Just when I thought this blog had become a vehicle for discussing nothing but Western Sahara, some old friends have cropped up to stimulate a post on another favourite topic.
The stimulation in question was delivered by the BBC Radio 4 show PM, which has been running a series of reports and discussions about world population. I tuned in to find myself listening to a debate between diplomat turned professional environmental worrier Crispin Tickell, and one Austin Williams. Tickell was arguing that the world is overpopulated, and Williams was taking issue with this assertion. The first thing that I heard was Williams (an as yet unidentified voice) stating that “Effectively we are above nature and that’s what makes us human.”
Now the idea that we are separate from nature, and that this separation is a defining characteristic of our humanity, has a long history in Western thought. But when you hear someone espousing this philosophy in the UK media in the early 21st century, it’s a good bet that they’re an old Revolutionary Communist and current member of the LM Group, a body of individuals and organisations with their roots in the old Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), united by a common hatred of environmentalism, nature, and the precautionary principle.
Needless to say I wasn’t disappointed. Williams was identified by the presenter of PM as the Director of the Future Cities Project, a significant player in the LM Group’s long game of persuading the world to sign up to its ideology of rapacious consumption and permanent technological revolution. This organisation had jumped into my mind when Williams said that he was against sustainable development (the FCP “fights for development instead of sustainable development”, according to its website – Williams is also the author of a polemic against “sustainability” titled “The Enemies of Progress”). He described population control as an inevitable and “poisonous” extension of environmentalism, and decried the fact that many parts of the world “still have that tragic relationship with nature”. He contended that an increase in global population to 9 billion would be a good thing.
Now I don’t buy the ideas of carrying capacity that the likes of Crispin Tickell apparently believe in. The number of people a region, ecosystem or planet can support depends very much on how those people manage their environment. The greater the population, and hence the greater the need for resources, the more careful and parsimonious that population will have to be in its resource use. Perhaps we can support 9 billion people, but I have my doubts that this will be achievable along the lines favoured by Williams, which involve everyone on Earth emulating the unsustainable development practices of the rich industrial and post-industrial world, practices which are based on the availability of a large, poorly paid workforce and lax labour and environmental regulations in the developing world that the likes of Williams invariably claim to champion. A couple of recent papers (1, 2) make a convincing case that the costs of environmental degradation associated with economic growth are borne disproportionately by the world’s poor – the relationship of many people in the developing world with nature is becoming more tragic as a result of consumption, pollution and climate change driven by processes that have disproportionately benefited wealthy nations and wealthy minorities within poor countries. We should certainly strive to improve the lot of the poor, oppressed and marginalised, but we are likely to have to change our ways in order to do so. Williams and his chums believe no such changes are required.
The worship of nature to the exclusion of considerations of human welfare is neither sensible nor desirable, but the worship of humanity to the extent that all considerations of environmental sustainability are ignored, and issues of concerns about population and resource use simply brushed aside, is simply self-defeating and idiotic. By forgetting that our societies are embedded in and ultimately dependent on complex, dynamic natural systems which we influence through our actions, and which in turn affect us through the agency of environmental variability and change, we make ourselves more vulnerable to environmental hazards. For example, the expansion of agriculture into the southern margins of the Sahara desert in the unusually wet 1950s and 1960s set up the Sahel region of Africa for the catastrophic famine of the 1972-73. The movement of agriculture into historically marginal and unproductive areas resulted in the collapse of food production when rainfall returned to “normal” and then declined dramatically in the early 1970s. By neglecting to consider issues of environmental viability and sustainability, development planners in the Sahel, influenced by ideologies of nationalism, progress, growth, and faith in technology, massively increased the vulnerability of food production to environmental variation.
Across the world other examples of such “maladaptation” abound, rooted in a development ideology that fetishizes economic growth and has at its core the idea that we are separate from and above nature. From the clearing of protective mangroves for shrimp farms in southeast Asia to the development of settlements on flood plains all over the globe, societies are making themselves more vulnerable to environmental hazards by ignoring the agency inherent in the environment as they grow their populations and economies. As our climate changes as a result of the emission of more and more greenhouse gases in an energy hungry and growth obsessed world, we are going to have to pay more, not less attention to issues of environmental sustainability and the role of the environment in constraining our development options. This will be essential for the survival of communities and societies all over the world. But the likes of Williams and the LM crowd are trying their damnedest to convince us otherwise. Their solution to the problem of a dynamic environment is to say that we should simply control it. Well, good luck guys – first you have to understand it, and even then there’s no guarantee that you can get it to do what you want. This is simply a declaration of blind faith in technology, driven by a refusal to accept the reality of humanity as embedded in, and part of, nature. It is not a practical solution, nor a sensible suggestion.
Williams and his fellow travellers in the LM Group are taking the dogma of human separation from and elevation above nature to new and dangerous heights in what appears to be a concerted campaign aimed at spreading their ideology of rapacious consumption and environmental destruction throughout society at all levels. They may claim to be nothing more than a bunch of people with a common background in the old RCP who just happen to hold certain views in common, but they seem to be mouthing a strict party line. The rhetoric from the various individuals and organisations that make up the LM family is remarkably consistent, and in this respect the extreme libertarian LM group of today echoes the RCP that gave birth to it. Williams’ insistence on our elevation above nature mirrors Keenan Malik’s writings on “human exceptionalism”. His insistence on an increase in the human population echoes LM spiritual leader Frank Furedi’s writings on the same topic in the LM online organ Spiked (an article with the subtitle “Can there really be too many of us?” appears in a series amusingly and accurately titled “Frank Furedi’s Really Bad Ideas”). Claire Fox, director of the poorly named Institute of Ideas, made a similar assertion in a radio interview in 2006 when she claimed on the BBC Radio 4 Today Programme that “You can’t be progressive if you accept the ecological limits to growth”. Daniel Ben Ami decries what he refers to as “the dismal quackery of eco-economics“, arguing firmly that the environment should be left out of development considerations. I’ve ranted plenty about Martin Durkin in previous posts, so no more on him here.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. The LM Group are not the only people pushing the ideology of nature-hatred. But they are arguably the most organised when it comes to disseminating this ideology. If you hear anyone in the UK media asserting that we are separate from or above nature, that anyone advocating action on climate change change or other environmental issues is anti-progressive, or that environmentalists are anti-human, the chances are that you a listening to an old trot from the LM stable bent on pushing their latest nihilistic ideology of permanent revolution. If you want to confirm their affiliation, it’s easy.
(1) Turner, R. K. and Fisher, B. 2008. To the rich man the spoils. Nature 451, 1067-1069.
(2) Srinavasan, U. T. Carey, S. P., Hallstein, E., Higgins, P. A. T., Kerr, A. C., Koteen, L. E., Smith, A. B., Watson, R., Harte, J. and Norgaard, R. B. 2008. The debt of nations and the distribution of ecological impacts from human activities
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 105, 1768-177.
