What a fascinating post. It made me think about how modernity has changed how we see humanities relationship with the our planet in the West. It’s all talk of ‘stewardship’ etc. In the Bible Genesis1:26 it says “And God said, Let Us make man in Our image, after Our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.”
And yet, we know this talk of stewardship is fake, that the accumulation of wealth and resources is to be concentrated in a few hands who are ‘rewarded’ for their fake caring, with umpteen trips on private jets etc. Some of them may truly believe they deserve it or they can forgive their sins through the indulgences of buying carbon capture but I am cynical that this is the case for most.
This doesn’t mean there are not issues with products and producers and impacts on health and nature but I don’t think these are the ones screeched about on the BBC. By nature I am not a fan of waste and what could be more wasteful than flying food round the world just because we fancy asparagus in the winter? Also, moving resources round the world lessens our security. I am also not a fan of our rapid adoption of heavily manufactured food, big Pharma (who knows what all that crap does to you) or the ubiquitous use of plastic with dangers to humanity and nature. Funny how the issues are with big scale production and consumption isn’t it and, as you say, it is smaller scale production gets driven out?
Cognitive dissonance is a powerful thing. I don’t doubt that almost everyone visiting COP26, for instance, believes very strongly that they are doing the right thing. They almost certainly rationalise everything on the basis that they have to visibly act in order to fundamentally reorganise the economy and society and a relatively trivial amount of extra carbon emissions from flights is a small price to pay to do so. They are not rational: it is the human capacity for self-delusion and self-justification in action. We are very good at thinking up reasons why our own conduct is good for us even if it is bad for everyone else.
I love this topic! largely because I have no definite stance. What I find especially compelling is the question of how we are living, and how evident it is that it's all wrong-headed. So when talk of prosperity comes up, I wonder whether this ought to be considered from a merely materialist standpoint, and I don't mean this in a naive sense. I understand that a minimum material prosperity is needed for folk to get their heads above the struggle for survival. The issue to me... and let's stick with the example you provided, David... is that industrial agriculture is a total failure on every level. Industrial monocultural agriculture creates problems that require extreme solutions like pesticides and soil depletion solutions that no one wants. Central distribution centres contribute to food contaminations and recalls. It also hands over control of food to corporate interests, and thereby threatens to enslave populations. There are solutions. And as always, good solutions, healthy solutions require lifestyle changes. If, for instance, folks were to grow permaculture food forests in every home garden and on school grounds and institutional acreages instead of spraying these areas with toxins for green lawns... wouldn't most of the food issues just vanish? I mean there'd be far less need for wasteful forms of food production and distribution. And the need for toxic food and land management would likely also be done with. Of course, this isn't what's being proposed, and that leads to our hair-pulling, but nevertheless, this sort of solution is an option that might be seeded by some smart grassroots work. Would this ultimately entail less prosperity? Maybe in the back pages of the Economist where the GDP rat race is logged, but I think we'd see local and familial prosperity and happiness increase. Like I said, I'm sorta spitballing here. I've clearly thought about this a bit, but I haven't gotten into the nitty gritty. Happy to have anyone jump in...
But that image of Robin Hood's "Merry Men" living in the wilderness off the bounty of nature is one that the technocrats don't like. Their vision is one in which most of the population live in "megalopolises". Thus it was proposed by the previous Swedish government that the province of North Bothnia (Norrbotten) have its entire population removed to the south for reasons of convenience in providing government services. Recently in northerly portions of my own province of Ontario, Canada there has been concern over communities of people settling in unincorporated districts without any municipal government.
Claiming that environmentalism was ever thus and was the real message of ancient myths is akin to the claims that there were Christians before Christ. It is an attempt to claim that it is simply a fundamental truth that has always been with us. I expect this is what children will feel as they grow up, never having heard an alternative or indeed the original stories.
And yet it must be admitted that 'material prosperity' often or regularly is destructive of other more valuable kinds of prosperity. Rachel Carson's SILENT SPRING hasn't become less important since 1962. Bob Dylan asked 'where have all the flowers gone?' He might better have asked 'where have all the flies gone?' In the summer, 80 years ago, in Kent, my Gran had fly-papers up in her kitchen, which had to be changed regularly, covered with them. And at night the hedgerows were full of the flickering lights of 'gloworms'. Is there now a gloworm left in Kent? And every middle-aged and older person must remember when car windscreens got covered by hordes of insects. Where are they now? A key measure of material prosperity must be the number of cars on the roads--with all the freedom cars give. But freedom for whom? For the adult users certainly but what about the freedom of their children?. The deaths of children per number of vehicles on the roads dropped, between 1922 and 1986, by 98% (ONE FALSE MOVE... A Study of Children's Independent Mobility, Mayer Hillman, John Adams and John Whitelegg, Policy Studies Institute 1990) but this isn't a measure of how safe our roads had become for them but the reverse. What it measures is how much their freedom had been curtailed by how dangerous roads had become. Adults complain about '15 minute neighbourhoods'. Children have had to put up with worse for decades--so much so that they don't know it.
