A Rational Environmentalism
There has been yet another book published by a long-term member of the environmental movement, pointing out the flaws and delusions of environmentalism, which the ‘climate sceptic’ press are praising highly. The book is by Michael Shellenberger and is called Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All.
I've never been impressed by 'the God that failed narratives.' That people were so deluded once doesn't encourage me to believe that they are any less deluded now. Usually, such folk spend a lifetime exchanging one delusion for another. Rather than spend a lot of time on this, I shall briefly comment. I have written at length on the deficiencies and failures of environmentalism as an ethics and politics. Rather than repeat my criticisms there – which are lengthy and detailed – I shall provide links to my own work. Briefly, my view is that the environmental movement is failing because it lacks a bridge between the field of theoretical reason (our knowledge of the external world, science, fact, and its spin-off technological know-how) and the field of practical reason (politics and ethics, also economic as a branch of them, the world of value, how humans negotiate their practical interchange with their environment, the mediation between society and nature). I can already hear environmentalists denying this, pointing to myriad schemes and plans and designs and blueprints they have for the ecological society. Such thinking mistakes design and engineering modeled on abstract knowledge for ethics and politics. There is no dialogue and no negotiation, there is no engagement with people, no civics, no genuine politics. There is a disconnect. The criticisms I have developed over the years are far more intricate than this, though, and address the issue at a moral-psychological and spiritual level. There is a despair about the environmental movement that derives from the way that the cosmic longing for meaning on the part of human beings have been diverted and perverted, improperly attached, betraying an excessive adherence to some objects and a deficient, inattentive, or plain absent attitude to others. The religious sensibility cannot be extirpated, as many have thought, and consciously pursued, only sublimated, reappearing in myriad bastardized forms. A couple of years ago now I wrote a blog article on the number of environmentalist friends I saw sharing an article by Dr Glenn Barry, repeating its message like a mantra: ‘There is only Nature, and she needs us.’ There comments were hysterical, demonstrating a hopeless negativity about human beings, a disdainful attitude towards politics and various attempts to turn things around by way of collective political action – socialism – and openly contemptuous about God, religion, and Christianity. All we have, Barry claimed, are ‘god myths.’ I checked his work out and discovered an anti-religious bigot who seems to think we live in the mid-seventeenth century. I pulled this thinking apart at the time and will say no more here, other than supply the links. And underline the extent to which far too many environmentalists positively revelled in the doom and negativity. That indicated to me that I was in the presence of a death cult, people who were projecting their own inner hopelessness upon the world, denying a future to others because they could see no future for themselves and their own narcissistic prejudices.
Last year I engaged in much more detailed work on the activist turn in environmentalism, paying particular attention to Extinction Rebellion and the circus around Greta Thunberg. This is treacherous ground, not least on account of the mass support both have generated, both among those who were already environmentalists as well as the public, especially the youth of the world. So many young people declared themselves so inspired and so afraid at the same time. This was ill-tempered and ill-balanced. I saw branding and marketing at work, an engineering and a manipulation of a public realm instead of the genuine constitution of public community on the part of citizens. At risk of upsetting, antagonising, and losing many environmentalist friends, I spoke out – environmentalism has been doing it wrong, and has been doing it wrong for years. It has the mistaken belief that knowledge and know-how constitute an effective ethics and politics. It will fail for want of a genuine foothold in the field of practical reason, including an internal connection with people as citizens of a public realm, not to mention producers in an economic realm. I also examined the twin cults of scientism and naturalism that are embedded within environmentalism, grounding itself on nature as an empty signifier. Basically, the nature that environmentalists worship is a reification of science, and is something that becomes particularly poisonous in politics when it is employed as an unanswerable authority. I have consistently argued for a moral and political ecology in which human beings are considered knowledgeable and creative co-agents, creating a public life that mediates relations between themselves in society and between society and nature. I also argue for a civic environmentalism, something which avoids intractable and irrelevant debates over biocentrism and ecocentrism as against anthropocentrism. Human beings being what they are will always view the world through human eyes, and attempts to extinguish the human perspective betray an inhuman naturalism that can issue, at best, only in an austerian environmental megamachine in which government institutes policies repressive of liberty and inimical to freedom. At worst, it is psychic preparation for the extinction of the human species. Either way, I have seen inhumanism all over this movement. I have made that argument in several places.
