the religion of climate change 1 - book review

Bin doing some pondering & come up with a few new questions for you... so I'm going to serialise this, as there's a lot of things....

Basically I've found myself doing some thinking about the similarity between some greenies and people with religious beliefs, and links between climate change and evidence for and the need for god.

Stick with it...

Anyway to start at the beginning, I want to do a bit of a literature review (fancy term for talking about some things I've seen / read).

Firstly Heat by George Monbiot and An Inconvenient Truth, care of Mr Gore.

I find both of these very attractive because they approach things in the same way I do. They are focussed on a defined problem and take a rational /scientific / logical approach to explore that problem and its solutions. So far so good.

[Anyway, I want you to read Heat because I was surprised how pro-nuclear, and sceptical about renewables and energy efficiency GM was..., but that's off topic.]

I have also seen The 11th Hour, the new feature documentary by Leonardo DiCaprio (no, really), and read Concrete - Think Like a Mountain, a graphic novel by Paul Chadwick.

[ I really don't like the term graphic novel - it sounds poncey. But 'comic' sounds silly too as a lot of these books aren't particularly humorous...]

I know you won't have read many of these, but that's not relevant really. Either you're going to recognise what I'm talking about or not. Anyway, I'm going to describe them a bit...

The 11th Hour is a mixture of talking heads and impressive film to flag up the fact that we have a huge environmental crisis. The talking heads are very varied and sometimes even contradict each other, even though the film is styled as a single story, but essentially the film is a platform for and illustration of the views of a group of mainstream-ish US environmentalists. Oh & Mikhail Gorbachov and Stephen Hawking. And probably others but still...

Anyway, it's much much broader than An Inconvenient Truth. The problem is anything but defined. Instead the film tackles broad themes - the existence of ecosystems and the biosphere, the threat that mankind's activities pose to that biosphere, the failure to acknowledge and address this threat and the possible fixes in the future.

Deforestation, the overexploitation of the seas, loss of water resources, loss of bio-diversity - a lot of stuff is squeezed in there. It's a very uneven film & has some interviewees that you watch and go 'yes, that's brilliantly convincing and very well put' and others where you go ' you mad hippy, please leave me alone'.

[The latter is an interesting reaction. I sometimes think that some of CA's current policy would have that effect on people, but I also have been following & part of the logic that developed them & am sure we're right. I just don't think the (rich) world will accept it. ]

But there's a lot of talk about the biosphere, and ancient sunlight and other bits of hoo-hah. And most of it is taken as read, i.e. you should understand this stuff.

So I find it interesting, and I think it's attractive to try & look at the problem holistically. Arguably you can't deal with environmental issues one by one as the environment doesn't work this way. But overall the film is much less convincing, much less valid to me.

On to Concrete - this is a series of books about a political speech writer who has been transformed into a huge stone-like creature. Naturally thoughtful & meditative by nature he turns his hand to different things - exploration & travel writing, farming, doing the stunts on a film, generally exploring life from his unique perspective. In Think Like a Mountain, Concrete is enlisted by a group of Earth First! eco-warriors to observe and ultimately to oppose clear-cutting of ancient forest in Washington state. The book is well written and acknowledges the loggers as people with jobs and reasons for doing what they are doing, while also making the case that something must be done to address what humanity is doing, and that maybe what that something is is direct action. I recommend it, anyway.

Anyway! While I hope that was interesting my point is that roling these 4 things over in my head it came to me that while environmentalists tend to start with, and hide behind scientific rationales that actually a lot of them have a lot in common with religious believers.

'No compromise in defence of Mother Earth'
'Not one more ancient tree'
'Save the biosphere'

There are slogans, articles of faith, statements of belief. But then that's not surprising. Everyone needs to start from a set of values. And maybe it's just human to be more about, more interested in those values and statements than in dry science and logic.

At this point I don't have a lot of logic and science myself. I can't define the family traits of a religion (and I certainly couldn't distinguish between a religion and a cult!), and I have no papers that break down the speeches and actions of key environmentalists to identify if & when they show such traits. But I find the exclusivity, the divisive passion, the 'them-&-us'-ness, the sense of being united against the world, the intolerance of dissent, the retreat into core values rather than engagement in debate that some, deep green, environmentalists show as being very similar to religion, or religious faith.

Do you agree? I'm not saying this is not a limited group, of course. But I think it's there.

Anyway, while I'm at it, one thing that's purely personal & follows on from this. A line in Concrete mentions biocentrism. '"small pox viruses have every bit as much right..."' Which is quickly dismissed as pure provocation. But again... Don't you think some greenies really don't like people?

EDIT: Another thing on that last line - Malcolm Wicks (I think) recently scored some quite telling points by accusing environmentalists of a 'Vicky Pollard' approach to energy policy. Yeah but we want renewables, but no but we don't want onshore wind, or off shore wind, or the Severn Barrage. Without knowing too much about the latter by initial take on it is that the Sand-piper might have to take one for the planet.