Back Issue - July 2004
BY FORCE, PERSUASION OR ENLIGHTENED SELF-INTEREST?
Part 1
A remarkable event took place in a committee
room in the Houses of Parliament in the UK on Tuesday 15 June.
It followed the book launch the previous evening at the Royal
Institution in London. It consisted of a series of passionate
presentations on the extreme danger to our world from the
onset of climate change, led by the author of the book in
question: "How We Can Save the Planet".
Mayer Hillman, the author of the book, was so passionate that
he advocated carbon rationing to be imposed on the population
in order to avert climate catastrophe by the end of this century,
if not before. He argued that the population of Britain was
prepared to endure food rationing to see it through World
War II, and we are now in just as acute an emergency as we
were between 1939 and 1945. Now the emergency is about the
onset of global warming and climate change, cited by Sir John
Houghton as "a weapon of mass destruction", and
by the UK government's chief scientist as a "more serious
threat to world security than terrorism".
Michael Meacher, the former UK Minister for
the Environment, was equally as passionate when it came to
making his presentation, but he brought to the debate his
political instinct to induce and persuade the population to
reduce its carbon emissions through "carbon entitlements"
rather than "rationing". Ambassador Estrada of Argentina,
who came to world attention for forcing countries, as chairperson,
to agree the Kyoto protocol at the very last moments of the
convention in 1997, was also present at this event. He said
he views his role as attempting "to seduce rather than
enforce other parties". He is clearly a very patient
person, for he said it took the United States 47 years from
1948 to 1995 to agree to participate in a multilateral global
organisation on trade.
Although the analogy with wartime rationing has been made
before, the advocacy of compulsion with or without prior agreement
is unusual. Admittedly rules, that are devised in order to
implement agreements, result in compelling parties to abide
by them for agreements to be effective, but I do not regard
such actions to be forceful by nature. Were countries to be
faced with sudden, unpredictable climatic crises, then autocratic
measures could be imposed on populations in ways which are
indeed parallel to the Homeland Security Act in the USA and
on the horizon in the UK, in order to counter perceived terrorism.
It is in everyone's interests that countries are not panicked
into such action through continuing to be as woefully unprepared
for the onset of climate change as they clearly are at present.
In the meantime, effectively all current efforts to avert
climate catastrophe are by persuasion - as exemplified by
the contributions of Michael Meacher and Ambassador Estrada
which have just been mentioned.
This Boiling Point
issue advances the proposition that dictatorial force should
be avoided at all costs, that persuasion alone is not working
and that enlightened self-interest provides the only durable
solution to saving the planet from calamitous global warming
and climate change.
This is an ambitious undertaking, and both column
length and eyestrain for viewers prevents this from being
more than just a start. First an overview of the different
forms that persuasion takes will be attempted, and then some
ideas on the potential contribution of a more enlightened
approach.
The most familiar form of persuasion is warning to take action
on the basis of scientific evidence, as contained in reports
and publicised in parts of the media. We have used it ourselves
in letters to the press and in issues of Boiling Point, most
notably to refute the efforts of the self-proclaimed 'skeptical
environmentalist' Bjorn Lomborg to downplay the dangers of
climate change (see September 2001 - Denial, Justification
and Deception about Climate Change). However, despite increasingly
alarming reports confirming the onset of dangerous climate
change in recent months, there has been rhetoric but very
little increased activity in order to respond to them [1].
What activity should follow from these warnings is normally
thrashed out at conferences and contained in national and
international reports. The prime global examples are the UN
World Summits in 1992 and 2002, and the Kyoto protocol in
1997. The main national examples in the UK are the Report
of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, the Cabinet
Office's Performance and Innovation Unit's Energy Review in
February 2002 which built upon it, and the resulting Government
White Paper 'Our energy future - creating a low carbon economy'
[2].
As a non-government organisation, Save our World with others
homed in on the most specific necessity to be stated in the
UK reports: 60% reductions in greenhouse gases by 2050. Prime
Minister Tony Blair made it clear, for the first time, that
this was not only a UK but a global imperative in a speech
he gave on the eve of the 2002 World Summit, though we had
been co-ordinating pressure on him for months to lay this
down as a challenge at the Summit itself [3].
Courage must have deserted him to take on President Bush on
such a public occasion, although Bush had already pulled out
from attending in person.
The US administration had already managed to bully the other
countries at the Summit not only to remove climate change
from the agenda but also from setting binding targets for
renewable energy which is one of the main ways of addressing
it. Gerhard Shroder, the German Chancellor, was left to make
the only significant proposal on renewable energy, in the
form of offering to host an international convention in order
to promote it. This was highly significant, for Germany had
borne the brunt of horrendous floods that had plagued seven
European countries within the previous month [4].