Again, I shall write no more here, for the reason I wrote at length and in depth on these issues. It seems that, here and there, some are beginning to see the point.
The following sustains a critique of environmentalism as a scientism and a naturalism, throughout the text, but most particularly in the three extensive chapters attached in the appendix. Much of this work was published by Monthly Review. “Culturalism, Naturalism, and Social Metabolism;” “The Social Monist Critique of Environmentalism,” and “Politicizing the Environment, Re-Politicizing the World.”
I shall continue to post links to my works throughout what follows.
It remains for me to say that not only have I argued for environmentalism to reclaim the ethical and political commons as well as the physical commons, but to recover the sense of transcendent so essential to the spiritual dimension of life. People are lost souls, with nowhere to go to satisfy their craving for meaning and purpose; they are spiritual beings confined within finitude, and the oppressive effects are expressed all over an environmental movement addicted to doom and catastrophe. There is no hope here; it is the realm of the damned.
I have consistently criticized environmentalism as a false religion. I do this not as many critics do, condemning something as bad, deluded, and misguided on account of being religious, but on account of being a false religion, giving perverted expression to a legitimate religious sensibility. We need to recover true religion to give healthy expression to the religious sensibility. These issues will not be resolved until this happens. A paradoxically disenchanting/reenchanting scientisim/materialism/industrialism lies at the source of our ills. What we need most of all is a metaphysical reconstruction. If that seems an outrageous suggestion to rational environmentalists, then consider that E.F. Schumacher made it the most important task of the day:
It is no surprise that environmentalism has found itself going round and round in circles: scientism and naturalism are infernal.
I cite all this past work to underline the extent to which I have been onto these deficiencies in the environmental movement for years now. I have sought to educate and re-orient environmentalism from within, only to find environmentalists are wedded to the prevailing scientism and naturalism, clinging on all the harder to these modes of thought the more the ethics and politics attendant upon them fail. I also cite these texts to make clear the extent to which I share the concerns of environmentalists, and distinguish myself from that strip of ‘God that failed’ environmental confession that seeks to downplay or even deny the scale of the environmental crisis that is upon us. There are many reasons to be alarmed, even if alarmism is not the way to incite interest (people like Katharine Hayhoe and Per Espen Stoknes have said so for a long time).
I come now to Michael Shellenberger’s book Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All
by Joel Kotkin
June 18, 2020
Kotkin starts by noting that like many contemporary social movements—#metoo, Black Lives Matter, the Women’s March — ‘the environmental lobby has tended to create an atmosphere of unanimity.’ Yes indeed, using the authority of ‘the science’ to engineer a cult of authority in the political and civic sphere, exploiting loyalties and solidarities to ensure conformism. The environmental movement has ‘frequently evoked “science” as something settled and immutable, warning that those who dissent are either self-serving or seriously deranged.’ I said precisely this in the works above.
Kotkin notes that ‘in recent months, there has been growing criticism about the current green orthodoxy, including from people long associated with environmental causes.’ I have been part of that criticism, and shed my former timidity. In the past, I proceeded by dropping hints from within the environmental movement, hoping that many would latch onto an insight here and there, on account of the evident failure of the movement to progress. I was met with indifference or disdain, ignored for the most part, but treated with outright contempt on many occasions. ‘These are issues for science to decide’ I was told repeatedly, on the few occasions when there was actual engagement. My work on ethics and ecological virtue was simply dismissed. The dominant view that ethics is no more than a series of value judgements is almost unanimous. I have detailed at length as to why that view is ultimately debilitating. Many environmentalist repeat the view that preserving the planet is a ‘moral imperative.’ They have yet tom grasp that such a statement is meaningful and, importantly, actionable, only if there is a moral referent – that is precisely what is lacking, and those that believe a nature reified by way of science is such a referent are deluded, fatally.
