An apology from an environmentalist
I have worked all over the world as a professional environmentalist. And I’m sorry.
I’m going back to where this all started. A version of this piece was originally published in The Spinoff. After that the editor refused any further material without explanation, which I think kind of proved my point.
I told you changing your light bulbs or buying organic couscous would save the world. I was wrong and I knew I was wrong at the time. I crowed about the ‘successes’ of the global charities I worked for. I knew full well that we were losing the natural world hand over fist.
I started working for my first major environmental organisation in 2003. I turned the serious scientific stuff the wildlife boffins were doing into emotional blackmail. The boffins wanted to post out their Phd thesis with an invoice. The fundraisers wanted to send ransom notes saying “give us the money or we mince the panda”. I wanted a proper job. I wanted to build myself a future. So I worked the middle ground.
I flew to the Amazon. I helped investigate a new road for trucking the rainforest out and turning it into toilet paper. I flew to Borneo. I visited the orang utan our donors could ‘adopt’. She wisely threw her shit at me until I went away again. I rode a bicycle to work, then went on trips that racked up more carbon emissions than if I had commuted every day in a badly tuned Sherman tank.
I got married and bought a house. I became a consultant and wrote for magazines and newspapers. Everyone I worked for told me not to “scare the horses”. I shouldn’t tell the full truth of the encroaching horrors I researched all day. Otherwise people might “give in”. In other words: stop sending the money.
I complied. I had an eye-watering mortgage to pay and more bills than a gannet colony. I’m sorry.
This is what most of the environmental movement has become. Meanwhile, flick on any news outlet with any kind of open-mindedness and honesty. It will show you catastrophe upon catastrophe.
Being honest about this has at times felt like leaping out of a closet in a luminous mankini. That feeling should be a warning sign. When did reality become so unpalatable that stating the obvious feels like shouting fuck in the library? Since when did so many of us need to be shielded like the vicar’s children? Why should we dissemble, distract or lie about the state of our world?
It feels good, opening up. It’s clear to me now. ‘Not scaring the horses’ is like standing in a burning building selling damp napkins, instead of shouting fire.
The truth is, despite my career, in spite of the years of conferences, studying and endless strategizing, I don’t know that much that you don’t know or sense already. It’s that continuous kind of mental tinnitus you only notice in quieter moments when you’re not drunk.
The Bible had four horsemen of the Apocalypse - Conquest, War, Famine and Death. This is more like the final Charge of the Apocalypse Brigade riding chopped Harley’s with their exhausts smashed off. You have to have your fingers in your ears going ‘lalalalala’ to miss it.
Climate Change. Pandemics. Mass Extinction. Topsoil Loss. Antibiotic Resistant Disease. Water Pollution. Air Pollution. Nuclear Holocaust, Financial Collapse. They're all hitting their rev limiters for the human hunt.
Before the pandemic it was the thundering onset of climate chaos that woke some of us from our slumber. The news on that is so arse-quiveringly terrifying it’s hard to ignore, which is simultaneously why most of us ignore most of it. Despite the accusations of some, it’s also a real bugger to spin into optimistic fundraising material or jolly listicles for lifestyle magazines.
For example, the guidance from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is an increasingly tricky sell. It translates as something like: “In the next few years we need to put aside all our differences and peacefully orchestrate a massive and abrupt slow down in the world’s economy without crashing it into chaos. Meanwhile, we need to pull carbon out of the air with gadgets we haven’t invented yet, or the planet will kill most of us.”
Maybe I shouldn’t have tried to make a living by campaigning on climate change at all. Following the logic means realising we are actually campaigning against industrial civilisation. For anybody in the industrialised world this is the source of all our wealth. It’s what pays all our wages. Have fun sawing down the tree branch you’re sitting on.
I am not wildly successful or talented. But I’m white, male, middle-aged and middle class. This provides me with the means to feast better than a mediaeval king every day of the week. I can buy out-of-season exotic foods from all over the world, and then throw them away when I forget to eat them. I live and work in a Marie Antoinette society, stuffing my face with cake, idly wondering what the scaffold outside is for.
The environmental movement was supposed to do something about that. But we lost our way.
We’ve been blindsided by climate change, even though we had known about it for more than a century. The only way I can explain that is to quote a Sudanese farmer encountered by Jason Clay, from WWF-US. His job title - Senior Vice President, Markets and Executive Director, Markets Institute, might on its own sum up everything that went wrong better than I have. When asked why the rich countries weren’t helping to relieve their famine the farmer said: “You can’t wake a person who is pretending to be asleep.”
All of us feasting on the carcass of a dying planet bear some responsibility. But some of us got paid to know what was happening. We failed to find a way to tell you. We have our own special blame to carry.
Awesome writing thanks! I'm strongly reminded of Paul Kingsnorth's essay from a decade ago, which concludes:
"...But this is fine — the dismissal, the platitudes, the brusque moving-on of the grown-ups. It’s all fine. I withdraw, you see. I withdraw from the campaigning and the marching, I withdraw from the arguing and the talked-up necessity and all of the false assumptions. I withdraw from the words. I am leaving. I am going to go out walking.
I am leaving on a pilgrimage to find what I left behind in the jungles and by the cold campfires and in the parts of my head and my heart that I have been skirting around because I have been busy fragmenting the world in order to save it; busy believing it is mine to save. I am going to listen to the wind and see what it tells me, or whether it tells me anything at all. You see, it turns out that I have more time than I thought. I will follow the songlines and see what they sing to me and maybe, one day, I might even come back. And if I am very lucky I might bring with me a harvest of fresh tales, which I can scatter like apple seeds across this tired and angry land."
https://orionmagazine.org/article/confessions-of-a-recovering-environmentalist/
Your first three paragraphs, with a tweak, encapsulate much of my career too and my conscience remained clear until about 2013. Which goes to show how I was able to delude myself that through wisdom, technology and democratic politics, that we'd get it all worked out. As we sail past tipping point after tipping point, those of us with some awareness need a new paradigm to cling to or perspective to work from and I think that's what I'm seeking when I read your work and that of others. I've recently got stuck into 'How the World Really Works' by Vaclav Smil which does a wonderful job of deconstructing the tenants of our errant civilization and I heartily recommend it to your readers. It's neither alarmist nor offering any solutions but is a solid work, doing a 'stock-take' of our history and situation in quantitative but digestible terms. Anyway, thanks for exploring the depths of where we're at and helping the discombobulated (me) see ourselves and our legacy a little more clearly.