Blogpost by Rex Weyler
- January 14, 2011 at 22:14 2 comments Deep
Green is Rex Weyler's monthly column, reflecting
on the roots of activism, environmentalism,
and Greenpeace's past, present, and future.
The opinions here are his own.
January 2011
“Ecology is a subversive subject.”
Paul Sears, BioScience, July 1964
Last November, British
television’s Channel 4 aired ‘What the Green
Movement Got Wrong’, attacking environmentalism
while supporting nuclear power, DDT, genetically
modified crops and geoengineering. The diatribe
was laced with bias, misrepresentation and
outright errors.
One of the show’s contributors,
Adam Werbach, is a former member of Greenpeace
International’s Board of Directors. Werbach
reported that the Channel 4 producers misled
him about the content of the documentary,
misrepresented his ideas and used his comments
to support points of view he opposes.
Willing contributors
included Florence Wambugu, lobbyist for
biotech giants Monsanto and DuPont, and
Stewart Brand, consultant for ExxonMobil,
Cargill, Dow Chemical, General Electric,
and Bechtel - a virtual Who’s Who of socially
predatory and ecologically-destructive companies.
Propaganda as news
“The ‘control of nature’
is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born
of the Neanderthal age of biology.”
Rachel Carson, Silent
Spring, 1962
The errors and biases
of this show have been exposed by George
Monbiot at The Guardian, The Weather-Makers
author Tim Flannery, Greenpeace scientist
Dr. Doug Parr, Greenpeace International
Executive Director Kumi Naidoo and many
others. Naidoo points out that the focus
on GM foods to solve hunger, for example,
undermines the real solutions, such as improving
soil fertility and providing access for
the poor to land, water and agricultural
financing.
Other obvious errors:
Nuclear Power: Climate
blogger and nuclear power promoter Mark
Lynas claimed on the show “Nuclear power
is ... a massive potential source of zero-carbon
power.”
Zero carbon? Dead wrong.
Nuclear power is among the most carbon-intensive
forms of energy. Why? Start with cement,
a massive carbon-consuming product. Add
mining, milling, enriching and transporting
uranium; forging high-alloy steels for pressurised
containment vessels; construction of complex
plants; and handling, shipping, reprocessing
and storing radioactive waste. All of these
stages require fossil fuel supplies. Mark
Jacobson at Stanford University compared
the lifetime CO2 emissions of energy sources
in a Review of Global Warming Solutions.
He found wind and concentrated solar emit
3 to 11 grams of CO2 per kilowatt-hour (kWh)
of electricity. Nuclear electricity emits
between 68 and 180 grams per kWh. Mr. Lynas
was wrong. Nuclear energy is not zero-carbon
– it’s a carbon hog! It also presents unsolved
problems with security, weapons proliferation,
radioactive emissions, decommissioning and
waste storage.
DDT: Stewart Brand claimed
that the ‘green movement’ is responsible
for millions of malaria deaths because environmentalists
– including Greenpeace – campaigned for
and won a worldwide ban on DDT, resulting
in malaria epidemics. Brand, repeating a
myth created by corporate interests to sabotage
environmentalism, was wrong on all counts.
First of all, Greenpeace
has never conducted a campaign to ban DDT
worldwide and has never opposed the use
of DDT for disease control. Never. Secondly,
there is no worldwide ban on DDT, and never
has been. The only international instrument
to regulate DDT - the 2001 Stockholm Convention
- restricts agricultural use so as to avoid
producing DDT-resistant mosquitoes, and
never mentions a ban for disease control.
“Brand and Lynas present
themselves as heretics,” wrote George Monbiot
at The Guardian, “but their convenient fictions
chime with the thinking of the new establishment:
corporations, think tanks, neoliberal politicians.
The true heretics are those who remind us
that neither social nor environmental progress
are possible unless [political] power is
confronted.”
What environmentalists
got right
“Love of the wilderness
is … an expression of loyalty to the earth
which bore us and sustains us, the only
home we shall ever know, the only paradise
we ever need.”
Edward Abby, Desert
Solitaire
Historically, ecologists
and environmentalists have offered thousands
of genuine solutions and critical ideas
to help humanity achieve peace and sustainability.
The problem is not that ecologists offer
no solutions. The problem arises because
those solutions are not convenient for those
who want to concentrate wealth and political
power.
Corporate promoters
like Brand, Lynas and Channel 4 insist on
high-tech, complex solutions such as nuclear
power, biotechnology and geo-engineering
because those ventures promise more wealth
and centralised control for the wealthy.
