Industrial civilisation is trashing the environment.
Should we try to reform it or just watch it go down?
by George Monbiot
Published in the Guardian (May 11 2010)
Those who defend economic growth often argue that only rich countries can
afford to protect the environment. The bigger the economy, the more money
will be available for stopping pollution, investing in new forms of
energy, preserving wilderness. Only the wealthy can live sustainably.
Anyone who has watched the emerging horror in the Gulf of Mexico in the
past few days has cause to doubt this. The world’s richest country decided
not to impose the rules that might have prevented the Deepwater Horizon
oil spill, arguing that these would impede the pursuit of greater wealth
{1}. Economic growth, and the demand for oil it propelled, drove companies
to drill in difficult and risky places.
But we needn’t rely on this event to dismiss the cornucopians’ thesis as
self-serving nonsense. A new paper in the Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences calculates deforestation rates between 2000 and 2005
in the countries with the largest areas of forest cover {2}. The nation
with the lowest rate was the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The
nation with the highest, caused by a combination of logging and fire, was
the United States. Loss of forest cover there (six percent in five years)
was almost twice as fast as in Indonesia and ten times as fast as in the
DRC. Why? Because those poorer countries have less money to invest in
opening up remote places and felling trees.
The wealthy nations are plundering not only their own resources. The
environmental disasters caused by the oil industry in Ecuador and Nigeria
are not driven by Ecuadorian or Nigerian demand, but by the thirst for oil
in richer nations. Deforestation in Indonesia is driven by the rich
world’s demand for palm oil and timber, in Brazil by our hunger for timber
and animal feed.
The Guardian’s carbon calculator reveals that the UK has greatly
underestimated the climate impacts of our consumption of stuff {3}. The
reason is that official figures don’t count outsourced emissions: the
greenhouse gases produced by other countries manufacturing goods for our
markets. Another recent paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy
of Sciences shows that the UK imports a net 253 million tonnes of carbon
dioxide, embodied in the goods it buys {4}. When this is taken into
account, we find that far from cutting emissions since 1990, as the last
government claimed, we have increased them {5}. Money wrecks the
environment.
So the Dark Mountain project, whose ideas are spreading rapidly through
the environment movement, is worth examining. It contends that “capitalism
has absorbed the greens” {6}. Instead of seeking to protect the natural
world from the impact of humans, the project claims that environmentalists
now work on “sustaining human civilisation at the comfort level which the
world’s rich people – us – feel is their right” {7}.
Today’s greens, it charges, seek to sustain the culture that knackers the
planet, demanding only that we replace old, polluting technologies with
new ones – wind farms, solar arrays, wave machines – that wreck even more
of the world’s wild places. They have lost their feelings for nature,
reducing the problem to an engineering challenge. They’ve forgotten that
they are supposed to be defending the biosphere: instead they are trying
to save industrial civilisation.
That task, Paul Kingsnorth, co-founder of Dark Mountain, believes, is
futile: “the civilisation we are a part of is hitting the buffers at full
speed, and it is too late to stop it” {8}. Nor can we bargain with it, as
“the economic system we rely upon cannot be tamed without collapsing, for
it relies upon … growth in order to function”. Instead of trying to
reduce the impacts of our civilisation, we should “start thinking about
how we are going to live through its fall, and what we can learn from its
collapse … our task is to negotiate the coming descent as best we can,
whilst creating new myths which put humanity in its proper place” {9}.
Though a fair bit of this takes aim at my writing and the ideas I
champion, I recognise the truth in it. Something has been lost along the
way. Among the charts and tables and technofixes, in the desperate search
for green solutions that can work politically and economically, we have
tended to forget the love of nature that drew us into all this.
But I cannot make the leap that Dark Mountain demands. The first problem
with its vision is that industrial civilisation is much more resilient
than it proposes. In the opening essay of the movement’s first book, to be
published this week, John Michael Greer proposes that conventional oil
supplies peaked in 2005, that gas will peak by 2030 and coal by 2040 {10}.