Kotkin refers to ‘the strange case of the Michael Moore–produced Planet of Humans,’ which exposes the rapacious profit-seeking and gratuitous environmental damage caused by the renewable energy industry. I actually started to sketch out my own response to the documentary, but decided not to publish it. The Gibbs-Moore film missed its target. It had valuable things to say, but its criticisms were out and out-dated. But I was struck by the tenor of those who sought to rebut the film, particularly on this notion of out-dated criticisms and facts. I was very much an environmental campaigner at the time of these ‘outdated’ errors of environmentalism with respect to renewable energy. I remember basing myself on the claims made by those extolling the virtues of renewables against critics who cited problems of intermittency and such like. There were no problems, it’s all in hand, the engineers have the solutions etc I parroted the claims I was fed by the techies, and it turns out the critics were right. So I’ll be damned if I pay too much attention to the techies now howling Gibbs and Moore down. And it’s not the issue in any case. The idea that science and technology will resolve our problems is misguided at best, and ultimately delusional. I am interested in the politics and civics. Critics have attempted to get the Gibbs-Moore film de-platformed and the green establishment has pressured distributors not to take the film. I pay strong attention to this ‘green establishment,’ because in them and their dictatorial temper I see an aspiring ruling class presiding over an austerian environmental megamachine. There are other and much better ways of doing politics, and I have grown alarmed at the extent to which these would-be planetary – and people and public – managers and engineers have succeeded in creating loyalty on the basis of a cult of authority around ‘the science.’ The phrase ‘follow the science’ is meaningful only with respect to a political manipulation. Politics is always the realm of judgement and negotiation, scientists advise, politicians – and people – decide. The device of citizens assemblies is a laughable attempt to give the semblance of democracy – ‘give people the right information and they make the right choices,’ say its defenders, with a naivety or a cynicism that is truly breath-taking. By ‘right’ choices and decisions, they mean that they already know the truth and are simply searching for political mechanisms to fool people into thinking they have discovered the truth for themselves. This is not a genuine public realm; it is manipulating people and manufacturing consent: there is no creative citizen agency at work.
‘Such censorious behavior is increasingly common among the greens,’ states Kotkin. He gives a list of people who have been ‘demonized and marginalized’ for deviating from an overly ‘monolithic’ approach to the issue of climate change. I don’t like the deification of some individuals for the same reason I don’t like demonization. The attitude betrays something seriously unhealthy at the heart of a movement. ‘Greta says …’ So what?
Kotkin goes on to state that ‘some political leaders even seem ready to take dissenters to court in an effort to ban their ideas by legal means. Not only energy companies but think tanks and dissident scientists have been targeted for criminal prosecution.’ Kotkin gives links to all these claims in his article.
These tactics, he states, are ‘all too reminiscent of the medieval Inquisition.’
The Green War on the Working Class
There is certainly a disconnect of the environmental movement from the concerns and mundane affairs of ‘ordinary’ people. I have made this point repeatedly: people suffering in the here and now on account of social inequality, deprivation, unemployment or poorly paid or insecure work are not going to have the time, the resources or the inclination to concern themselves with the preservation of fungi and flora in one hundred years’ time. I state at extremes, of course, in order to express just a little of the frustration I have felt over the years at the sheer incomprehension on the part of middle class greens with respect to the socio-economic realities faced by working class people. I remember raising this point with green campaigners, relating the experiences of my campaigning door-to-door in my own home town of St Helens, a town blighted by deprivation. I argued for the need for a language that connects climate issues with social issues. I was treated with a disdain that was only just short of outright contempt: ‘tell them we’re doomed.’ These words came from a Green Party co-ordinator. And there in a line I saw the chasm that existed between environmental campaigners and ‘ordinary’ people, a chasm in which knowledge, authority, and legitimacy is all on one side and nothing but stupidity and ignorance lay on the other. The contempt for people – and for me, too, in this exchange – was palpable. I lost my feelings of loyalty for the very reason that this was not an isolated instance.
I have tried to put the question put by Ken Caldeira, himself a climate scientists and campaigner:
Retweeted Ken Caldeira (@KenCaldeira):
“How do we address the climate problem, when 99.999% of the people in the world have other more immediate problems to address?
For many, the climate problem seems like a luxury problem for those who don't have to worry about jobs, debt, corruption, violence, health care, etc.”
I was most reasonable in making the point that people do not respond to being lectured to from the outside. How to make the climate threat existentially meaningful in terms of the bread and butter issues of employment, income, and housing was my concern, how to make the threat comprehensible in those terms.
The response?
‘Tell them “we’re doomed.”’