I agree, and I am painfully aware of the importance of conservation. But what is important to remember is that it is only wealthy societies which have the wherewithal to conserve.
And how about the difference between Eric Hobsbawm's and Gerald Rudé's Captain Swing--with its Marxising belief in rural idiocy--and the Hammonds' The Village Labourer, which speaks of “so immense an event as the disappearance of the old English village society”. I know which seems more idiotic to me. And George Sturt's The Wheelwright's Shop ... any suggestion of idiocy there?
But isn't it also true that only societies as wealthy as ours have the need? And Shakespeare's society--however poor compared with ours--can hardly be said to have been sunk in rural idiocy.
That phrase 'rural idiocy' of Marx's: doesn't it just express his annoyance that a peasantry isn't a proletariat and won't bring about the Revolution? And as for us, we're urban enough but has any people ever been more idiotic? Idiotic as only those with their heads full of ideas can be?
The EU has a long track record of implementing regulations that small businesses can't hope to comply with and still afford to compete against the big boys. It's the main purpose of the countless lobby groups in Brussels, such as the European Round Table for Industry. In my view the effect of lobbying on policy is one of the worst aspects of modern politics. Lobbyists, often given money by 'charities' that can and do get taxpayers' money from governments, get listened to and have their wishes enacted in policies which impose extra costs on the hard-pressed taxpayers (and cash for the lobbyists' friends, of course) . Fixing that will not be easy, given that the parties involved currently have the ears of our governments. You might think, in a more charitable moment, that our lords and masters might wake up to the prospect of a lack of food, but a lack of reliable energy doesn't seem to have done the trick (yet). I won't hold my breath.
I was a member of the Green Party in my youth, and at that time one of the big issues that activists were interested in was the Common Agricultural Policy and how it tipped the balance against the developing world. Plus ca change...
What a fascinating post. It made me think about how modernity has changed how we see humanities relationship with the our planet in the West. It’s all talk of ‘stewardship’ etc. In the Bible Genesis1:26 it says “And God said, Let Us make man in Our image, after Our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.”
And yet, we know this talk of stewardship is fake, that the accumulation of wealth and resources is to be concentrated in a few hands who are ‘rewarded’ for their fake caring, with umpteen trips on private jets etc. Some of them may truly believe they deserve it or they can forgive their sins through the indulgences of buying carbon capture but I am cynical that this is the case for most.
This doesn’t mean there are not issues with products and producers and impacts on health and nature but I don’t think these are the ones screeched about on the BBC. By nature I am not a fan of waste and what could be more wasteful than flying food round the world just because we fancy asparagus in the winter? Also, moving resources round the world lessens our security. I am also not a fan of our rapid adoption of heavily manufactured food, big Pharma (who knows what all that crap does to you) or the ubiquitous use of plastic with dangers to humanity and nature. Funny how the issues are with big scale production and consumption isn’t it and, as you say, it is smaller scale production gets driven out?
Cognitive dissonance is a powerful thing. I don’t doubt that almost everyone visiting COP26, for instance, believes very strongly that they are doing the right thing. They almost certainly rationalise everything on the basis that they have to visibly act in order to fundamentally reorganise the economy and society and a relatively trivial amount of extra carbon emissions from flights is a small price to pay to do so. They are not rational: it is the human capacity for self-delusion and self-justification in action. We are very good at thinking up reasons why our own conduct is good for us even if it is bad for everyone else.
Yes, a matter of faith rather than facts..
I love this topic! largely because I have no definite stance. What I find especially compelling is the question of how we are living, and how evident it is that it's all wrong-headed. So when talk of prosperity comes up, I wonder whether this ought to be considered from a merely materialist standpoint, and I don't mean this in a naive sense. I understand that a minimum material prosperity is needed for folk to get their heads above the struggle for survival. The issue to me... and let's stick with the example you provided, David... is that industrial agriculture is a total failure on every level. Industrial monocultural agriculture creates problems that require extreme solutions like pesticides and soil depletion solutions that no one wants. Central distribution centres contribute to food contaminations and recalls. It also hands over control of food to corporate interests, and thereby threatens to enslave populations. There are solutions. And as always, good solutions, healthy solutions require lifestyle changes. If, for instance, folks were to grow permaculture food forests in every home garden and on school grounds and institutional acreages instead of spraying these areas with toxins for green lawns... wouldn't most of the food issues just vanish? I mean there'd be far less need for wasteful forms of food production and distribution. And the need for toxic food and land management would likely also be done with. Of course, this isn't what's being proposed, and that leads to our hair-pulling, but nevertheless, this sort of solution is an option that might be seeded by some smart grassroots work. Would this ultimately entail less prosperity? Maybe in the back pages of the Economist where the GDP rat race is logged, but I think we'd see local and familial prosperity and happiness increase. Like I said, I'm sorta spitballing here. I've clearly thought about this a bit, but I haven't gotten into the nitty gritty. Happy to have anyone jump in...