While I’m prepared to believe that oil supplies might decline in the next
few years, his coal prediction is hogwash. Energy companies in the UK, as
the latest ENDS report shows, are now beginning to deploy a technology
which will greatly increase available reserves{11}. Government figures
suggest that underground coal gasification – injecting oxygen into coal
seams and extracting the hydrogen and methane they release – can boost the
UK’s land-based coal reserves seventy-fold {12, 13}; and it opens up even
more under the seabed. There are vast untapped reserves of other fossil
fuels – bitumen, oil shale, methane clathrates – that energy companies
will turn to if the price is right.
Like all cultures, industrial civilisation will collapse at some point.
Resource depletion and climate change are likely causes. But I don’t
believe it will happen soon: not in this century, perhaps not even in the
next. If it continues to rely on economic growth, if it doesn’t reduce its
reliance on primary resources, our civilisation will tank the biosphere
before it goes down. To sit back and wait for what the Dark Mountain
people believe will be civilisation’s imminent collapse, without trying to
change the way it operates, is to conspire in the destruction of
everything greens are supposed to value.
Nor do I accept their undiscriminating attack on industrial technologies.
There is a world of difference between the impact of windfarms and the
impact of mining tar sands or drilling for oil: the turbines might spoil
the view but, as the latest disaster shows, the effects of oil seep into
the planet’s every pore. And unless environmentalists also seek to sustain
the achievements of industrial civilisation – health, education,
sanitation, nutrition – the field will be left to those who rightly wish
to preserve them, but don’t give a stuff about the impacts.
We can accept these benefits while rejecting perpetual growth. We can
embrace engineering, while rejecting many of the uses to which it is put.
We can defend healthcare, while attacking useless consumption. This
approach is boring, unromantic, uncertain of success, but a lot less ugly
than the alternatives.
For all that, the debate this project has begun is worth having, which is
why I’ll be going to the Dark Mountain festival this month {14}. There are
no easy answers to the fix we’re in. But there are no easy non-answers
either.
www.monbiot.com
References:
1. Even now the US has failed to tighten up the regulations -
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/may/09/oil-spill-ecological-review-environment
2. Matthew C Hansen, Stephen V Stehman and Peter V Potapov, 26th April
2010. Quantification of global gross forest cover loss. Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences. doi: 10.1073/pnas.0912668107.
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2010/04/07/0912668107.full.pdf+html?sid=5b769cf3-6222-4b4c-bcf0-365a786bca9b
3.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/interactive/2010/apr/21/national-carbon-calculator
4. Steven J Davis and Ken Caldeira, 23rd March 2010. Consumption-based
accounting of CO2 emissions. doi: 10.1073/pnas.0906974107. You can read
the abstract here: http://www.pnas.org/content/107/12/5687.abstract But I
had to pay $10 for the full paper.
5.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2010/may/05/labour-tories-carbon-calculator
6. The Dark Mountain Project, 2009. Uncivilisation: the Dark Mountain
manifesto. Hard copy.
7. Paul Kingsnorth, 2010. Confessions of a recovering Environmentalist.
Dark Mountain, Volume 1. Proof copy. The Dark Mountain Project.
8. Paul Kingsnorth, 18th August 2009. Should We Seek to Save Industrial
Civilisation?: debate with George Monbiot.
http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2009/08/18/should-we-seek-to-save-industrial-civilisation/
9. ibid.
10. John Michael Greer, 2010. The falling years: an Inhumanist vision.
Dark Mountain, Volume 1. Proof copy. The Dark Mountain Project.
11. Environmental Data Services, April 2010. Interest grows in ‘clean’
sub-sea coal gasification.
http://www.endsreport.com/index.cfm?action=report.article&articleID=22309
Unfortunately you need a subscription to read it.
12. Recoverable coal reserves, 2003: 243 million short tons. US Energy
Information Administration, May 2006. Country analysis brief – United
Kingdom. http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/cabs/United_Kingdom/Background.html
13. Coal recoverable by UCG, 2004: “UK coal resources suitable for deep
seam UCG on land are estimated at seventeen billion tonnes (300 years’
supply at current consumption) and this excludes at least a similar
tonnage where the coal is unverifiable for UCG”. Department of Trade and
Industry, October 2004. Review of the Feasibility of Underground Coal
Gasification in the UK.
http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/tna/+/http://www.berr.gov.uk/files/file19143.pdf
14. http://www.eventelephant.com/uncivilisation
http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2010/05/10/moneys-hunger/