I replied that I have told people ‘we’re doomed.’ Their response back is that ‘we’re doomed already, mate.’ There was no response from my green colleagues. Plainly, the concerns of ordinary people do not register and are considered of no account. People are dispensable. There is a misanthropy here. Hence my objections to people who equate humanism with an anti-religious position. With the death of God, the death of the human subject follows in short order. This is an inhumanism.
People mired in social deprivation, insecurity and even hopelessness are not going to respond to abstract climate appeals. The fact that, decades on, they haven’t should have told people that their ‘business model’ is failing.
Even in this current phase I have argued the need to move from this rebellion/disobedience mode to a politics of reconstruction – by which I mean a genuine politics, building material organizations and constituencies, involving people and equipping them in communities of practice. And that means translating the climate message into terms of everyday concern – Lord alone knows there are enough of them to motivate and mobilize the people. Joachim Radkau sought to deliver a warning on this in The Age of Ecology, arguing:
‘Climate policy goes down a blind alley if it is nothing other than climate policy; it will have a truly global basis only when it builds upon vital needs of people alive today. As Hegel rightly pointed out in his lectures on aesthetics: 'Man is essentially here and now.' For all the talk of sustainability and biodiversity, we should not forget that environmentalism has a much more solid foundation in life’s necessities than in concern for a distant, ill-defined future; it stands a chance of lasting success only if it appeals primarily to man’s instinct for self-preservation, not just to a selfless dimension (or rather: to spiritual dissolution of the self into a greater whole.)’
Radkau, The Age of Ecology 2014
Not least when that ‘greater whole,’ ‘Nature,’ could care less one way or the other.
As God is my witness, I have offered friendly criticism and advice to the climate movement on politics to avoid precisely this backlash against environmentalism.
As for being ‘anti-working class,’ these claims seem to be based on the view that capitalism is a successful economy that has raised people out of poverty, an economic system upon which working people depend, so to shackle, even dismantle that system is to harm the working class.
The criticism is shallow. There are other ways to move to a post-capitalist social order, ones that are based on the participation of the working class themselves, which is the view I argue for, but which is nowhere in sight. The loss of a critique of political economy and working class politics leaves us with people seeking to dismantle capitalism without having the first idea how to do it by way of social transformation. It seems government will be authorized to institute degrowth – that is, to take out the central accumulative spring of the capital economy. The thinking is utterly delusional, and fails to see in the first instance the fact that the state is not a neutral arbiter of the public good but is capital’s political command centre and one of the central second order mediations of the capital system. The thinking is incoherent and, if attempted, to the extent it doesn’t collapse under the weight of its incoherence, can be realized only as an austerian governmental environmentalism in which capital relations remain intact, the workers remain workers, exploited all the more in the cause of saving capital in the name of saving the planet.
Kotkin describes Michael Shellenberger as a green zealot from his high school years, someone who has worked on protecting habitats for endangered species and has battled climate change. His environmentalist credentials are impeccable. His book, Apocalypse Never exposes the hypocrisy of the green elite. I expose the dangers of a green ruling class in the process of emergence, presiding over a green reboot of an ailing global capital system. But, yes, the hypocrisy is palpable. Both Shellenberger and I offer a far more hopeful approach than that offered in the Gibbs-Moore documentary.
Shellenberger denounces the policies promoted by the green lobby as self-serving and often counterproductive. He details how policies backed by oligarch-funded nonprofits have often worked against the economic interests of people in Africa, Southeast Asia, and South America, often leaving them having to pillage their own natural environments in order to survive. Shellenberger blasts green nonprofits for blocking new energy development—dams, gas plants, pipelines—in these countries. Whilst such actions strike comfortably wealthy westerners as noble, they slows the manufacturing growth that could allow these countries to become rich enough to accommodate such things as habitat preservation. The economic development of the past that has been instrumental in generating the climate crisis has also bought a margin of comfort that allows westerners to indulge their environmental principles to the extent of denigrating economic realities as such, effectively seeking an environmental regime that freezes development at current levels. Worse, with respect to degrowth, there is an insistence on an economic contraction or downsizing that is easier for those with a degree of material comfort than it is for those already living in materially straitened circumstances. Again, the disconnect is palpable. At its heart is a failure to take practical reason – people, basically, as creative agents – seriously, people as more than a puppet mass to be engineered and directed in accordance with pre-set positions.