But that image of Robin Hood's "Merry Men" living in the wilderness off the bounty of nature is one that the technocrats don't like. Their vision is one in which most of the population live in "megalopolises". Thus it was proposed by the previous Swedish government that the province of North Bothnia (Norrbotten) have its entire population removed to the south for reasons of convenience in providing government services. Recently in northerly portions of my own province of Ontario, Canada there has been concern over communities of people settling in unincorporated districts without any municipal government.
Yes, it's a strange melange of impulses - the desire to make 'legible' (as James C Scott would put it) and yet also to 'rewild'.
Ed Dutton, a.k.a. The Jolly Heretic, made a similar point re. Dr Who.
https://www.jollyheretic.com/p/what-on-earth-has-happened-to-dr
Claiming that environmentalism was ever thus and was the real message of ancient myths is akin to the claims that there were Christians before Christ. It is an attempt to claim that it is simply a fundamental truth that has always been with us. I expect this is what children will feel as they grow up, never having heard an alternative or indeed the original stories.
Presumably it was ever thus; it just goes to show that humanity never really changes. We repurpose myths to suit the pieties of the current moment.
And yet it must be admitted that 'material prosperity' often or regularly is destructive of other more valuable kinds of prosperity. Rachel Carson's SILENT SPRING hasn't become less important since 1962. Bob Dylan asked 'where have all the flowers gone?' He might better have asked 'where have all the flies gone?' In the summer, 80 years ago, in Kent, my Gran had fly-papers up in her kitchen, which had to be changed regularly, covered with them. And at night the hedgerows were full of the flickering lights of 'gloworms'. Is there now a gloworm left in Kent? And every middle-aged and older person must remember when car windscreens got covered by hordes of insects. Where are they now? A key measure of material prosperity must be the number of cars on the roads--with all the freedom cars give. But freedom for whom? For the adult users certainly but what about the freedom of their children?. The deaths of children per number of vehicles on the roads dropped, between 1922 and 1986, by 98% (ONE FALSE MOVE... A Study of Children's Independent Mobility, Mayer Hillman, John Adams and John Whitelegg, Policy Studies Institute 1990) but this isn't a measure of how safe our roads had become for them but the reverse. What it measures is how much their freedom had been curtailed by how dangerous roads had become. Adults complain about '15 minute neighbourhoods'. Children have had to put up with worse for decades--so much so that they don't know it.
I agree, and I am painfully aware of the importance of conservation. But what is important to remember is that it is only wealthy societies which have the wherewithal to conserve.
And how about the difference between Eric Hobsbawm's and Gerald Rudé's Captain Swing--with its Marxising belief in rural idiocy--and the Hammonds' The Village Labourer, which speaks of “so immense an event as the disappearance of the old English village society”. I know which seems more idiotic to me. And George Sturt's The Wheelwright's Shop ... any suggestion of idiocy there?
But isn't it also true that only societies as wealthy as ours have the need? And Shakespeare's society--however poor compared with ours--can hardly be said to have been sunk in rural idiocy.
That phrase 'rural idiocy' of Marx's: doesn't it just express his annoyance that a peasantry isn't a proletariat and won't bring about the Revolution? And as for us, we're urban enough but has any people ever been more idiotic? Idiotic as only those with their heads full of ideas can be?
Another great article, thank you for bringing clarity of thought to these issues.
The EU has a long track record of implementing regulations that small businesses can't hope to comply with and still afford to compete against the big boys. It's the main purpose of the countless lobby groups in Brussels, such as the European Round Table for Industry. In my view the effect of lobbying on policy is one of the worst aspects of modern politics. Lobbyists, often given money by 'charities' that can and do get taxpayers' money from governments, get listened to and have their wishes enacted in policies which impose extra costs on the hard-pressed taxpayers (and cash for the lobbyists' friends, of course) . Fixing that will not be easy, given that the parties involved currently have the ears of our governments. You might think, in a more charitable moment, that our lords and masters might wake up to the prospect of a lack of food, but a lack of reliable energy doesn't seem to have done the trick (yet). I won't hold my breath.
I was a member of the Green Party in my youth, and at that time one of the big issues that activists were interested in was the Common Agricultural Policy and how it tipped the balance against the developing world. Plus ca change...