a good thing. But it’s not necessarily because they consider climate change a particular priority. It’s because they need all the energy they can get to lift their people out of poverty, and they’ll get it from wherever they possibly can.

Environmentalism has hit a wall because in 2010, and for much of the past few decades, we’ve asked the World to choose between being better off and being good as if the two were mutually exclusive.

The world chose being better off.

If we step back from our environmentalist selves and think about our basic human instincts, that’s hardly surprising. As humans, we have an amazing capacity for empathy, for altruism, for the bigger picture- but ultimately, our own immediate physical needs come first.

It’s what social scientists call post-materialism. People’s concern for what they see as bigger picture issues like climate change, civil liberties and self-expression only really come to the fore after they become physically and materially secure.

That’s why environmentalists tend to be disproportionately middle class, why there’s a strong correlation between levels of environmental activism in a country and the wealth of its population. It’s why the radicalism of the 1960s was built on the back of the affluence of the 1950s.

So right now, we are staring over the edge.

We can play Pollyanna for as long as we like, but at the end of the day, environmentalists are failing to stop climate change and the clock. keeps. ticking. For all our fantastic achievements, environmentalism has failed.

Where does that leave us? The topic of today’s discussion is ‘the future of environmentalism’. When it comes to climate change at least, my somewhat controversial answer is that environmentalism doesn’t have a future. We need something new. Something bigger. Something more equal to the task.

What would this new, post-environmental politics look like? It’ll be great to hear your thoughts in just a few minutes’ time. But I’d like to share with you some of my thoughts, which I began in Ross’ film which you just saw.

The first change that needs to happen is that we need to abandon a politics of limits in favour of a politics of possibility. Far too often, having discussed a problem, we decide that the solution is to ban something. To reduce, to restrain- to pull back. We tell people to eat less meat, fly fewer planes, buy less stuff, ban plastic bags, don’t shop in this store, don’t say this, and don’t think that. And we publish books with appealing titles such as ‘’Our Final Hour”, “The Revenge of Gaia”, “The Long Emergency”, and “An Inconvenient Truth”.

This is what we could call the politics of limits. It’s the idea that reduces the problems we face into a battle between two polar opposites- Nature vs. Humanity. Nature is perfect, man has fallen from nature and, for nature to be restored, Man must stop doing whatever nasty things it is doing. It essentially views humanity as the problem whose behaviour must be curtailed for the greater good.

What I’m suggesting is that we need to move towards a worldview that sees humanity as part of nature, rather than opposed to it.

The truth is, as Nordhaus and Shellenberger put it [Google Books]:

“We are neither a cancer on, nor the stewards for, planet Earth. We are neither destined to go extinct, not destined to live in harmony. Rather, we are the first species to have any control whatsoever over how we evolve.”

We face a choice. An opportunity about where humanity will go over the next 200 years. It’s a choice which asks us to embrace a politics of possibility. It’s the kind of politics which believes that the way we solve the great problems of today is not by limiting human power, creativity, ambition and aspiration, but by unleashing them on a scale never seen before.

It’s the kind of politics which sells dreams rather than nightmares, opportunities rather than limits. It’s the kind of approach which calls on leaders of the nations not to stand around at the UNFCCC, wringing their hands deciding who will jump first and ‘take one for the team’, but rather an approach to the issue which sees the nations of the World racing against one another to decarbonise their economies and to reap the economic and technological benefits of being the first to do so.

In that respect, the young and sprightly International Renewable Energy Agency seems to offer far more possibility than the zombie-ridden UNFCCC bandwagon that has been rolling along in nowhere in particular for over 20 years now.

We need to awake the same sense of opportunity, belief in human enterprise and bare-faced peaceful competition that took mankind from the edge of orbit onto the surface of the moon in less than 10 years.

It’s already happening in the US. There’s a hugely exciting project over there called the Apollo Alliance, which is a coalition of environmental groups, trade unions and business leaders from both sides of the deep political divide who have published a roadmap for unprecedented investment in energy research and infrastructure that would decarbonise the US electricity supply using renewables in just 15 years. When Obama was planning his economic stimulus package in 2008 they were there with a plan, ready to go, and as a result, played a key part in shaping it.

Whether or not you agree with how they did it, the French have already shown that change on this scale can happen. In the space of 15 years, following the oil crisis in the early 1970s, France effectively decarbonised its electricity grid through a huge programme of nuclear construction. It’s that scale of ambition that we need to see, and you drive that ambition by becoming a movement of opportunities and ideas, not limits.

So finally before opening it up and letting the rest of you get your thoughts in, I want to close with some thoughts about how we make all this real to people. As I mentioned with the polling at the beginning, nobody cares about climate change as a standalone issue.

The way we do it, I think, is that we’ve got to break out of the yearly cycle of petitions and celebrity endorsements, and the ‘big’ campaigns that only those of us in the World of campaigning ever heard about, and ‘humorous’ stunts where only the organisers understand the joke.

We’ve also got to stop asking ourselves why more people aren’t joining our movement. Why should they? Why shouldn’t we come to them and talk to them about the issues that actually do keep them up at night?

One of those issues is almost certainly energy, which is of course directly linked to climate change. It’s the price of filling the car, the price of heating your home. Another one, of course, is jobs and employment. What about national security? That’s been a big one over the past decade, especially amongst those on the political right.

Building on those concerns and “using your tools to fix their car”, as the Clinton campaign put it, we could tell an entirely different, much more compelling, story of possibility.

How about a story that empathises with people worried about high petrol costs and explains how things could be better? Or one that listens to people’s concerns about Gran trying to keep warm this winter in the midst of yo-yoing oil prices? What about telling the story of the former miner in South Wales with black lung disease from a life down the coal mine, or the story of regions of the World torn apart by oil conflicts and of communities devastated by oil spills?