‘Rainforests in the Amazon and elsewhere in the world can only be saved if the need for economic development is accepted, respected, and embraced,’ Shellenberger writes. ‘By opposing many forms of economic development in the Amazon, particularly the most productive forms, many environmental NGOs, European governments, and philanthropies have made the situation worse.’
The lack of a genuine politics within a civic environmentalism only serves to open up a democratic deficit at the heart of the environmental cause. This cannot but come to generate a populist backlash that will most certainly be exploited by political leaders who are more concerned with expanding ‘the economy’ – that politically-loaded euphemism for the capital system – than preserving the environment. Green policies to increase energy prices, eliminate cars, and ban fossil fuel development have incited fierce opposition, and from the working class as well as vested economic interests, whether in pro-Trump middle America, or among France’s gilets jaune. This has been dismissed as merely the voice of angry white men – I have noted the deceit and the cynicism of the ‘girlwash’ all over contemporary ‘greenwash,’ all of which is designed to delegitimize critical voices. I despise it all, for its cynicism, for taking the good will and concern of people and perverting it, for taking sincerely held belief and ideals and making them serve the priorities of money and power. I did this in good faith, in the hope that environmentalism might pull back from the abyss it was most certainly heading for, inviting an anti-environmentalist backlash that will most certainly attract popular support. There is a democratic deficit at the heart of this environmentalism. To the extent that your politics is rootless in the sense of being disconnected from the concerns and interests of common people, it will be fruitless. Push hard on that basis, and the backlash will be even harder and, more than likely, a cite more popular. And utterly ruinous of one and all.
Kotkin notes that in California, some 200 local civil rights leaders have filed lawsuits against the state’s regulators, arguing that the state’s climate policies are essentially discriminatory toward poor people and minorities.
I do hope the response here is something other than ‘the people are wrong,’ and the ‘science says,’ which has been the response in the past. That approach simply uses a non-negotiable truth, buttressed by science (misused) as an authority to silence citizen voices. That approach is not politically persuasive. It creates a vacuum that opponents of environmentalism will certainly fill. People who are not listened to by one set of people will find another set of people who will listen to them, or at least pretend to, even as they deceive them. It’s an appalling situation and one which, if not resolved, will damn this civilisation.
Challenging Religious Orthodoxy (and Restoring True Religion)
Kotkin writes that even before Black Lives Matter, mainstream American journalism was being transformed into an extended-stay resort for the woke. The politics of permanent outrage and protest I call it. It’s not a genuine politics, just an endless resistance in a war of attrition which seeks to wear down existing public authority, either to force it to concede to certain demands, or merely to destroy it. Either way, it can never constitute the public authority we need to address our common affairs. Shellenberger calls out ‘stealth environmental activists working as journalists’ who report the most drastic environmental projections while ignoring any contrary perspectives. ‘Much of what people are being told about the environment, including the climate, is wrong, and we desperately need to get it right,’ Shellenberger claims, suggesting that he is ‘fed up with the exaggeration, alarmism, and extremism that are the enemy of a positive, humanistic, and rational environmentalism.’ I would need to see specific instances to determine whether Shellenberger is right, general claims are worthless. I have no doubt that his last claim is fundamentally correct – the crisis mentality is a deliberate attempt to herd and stampede and is the very antithesis of what constituting a genuine public involves. It creates an ecology of fear and treats people as a fearful mass to protect, not as active and informed citizens with a creative relation to public affairs. It is the very opposite of the Green Republic I have sought to develop in my work. My only regret is not to have called this out much sooner than I did. I had hoped that my connection with and support for environmentalism from inside the movement might actually count for something, and that people might make the effort to pursue the hints I kept making. Instead, I was constantly pressured to conform to the set grooves, finding that anything I said outside of those grooves was simply scotomized.
