Why should the Green movement be at one. Says Jonathon Porritt
This article originally appeared in Green Futures , the magazine of independent sustainability experts Forum for the Future”
“Opposing views of human nature are at the heart of the climate change debate”
Justin Rowlatt, the BBC’s Ethical Man, recently did a programme for Radio 4 investigating the proposition that the green movement is somehow responsible for the collapse of public confidence in the science of climate change.
I often feel inclined to hurl things at the radio, and the urge on this occasion was overwhelming.
Justin seemed astonished that the green movement is not “at one” on how best to engage with the general public on climate change. He’d spotted that there are huge differences in the advocacy and strategies of different organisations, many of them incompatible.
Obviously! The green movement has always been a very broad ‘church’ – an analogy worth considering. After all, if the Church of England can embrace gay-bashing, science-trashing creationists on the one hand, and tree-hugging, hell-denying vicars on the other, why shouldn’t the green movement be home to an equally diverse range of persuasions?
It’s easy to see how this impacts views on climate change. Some organisations are convinced we can ‘techno-fix’ our way into alow-carbon world, through an apocalypse-defying combination of energy efficiency, carbon capture and storage, renewables and (for a growing number of people) lashings of nuclear power.
Others have long since come to the conclusion that there is no solution to climate change within today’s growth paradigm, and that we should all enthusiastically embrace lives of stripped-down simplicity. Important to that mindset is the conviction that this particular model of capitalism is in terminal decline – even if climate change meant nothing more to us than the difference between one day’s weather and the next.
But Justin was outraged that anyone would consider challenging capitalism to be an essential part of our response to climate change. For him, it was out of the question that climate change should be seenas no more than a symptom (however threatening) of an inherently unsustainable system. He found that asking people to reconsider their behaviour within that system had a “whiff of social engineering” about it, which left him feeling “rather uncomfortable”.
I’m being a bit harsh, but it was frustrating to see the real culture clash between different organisations so superficially glossedover. If you analyse conflicting ideas about how we should be addressing climate change, you will see that, at the heart of the matter, lie opposing views about human nature.
Try it: place yourself on my ‘human perfectibility ready reckoner’. At one end of the scale we have those arguing that we are all genetically ‘programmed’ to prioritise short-term self-interest at the expense of everyone else, and that conspicuous consumption is simply the latest expression of our primitive drive for status.
At the other end are those who firmly pin the blame for the grotesque profligacy of today’s economy on decades of hugely seductive marketing campaigns on the part of big business, on the loss of a ‘moral compass’ and on the venality of contemporary politicians.
It’s the time-honoured ‘nature-nurture’ debate. Saint Augustine and Pelagius would have little difficultly locating their starkly different views on original sin within it!
But it has a huge bearing on how we address climate change. If you believe that human nature is fixed (and fixed in the wrong place), then passionate appeals to people to consume less, to live more simply (‘so that others may simply live’) and to focus on quality of life rather than quantity of consumption are clearly going to be seen as forlorn. Or patronising. Or even self-indulgent.
But if you subscribe to the view that human nature is not fixed – that dominant cultural values can shift easily (and often have) – then it all looks very different. The priority in this case is to lay out a values-based case for low-carbon living, with the emphasis on intrinsic reward mechanisms, such as feeling good about oneself, one’s relationships and the work one does.
Expect these contrasting positions to become more pronounced over the next couple of years. Both have merit. At the risk of sounding ‘third-wayish’, they could almost certainly rub along together – as long as politicians know what they are trying to achieve through different policy interventions.
It’s all a bit abstract, of course. Difficult to pin down. So much easier to make programmes about greens hurling mud at each other, and destroying the case for action on climate change in the process.
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Jonathon Porritt is Founder Director of Forum for the Future.
Thank you to Green Futures, the magazine of independent sustainability experts Forum for the Future for allowing us to publish this article.