But there’s also another half of the story that needs to be told. It’s the story of the workers at the newly-opened wind turbine factory who used to be unemployed, of communities turned around. Of state-of-the-art, high-speed rail forever healing the north-south divide that scars this country.

Then you could take it up a gear with the story of a foreign policy guided by our principles rather than our energy needs, and of a competitive, proud and prosperous British economy- an economy that relies on nothing but the wind that blows across our land and the waves that crash against our shores. Now that’s a story! – an epic story.

It’s a post-environmental story, one that can appeal to anyone, anywhere, one that you don’t have to be an environmentalist to buy into. A story of hope rather than fear, of possibilities rather than limits, a story that rallies the hope, ambition and aspirations in all of us for a better world.

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Beyond the Pollution Paradigm

5 January, 2011 by Ben West

A response to: 2011 Resolution – Call It ’Pollution‘ Kyle Gracey

While I am all in favour of re-framing where it helps us to communicate our values more effectively, it would be a real mistake for us to assume (or to suggest) that CO2 emissions are a straightforward pollution problem like any other.

CO2 is patently different. It’s invisible, odourless and non-toxic. Unlike the kind of noxious substances an ordinary person would consider ‘pollution’, it’s not inherently bad. Our problems are not caused by CO2 itself, but rather by the quantity of CO2. If a diabetic dies from too much sugar, that doesn’t make sugar a poison.

Similarly, the term ‘pollution’ suggests a foreign substance sullying an otherwise pure and unspoilt environment. The effects of a chemical spill, for example, are very clealy seen within a specific geographical area, with the source of the pollution close-by. CO2 is different- it’s distributed across our atmosphere, and the relationship between excessive CO2 emissions and its consequences is often far from obvious and separated by thousands of miles.

You can’t gloss over those differences- even your dumbest opponent knows that CO2 doesn’t look or behave like pollution. That’s where all this ‘CO2 is plant food’ bull comes from- our attempts to patronise.

The author is definitely right in that we need to take another look at the conceptual underpinnings of what we’re trying to do, as well as the language we use to describe those concepts. But the solution isn’t to simply re-emphasise the pollution paradigm, it’s to replace it.

I’m more inclined to go with Nordhaus and Shellenger’s analysis. In their excellent book ‘Break through: from the death of environmentalism to the politics of possibility’, they spend an entire chapter explaining why we need to get away from, not closer to, the pollution paradigm.

What’s needed is not a pollution paradigm that hinges on ideas of human restraint, of carbon bean-counting and greenhouse gas reduction, because the truth is, self-imposed austerity ain’t ever going to sell outside of the middle class, let alone in China or India.

Instead, we need a story that speaks of human optimism and opportunity unleashed- one that calls for us to tap into humanity’s endless resources of innovation, imagination and enterprise in order to abandon the failed solutions of the past and embrace the opportunities of the clean energy economy.

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The Future is Bright Green

24 December, 2010 by Ben West

Lands End Light
Creative Commons License photo credit: midlander1231

Are you feeling bruised and battered enough yet? Whichever way you look at it, 2010 will be remembered by those of us involved in energy and climate change issues as the year environmentalism took one hell of a beating.

As my colleague Hannah has pointed out, it’s the year in which the world of climate campaigning came under pretty intense scrutiny from the media and public opinion, asking searching and –at times uncomfortable- questions.

It’s not that having things thrown at us is anything new- the vested interests, the insiders, and the doubters have been throwing stuff at us for years. But 2010 has been different. The vast majority of people who have criticised us, accused us of lying or –in the bulk of cases- just plain stopped listening, are good people. The chances are at least one of them will be sitting around your Christmas dinner table.

Even more alarmingly for old-school environmentalists, some of the divergent voices are coming from within the movement itself. 2010 has been the year in which a few brave individuals such as Mark Lynas and groups such as the UKYCC have put their heads above the parapet.

These ‘Bright Greens’ and their counterparts such as Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger in the US and elsewhere have challenged the movement to re-think its approach and methods. They’ve even dared to suggest that we re-evaluate our instinctive opposition to GM and nuclear power in light of the urgent realities of climate science.

Whatever you think about these attempts to kill off sacred cows, it’s hard to dismiss the argument that, amid the unprecedented airtime and incremental successes we enjoyed in the years leading up to Copenhagen, we got complacent and became detached from political and cultural reality.

Many of us felt free to retreat into our own worlds cushioned by the moral certainties of middle class idealism and ethical consumerism. We spent too much time preaching and not enough time listening, too much energy posturing and not enough energy organising.

There’s nothing like a good knock across the head to clear the cobwebs away and 2010 has provided plenty of them. It would be a disaster for us to ignore or try to shut down the debate that has opened up over the past 6 months- to put our fingers in our ears and to suggest that the thing to do is for us to close ranks, to stick together and to keep on doing what we’re doing, just somehow harder.

Any dynamic movement truly committed to creating change must be open to change itself. It needs to be receptive to new ideas and dissenting voices, to be willing to engage with rather than to simply dismiss critics and challengers. Such debates make us stronger rather than weaker and contribute towards, rather than distract from, our ultimate goals.

Those debates will be difficult- they ask us to be critical friends to one another and to engage with the negative stereotypes of environmentalism rather than pretending they don’t exist.

2010 has given us all a heck of a headache and 2011 must be the year when the Bright Greens take centre stage and inject some much needed radicalism into an increasingly dull green climate movement.

Real radicalism isn’t re-fighting the battles of our parents’ generation, it’s having the courage to publicly challenge old orthodoxies and build something equal to the challenges of the here and now.

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