Extreme weather conditions are predicted consequences of climate
change by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
I made a point of attending the conference that Gerhard Shroder
had offered to be hosted by the German government - at the
beginning of June, expecting it to commit all 145 attending
countries to significant action. However, despite the formal
Policy Recommendations calling for 'overall goals and targets
for advancing the use of renewable energy' and representatives
of non-governmental organisations demanded that they be mandatory,
the Political Declaration at the end of the conference made
no mention of governments agreeing anything on goals or targets.
Furthermore, the conference was not attended by heads of governments,
including either Shroder or Blair, and received negligible
press coverage - globally or in the UK.
So, what to make of all this? The reasoned
scientific case is not working, conferencing is not working,
weather disasters immediately preceding conferences are not
having much influence, and protest marches and demonstrations
are not having much impact either.
Save our World has been supporting Campaign against Climate
Change marches for some years and has some members who are
common to both organisations. Since leaving office as Minister
for the Environment, Michael Meacher has made a number of
passionate speeches at the conclusion of several of them,
and none so well covered by the media as the one last November
as Bush flew in for the State Visit to London (see last Boiling
Point). There have been large demonstrations at global conferences
for finalising the Kyoto protocol, and Save our World became
an affiliate member of the Climate Voice web-site which accumulated
12 million demands on politicians taking part in one of them
at The Hague. All apparently to no avail.
One response to the failure of persuasion is direct action.
This is a counter-active form of force. In the environmental
arena, the activities of Greenpeace provide obvious examples,
from occupying the Brent Spar oil platform to boarding whaling
ships and those trading the products of illegal logging, and
pulling up genetically-modified crops. There are numerous
more informal and spontaneous examples, ranging from the residents
of Devises in Wiltshire defending their town centre trees
to occupations of sites which are planned for new transport
highways and airport expansions. Examples from other countries
include the determined occupation of land which is proposed
to be flooded for dams and hydro. projects.
Direct action has been highly effective. Unfortunately it
is also employed to the detriment of the environment, of which
the fuel price protests come most readily to mind in the UK.
The wholesale and insensitive development of wind-farms in
scenic areas is furthermore setting off spontaneous or organised
direct reaction [5].
Direct action is, moreover, the visible form of force being
used covertly behind the scenes by powerful financial and
commercial interest groups in order to counter the persuasive
power of scientific evidence, global and national policy-making,
reports and conferences. The primary legal responsibility
of companies to make profits for their shareholders adds to
these forces. The situation is actually a great deal more
complicated than that, since those producing the policies
and promoting them are beset by many conflicts of interest
among themselves, differing priorities, genuine disagreements,
vested interests in winning future elections and conditioning
by established cultural norms, often unconsciously, which
are no longer sustainable.
The most obvious of these, throughout the Western world,
is the presumption of uninterrupted economic growth and the
promotion of the consumer society. These forces not only control
the output of the media, through ownership and advertising
revenue, but serve as counter-incentives to awareness-raising
about environmental dangers (among many other things) in adult
society and in schools [6].
As if the situation were not already murky enough, the development
of political spin, double-think and double-talk in Orwellian
terms, adds deliberate confusion, denial and deception.
One other complication must not be forgotten, that has been
alluded to in previous issues of Boiling Point [7].
This is the still prevalent view of science being neutral
and objective, despite mounting evidence that scientists are
just as prone to cultural conditioning and value judgements
as anyone else. Whereas the methods they use have to be devised
and applied in a stictly unbiased and objective way, the choice
of theories to test and the selection of experiments inevitably
reflect the personal interests and values of the scientists
themselves, as well as their increasingly commercial funders.
The sub-tending of purposes to methods conveniently presents
scientists as 'experts', which can both flatter the scientific
community and promote spin, when it comes to politicians claiming
decisions on e.g. the commercial planting of genetically modified
crops are based on 'sound science'.
Enlightened self-interest starts
at the opposite end of the conceptual and political spectrum
from persuasion and force. It starts with a declaration of
the highest order: the valuation of the continuation of life
on Earth in its present form above all else.
Not only is it an openly declared value statement, and so
derived from the right brain instead of the left one. It also
develops from a completely different culture and literature,
from that of the politics of persuasion and inducement. For
example, support comes in a new book by Neale Walsch: "It
is only through PRE-serving ... (that is) serving Life itself
before you serve the Little Self ... that Life itself will
be preserved in its present form on the earth" [8].
