Background Argument 1 - June 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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