They attack the genuine solutions offered
by ecologists because those solutions require
less reckless consumption and more community
power. Nevertheless, over the decades, ecologists
and environmentalists got a lot of things
right. Here are some examples:
Poisons have unintended
consequences: Rachel Carson was right. The
overuse of DDT and other biocides killed
wildlife, damaged human health, and undermined
disease control by creating resistant insects.
A public relations campaign financed by
Philip Morris tobacco company mocked her.
Meanwhile, DDT use expanded to agriculture.
The world experienced a brief reduction
of malaria followed by the return of DDT-resistant
mosquitoes and new epidemics, as Carson
warned. In 1969, the World Health Assembly
acknowledged that eradicating malaria with
DDT was not feasible.
Lead, mercury and other
heavy metals are toxic: In 1923, General
Motors and Standard Oil (ExxonMobil / Chevron)
introduced leaded gasoline. Harvard toxicologist
Alice Hamilton warned them of the public
health dangers in the Journal of the American
Medical Association. GM and Standard Oil
launched a public relations campaign, smeared
Hamilton, and persuaded the New York Times
to print "there is no measurable risk
to the public.” Meanwhile, leaded gasoline’s
neurotoxic effects caused mental deterioration,
madness, antisocial behaviour, sickness
and death among the public. The US finally
banned the toxic gasoline in 1995, 70 years
after Hamilton’s warning, as oil companies
continued to sell it elsewhere. Africa finally
banned leaded gasoline in 2006. Ms. Hamilton
had been right; GM and Exxon, wrong. Millions
suffered. Similar tragedies with mercury
poisoning and other heavy metals have claimed
thousands of victims.
Radiation kills: Channel
4 attempted to minimise the Chernobyl nuclear
accident health impact, but as ecologists
and medical doctors have warned, ionising
radiation causes DNA damage, mutation, replication
errors, early aging and cancers, including
leukaemia, thyroid, liver, lung, myeloma
and so forth. There is no safe dose. Any
increase in radiation results in an increase
in risk. Twenty-eight rescue workers at
Chernobyl died from radiation sickness.
Medical researchers traced a certain link
between Chernobyl radiation and 1,800 thyroid
cancer cases. Thousands of others died from
Chernobyl’s radiation. How many? It is not
the environmentalist’s job to count the
dead for the nuclear apologists. One death
is too many. Radiation kills. We were right.
A hot air balloon floats
over the ruins of the ancient Mayan city
of Chichen Itza, as delegates prepare to
meet for UN Climate Negotiations COP16 in
nearby Cancun, Mexico. Image: Luis Pérez
/ GreenpeaceCO2 will heat the planet: Swedish
physicist Svente Arrhenius reported in 1896
that carbon dioxide from hydrocarbon combustion
would heat the planet. He estimated that
a doubling of atmospheric CO2 from pre-industrial
levels would cause a 5°C temperature
rise. Current estimates range from 3°
to 7°C, depending on successful mitigation
and feedback factors. Arrhenius was right.
Ecologists were right. Greenpeace first
voiced concern in 1979. Meanwhile, oil companies
financed a campaign to deny this simple,
physical science.
Laws of Ecology: In
the 1970s, Greenpeace published its first
ecology manifesto, The Declaration of Interdependence.
We suspected that the next century’s battle
would be to reconcile human enterprise with
nature’s rules. The Declaration included
three ‘Laws of Ecology’: Interdependence,
Stability through Diversity, and Consumption
Limits. Pardon the immodesty, but we were
right then and we’re still right today.
Interdependence: Life
forms remain interdependent. We co-evolve
and co-survive in complex, dynamic ecosystems.
Predator and prey collaborate in the genetic
process; all organisms share nutrient and
energy cycles in a habitat. Ecologist Gregory
Bateson was correct that the ‘survival unit’
in evolution is not the individual, nor
a single species, but species within an
ecosystem. Stability through Diversity:
In an ecosystem, species diversity provides
stability in dynamic homeostasis. Since
the 1960s, ecologists and naturalists –
Rachel Carson, Edward Wilson, Yvonne Baskin
and others – have warned of species loss
risk. Norman Myers calculated in the 1970s
that the human-caused extinction rate was
100 times the natural rate. Few listened,
and society’s response has proven ineffective.