He also writes: "The opportunity now placed before humanity
is to preserve life in its present form by pre-serving life
in its pre-sent form. That is, in the form in which it was
sent to you before you began changing it. That was its pre-sent
form" [9].
This approach will be developed in Part 2 of this Boiling
Point. However, some immediate implications and assurances
have to be given here, in order to make the intentions of
this approach clear and so forestall readers jumping to all
kinds of diversionary conclusions - though, no doubt, some
will defy my imagination whatever I try to do!
Firstly, this is not 'off-the-wall' New Age Religion, which
the environmental and climate change contrarians have already
employed as a weapon of attack. For example: "The green
movement is a modern secular religious movement engaged in
a world-wide crusade to impose its habits of the heart on
the world" [10].
Since this is a quotation from a professor emeritus of political
economy, no doubt the presumption that such a movement is
intrinsically associated with the power to impose any such
thing, is regarded as fair spin - however absurd it may be.
Whether you regard the sharing of enlightened self-interest
as a religious movement or a sensible response is another
matter. It deserves more, however, than smear and innuendo.
Enlightened self-interest is essentially a rational, not
a whimsical, response to the overwhelming scientific evidence
of the onset of dangerous climate change. However, the valuation
of the continuation of life on Earth above all else does challenge
all the short-term expediencies, vested interests, denials
and desires for an uninterrupted comfortable life that hitherto
have been regarded as perfectly legitimate and acceptable
grounds for taking action on averting climate change that
is in no way commensurate with the enormity of its impacts.
This perspective opens with the ultimate goal rather than
the ameliorative one, which, even with total acceptance world-wide
of the Kyoto protocol, the Millennium Goals, the World Summits
so far and the UK government White Paper, will, at best, produce
some improvement but not ensure the continuation of life on
Earth, as far as climatic stability is concerned. It poses
a complete and, I believe, an essential paradigm shift in
our approaches to such problems.
It also has to challenge areas that the ameliorative approach
has so far left untouched as being way beyond its current
aspirations. These are the global impacts of the wholesale
destruction of forests, coral reefs and fisheries in the interests
of commercial profits feeding an intensely cultivated culture
of consumerism; the presumed 'need' for unlimited air travel
without taxing it; the presumptions that economic growth and
global capitalism are sacrosanct; and that lifestyle aspirations,
or so called 'quality of life', that utilise the resources
of three planets in Europe and six in the USA, are acceptable
in perpetuity.
Practically speaking, this approach
requires testing every policy proposal and initiative against
the standard of valuing the continuation of life on Earth
above all else, and rejecting all of them that fail to do
so.
In terms of averting climate change it requires settling for
nothing less than immediate global commitment to achieving
the necessary greenhouse gas reductions to stabilising their
concentration in the atmosphere at a level that the best scientific
advice can give for ensuring the continuation of life on Earth.
Ancillary commitments are also necessary, in terms of equitable
methods of achieving the primary one, and what those methods
should be, in terms of agreements, processes, appropriate
technologies and uses of energy.
But it is also more than the substitution of one set of imperatives
for another. It goes deeper and becomes more personal. It
is not just a mental paradigm shift but also a deeply felt
one, that becomes, over time, instinctual. It requires holding
up all one's personal values to the mirror as to whether they
serve or obstruct the overriding one. This will affect, in
turn, one's most deeply held beliefs and most entrenched habits
before lifestyle changes can become established and durable.
This will almost certainly require new learning and support
with that learning, from those who are a little more familiar
with what is required than others. This is a matter of service,
not elitism.
It requires rediscovering personal qualities that have been
left to atrophy, in the headlong pursuit of comfort, convenience
and possessions - not least: service, modesty, honesty and
clarity of intention, perseverance, faith and endurance. If
this is too much to ask, life on this planet in its present
form will not survive. It is our choice. It is no one person's
imposition of will. Human life is at the cross-roads. The
situation can be viewed negatively as a dire threat, which
is not very rational as humanity has brought it about itself.
A growing number of people see it instead as a demand from
our whole life situation for transformation at all levels,
which is already under way, intensely exciting and the necessary
next step in evolution. After all, it is not just humanity
that is at risk but all life forms. For they too are the responsibility
of human beings, who have so far been heedless and negligent
stewards of the Earth.
So much for generalities. Part 2 of
the Boiling Point will be devoted to specific action that
needs to be taken, from this new perspective.
(c) Jim Scott 12 July 2004
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