Shellenberger places his hopes on “competition from outside traditional news media institutions,” having seen the gullibility of most reporters. For decades, they have embraced notions, first seen in Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 book, The Population Bomb, that humanity would “breed ourselves to extinction” if birthrates were not severely curtailed. Kotkin cites the way that environmentalists hailed the Club of Rome report Limits to Growth from 1972, which also adopted an apocalyptic approach, predicting massive shortages of natural resources unless there was a shift to lower birthrates, slower economic growth, less material consumption, and, ultimately, less social mobility. In the Climate Rebellion and System Change collection of articles and essays I cite above, I not only expose the combination and authoritarianism in the Club of Rome report, I trace it through the series of books with which Club of Rome followed up Limits to Growth. It was here that I noted a deficiency, even an absence, in politics that threw the popular interest in environmentalism under the bus. In an era of mass unemployment, from the 1970's and after, environmentalist claims about the future, were not on the list of political priorities. Those who are quick to denounce people and politicians here need to look more closely at their own failures to develop an effective politics for the here and now, the only place in which human beings as moral and political agents exist and act. A pious moralising is no serious ethics at all, and it is a disastrous politics.
Kotkin comments that many of these apocalyptic predictions, like those in the Middle Ages, proved exaggerated or even plain wrong. Whether true or not, predictions is not serious politics and is not and should never be the issue. The fact that people are addicted to projecting supposedly objective trends and tendencies is the thing that interests me, precisely on account of the focus on objective factors and the neglect of the subjective factor – other than to cite facts relating to the former to coerce the actions of the latter.
Contrary to environmentalist dogma from the 1970s, natural resources, including energy and food, did not run out but became more available than anyone expected. So why, asks Kotkin, the constant hyping and hysteria? Because what Shellenberger calls ‘the apocalyptic environmental tradition’ demands it.
That reveals a basic inhumanism, a writing of creative human agency and subjectivity out of history. Out of nature, even. For all of the repeated insistence that human beings are a part of nature, it is noticeable how often in these accounts everything in nature acts legitimately except human beings. Yes, human beings are often destructive, but not always. I shall simply note in passing that this was always the gig – human beings are capable of both good and bad and require the habitus which enables the virtues to be cultivated, nurtured, and practised. As in a true religion, the kind of religion that has been ditched and replaced by false religion. I shall say no more here, I am wearing myself down repeating myself to the deaf. So I shall speed on.
In a way that perhaps only someone bitten by the green bug could understand, states Kotkin, Shellenberger labels environmentalism as ‘the dominant secular religion of the educated, upper-middle-class elite in most developed and many developing nations.’ I have drawn that conclusion, too. I shall say no more than that I have written something remarkably similar. In fact, I go far, far deeper into this, beyond the class issues involved, into the disenchantment of the world in one sense and its reenchantment in another, the discarding of God and the metaphysical idea of an objective reality and order somewhere ‘out there’ in favour of valuing particular goods, most especially those we have chosen as a matter of personal preference and even more especially the imperatives of the new idols of money and power. God is not here.
Shellenberger considers Britain’s Extinction Rebellion to be a deranged cult but also criticizes august environmental groups like the Sierra Club or Friends of the Earth. Kotkin writes: ‘Christianity offered guidance for how one should live and conduct one’s personal affairs in a manner pleasing to God, but the green movement seeks to steer people toward a life in better harmony with nature.’
This is an angle that people don’t pursue enough. To criticize environmentalism by way of an analogy to religion is to reproduce the very delusions of modernist progressive thought that has mired us in a despiritualized existence in which the religious sensibility comes to be expressed in false religion. It gives us the worst of all worlds, a bad religion and a bad politics. The solution to both is not no religion and no politics but a proper ordering of human actions to the appropriate ends – good religion and good politics, then.
Like medieval Catholicism, the false green religion foresees impending doom caused by human activity; human sin was the primary reason for the world’s problems in medieval times, and has been rediscovered by environmentalists. It is a total misunderstanding, misappropriation, and misuse of religion, without all of the psychic depth, and the genuine hope for healing, restoration, and redemption. More than ever I am convinced that the source of our problems lie in the systematic dissolution of religion.
‘Apocalyptic environmentalism gives people a purpose: to save the world from climate change, or some other environmental disaster. It provides people with a story that casts them as heroes.’
If we need to learn anything out of this debacle, we need to learn the impossibilities of living on a destinationless voyage cut off from the transcendent origin and end of hope which alone invests life with meaning, purpose, and direction.
This is precisely the thing I have been arguing for consistently over the years. When I read this I don’t know whether to smile that some small part of the world is beginning to see things my way or cry that it has taken so long and wasted so much precious time, with who knows what consequences.