By 2000, extinction rates reached 1,000
times natural rates, and today the figure
approaches 10,000 times. Myers also warned
that habitat destruction reduced evolution’s
capacity to generate new species. Human
activity is now causing the greatest diversity
collapse since a meteorite hit the Earth
64 million years ago, weakening the entire
planetary ecology.
Consumption limits:
This remains the most disturbing ecological
fact for our society. Captains of industry
and their paid pundits deny and ridicule
this idea, but it remains absolutely true.
We live on a finite planet. No species in
any habitat can grow forever. Donella Meadows
and her co-authors were right about Limits
to Growth in their 1972 book of that name.
We witness the evidence in degraded soil,
drained aquifers, forest loss, global warming,
and resource depletion.
An activist dripping
in 'oil' protests at the World Energy Congress
(WEC) in Montreal - urging participants
to move beyond oil. Image: François
Pesant / GreenpeacePeak oil: Ecologists
and geologists have warned about oil depletion
for decades. Geophysicist M. King Hubbert
described the phenomenon in 1956. He was
largely ignored. Global peak oil per capita
occurred in 1979 and we have now arrived
at the absolute peak - just as predicted.
Net Energy: Oil depletion
and society’s oil addiction drives us toward
lower-grade reserves, such as tar sands,
with a low net energy, costing more energy
to retrieve, returning less to society and
emitting more CO2 pollution. Researchers
such as Charles Hall at the State University
of New York warned society about this in
the 1970s.
Habitat Overshoot: In
1980, William Catton published Overshoot,
explaining that humanity had ‘already overshot
[Earth’s] carrying capacity’. He was right.
No one in power listened. Humanity has now
reached about 30% overshoot, using more
resources each year than Earth can replenish.
Newsflash: a species cannot grow out of
overshoot.
Reduce consumption:
William Rees and Mathis Wackernagel at the
University of British Columbia devised the
‘Ecological Footprint’ analysis to help
individuals and communities gauge their
role in global overshoot and reduce their
consumption. Rees explained that our challenge
is less technical and more ‘behavioural
and social’. We hear of hundreds of large-scale
industrial ‘solutions’ but the only genuine
solution to habitat overshoot is this: Consume
less stuff.
Biomimicry: We’ll find
the keys to genuine sustainability in the
patterns and laws of nature itself. We can
design an authentically sustainable human
society, but only by apprenticing ourselves
to nature, as described by Janine Benyus,
John Todd, Wes Jackson, Elaine Ingham, David
Suzuki and many other ecologists.
Ecological Economics:
In the 19th century, economist John S. Mill
cautioned that industrial growth would eventually
reach Earth’s physical limits and require
‘stationary state’ economics. Donella Meadows
and colleagues (Limits to Growth), Nicholas
Georgescu-Roegen (The Entropy Law and Economic
Process), Herman Daly (Steady-State Economics),
Mark Anielski (Genuine Wealth) and others
have since refined these essential and inevitable
new ecological or biophysical economics.
It would take a very
long book to introduce all the important,
accurate and visionary ideas that ecologists,
environmentalists and biophysical scientists
have contributed to society: Organic farming,
voluntary simplicity, transition towns,
environmental rights, the conserver society
and so forth. Ecologists such as Paul Shepard,
Chellis Glendinning and Kathy McMahon examined
the psychological impact of the ecology
crisis. Arne Naess introduced ‘Deep Ecology’
and ‘richer lives with simpler means’. Vandana
Shiva, Mary Jo Breton, Rosemary Ruether
and others describe the importance of feminism
for ecology. Southern hemisphere nations
such as Bolivia have raised the issue of
environmental justice. Gregory
Bateson introduced the
link between mind, cybernetics and ecology,
and wrote “My knowing is a small part of
a wider integrated knowing that knits the
entire biosphere of creation.”
A young girl is amongst
up to 100,000 people who took part in a
demonstration on the Global Day of Action
against climate change in Copenhagen just
ahead of the UN climate negotiations held
there in 2009. Image: Christian Åslund
/ GreenpeaceThe anti-environmental sophists
bark for their patrons like the medieval
henchmen who burned scientists and healers
at the stake and conducted inquisitions
and pogroms. And like those agents of institutionalised
ignorance, they will end up on the wrong
side of history.
But being wrong isn’t
the problem. The problem appears in the
destruction and suffering caused by this
deceit, misinformation and propaganda. Every
day, as Earth spins through the heavens,
species blink from existence, cancers and
illnesses attack people, children starve
and communities suffer.
We aren’t quibbling
about facts here. We’re battling for lives.
-Rex Weyler
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