environmental justice go hand in hand” — a suggestion of such
bizarre inaccuracy that it could surely only be wishful thinking.
Suddenly, sustaining a global human population of 10 billion
people was not a problem at all, and anyone who suggested otherwise was not highlighting any obvious ecological crunch points
but was giving succor to fascism or racism or gender discrimination or orientalism or essentialism or some other such hip and
largely unexamined concept. The “real issue,” it seemed, was not
the human relationship with the nonhuman world; it was fat cats
and bankers and cap’lism. These things must be destroyed, by
way of marches, protests, and votes for fringe political parties, to
make way for something known as “eco-socialism”: a conflation
of concepts that pretty much guarantees the instant hostility of
95 percent of the population.
I didn’t object to this because I thought that environmentalism
should occupy the right rather than the left wing, or because I was
right-wing myself, which I wasn’t (these days I tend to consider
the entire bird with a kind of frustrated detachment). And I understood that there was at least a partial reason for the success of this
colonization of the greens by the reds. Modern environmentalism sprang partly from the early-twentieth-century conservation
movement, and that movement had often been about preserving
supposedly pristine landscapes at the expense of people. Forcing
tribal people from their ancestral lands, which had been newly
designated as national parks, for example, in order to create a
fictional “untouched nature” had once been fairly common, from
Africa to the USA. And, actually, Hitler had been something of
an environmentalist, and the wellsprings that nourished some
green thought nourished the thought of some other unsavory
characters too (a fact that some ideologues love to point to when
witch-hunting the greens, as if it wouldn’t be just as easy to point
out that ideas of equality and justice fueled Stalin and Pol Pot).
In this context it was fair enough to assert that environmentalism allied itself with ideas of justice and decency, and that it
was about people as well as everything else on the planet. Of
course it was, for “nature” as something separate from people
has never existed. We are nature, and the environmentalist project was always supposed to be about how we are to be part of it, to
live well as part of it, to understand and respect it, to understand
our place within it, and to feel it as part of ourselves.
So there was a reason for environmentalism’s shift to the left,
just as there was a reason for its blinding obsession with carbon.
Meanwhile, the fact of what humans are doing to the world became so obvious, even to those who were doing very well from
it, that it became hard not to listen to the greens. Success duly
arrived. You can’t open a newspaper now or visit a corporate
website or listen to a politician or read the label on a packet of
biscuits without being bombarded with propaganda about the
importance of “saving the planet.” But there is a terrible hollowness to it all, a sense that society is going through the motions
without understanding why. The shift, the pact, has come at a
probably fatal price.
Now that price is being paid. The weird and unintentional pincer movement of the failed left, with its class analysis of waterfalls and fresh air, and the managerial, carbon-über-alles brigade
has infiltrated, ironed out, and reworked environmentalism for
its own ends. Now it is not about the ridiculous beauty of coral,
the mist over the fields at dawn. It is not about ecocentrism. It
is not about reforging a connection between overcivilized people
and the world outside their windows. It is not about living close
to the land or valuing the world for the sake of the world. It is not
about attacking the self-absorbed conceits of the bubble that our
civilization has become.
Today’s environmentalism is about people. It is a consolation prize for a gaggle of washed-up Trots and, at the same time,
with an amusing irony, it is an adjunct to hypercapitalism: the
catalytic converter on the silver SUV of the global economy. It is
an engineering challenge: a problem-solving device for people
to whom the sight of a wild Pennine hilltop on a clear winter
day brings not feelings of transcendence but thoughts about the
wasted potential for renewable energy. It is about saving civilization from the results of its own actions: a desperate attempt to
prevent Gaia from hiccupping and wiping out our co=ee shops
and broadband connections. It is our last hope.
The open land
I generalize, of course. Environmentalism’s chancel is as accommodating as that of socialism, anarchism, or conservatism, and
just as capable of generating poisonous internal bickering that will
last until the death of the sun. Many who call themselves green
have little time for the mainstream line I am attacking here. But it
is the mainstream line. It is how most people see environmentalism today, even if it is not how all environmentalists intend it to
be seen. These are the arguments and the positions that popular
environmentalism—now a global force—o=ers up in its quest
for redemption. There are reasons; there are always reasons. But
whatever they are, they have led the greens down a dark, litter-strewn, dead-end street where the rubbish bins overflow, the light
bulbs have blown, and the stray dogs are very hungry indeed.
What is to be done about this? Probably nothing. It was,
perhaps, inevitable that a utilitarian society would generate a
utilitarian environmentalism, and inevitable too that the greens
would not be able to last for long outside the established political
bunkers. But for me — well, this is no longer mine, that’s all. I
can’t make my peace with people who cannibalize the land in the