Kotkin argues that Shellenberger’s call for a new, more human-centered, environmentalism is perhaps the most revolutionary part of his book: ‘In contrast to the green movement’s jihad against material progress, he suggests that only by making people more affluent will they be able to afford the environmental redress that the planet, in fact, needs.’
I can see what he means here, but I state the point very differently. We do need to recalibrate the economic system. The kind of criticism being marshalled here is nothing new at all, merely a variant of an eco-modernization that has been advanced for a long time now. I reject this approach as vehemently as I do the environmentalism adumbrated above. I criticized it at length in Of Gods and Gaia, exposing the way that development, industry, and technology was all to be promoted within continued capitalist relations with the purported aim of securing environmental health. Simply, it’s a recipe for disaster. That said, the abstract nature of the green movements claims on degrowth do indeed have all the hallmarks of a jihad instead of being a serious social transformation.
Shellenberger argues that we need to deal pragmatically, as opposed to religiously, with environmental concerns, accepting the reality that some forms of efficient energy production, such as natural gas or nuclear, need to be part of a cleaner future. ‘It is only by embracing the artificial that we can save what’s natural,’ he argues.
Seriously folks, I formulate all of this so much better, with much greater depth, taking the legitimate spheres of politics, civics, the interchange with nature, economic systems and religion and the spiritual dimension in their own terms within an integral philosophy. Shellenberger’s developmental environmentalism, and the environmentalism he rejects, are merely two sings of the same failing paradigm. I’m out of it, feel free to read.
The key to environmental success, Shellenberger argues, lies in affluence. “Richer countries are more resilient,” he says, quoting MIT climate scientist Kerry Emanuel, “so let us focus on making people richer and more resilient.”
We never saw this coming, did we …?
Countries like the United States, the United Kingdom, and particularly Scandinavia become cleaner, in large part, because they can afford to do so and also must respond to popular pressures. Poor autocratic and officially socialist states, like those of the former Soviet bloc and China, did not face the same pressures for a cleaner environment.
These are claims made by the likes of Stewart Brand in Whole Earth Discipline more than a decade ago. The likes of Mark Lynas followed suit in The God Species. What is striking about the claims – apart from their ideological nature, basically rationalizing the very capital system that brought us to crisis – is their superficial and shallow character. There is not a word in these paeans to progress with which Karl Marx would have disagreed. They are not the issue. That they appear to be the issue is because of the basic shallowness of the environmentalism that hasn’t the first idea how to engage in social transformation and build public community.
To succeed, Shellenberger argues, environmental policy has to consider human concerns, particularly those of the working and middle classes. This is simple but true. The hard part comes in the engagement with those concerns – and flesh and blood people dealing with the everyday here and now of life and its living. The next goal is also question begging, Shellenberger arguing that environmentalism needs not only to ‘protect the natural environment but also to achieve the goal of universal prosperity.’
I’m all in favour, but argue for a richer definition of prosperity than the endless accumulation of material quantities.
This contains articles on a new conception of prosperity and wealth
Thus Shellenberger speaks of ‘a positive, humanistic, and rational environmentalism.’
This sounds like the moral ecology and civic environmentalism I have developed with respect to the notion of ‘rational freedom.’
Kotkin concludes:
Like any movement in a still-democratic society, he suggests, environmentalists can win over the population not by terrorizing them but by showing that we can protect nature without stomping out all natural human aspirations.
This is precisely the way in which I criticized the dominant environmentalism of the age, to affirm a genuine public community and democratic green republicanism which embodies and articulates rational freedom.
I have many works on that theme:
I’m not being funny, but everything that is good, sound, and sane here involves arguments and positions I have not only stated in my own work, but stated much better, and developed in much greater depth. So much in these controversies is shallow. I am not shallow. And at no point do I fall for the deceptions and delusions of the eco-modernizers, still less the deceits of those who seek to downplay and even deny the depth of the twin socio-economic and ecological crises we face. They are deep, more deep than even environmental ‘alarmists’ know. The source of the crises are moral and spiritual, and will not be resolved by the exchange of facts and figures and applications of technology. And the problem is that very few are sounding the alarm there. A rational environmentalism restores the unity between fact and value and establishes science and ethics in proper relation. It means finally coming to terms with the impossibilities of disenchantment. And that involves a rounded humanism with the restoration of religion at its core.