A bar to the Soothscribe Award for this speech attacking climate catastrophism given by Spiked's Brendan O'Neill at the Gothenburg Book Fair. My only caveat is that he is unfamiliar with the terminology. "Environmentalism" is a broad term that includes a wide range of healthy and worthy activities that are the baby we should be careful not to throw out with the scummy bath water of climate catastrophism. Such activities can be broadly grouped as "conservationist" in contrast to modernity-hating "preservationism".
The doctrine of environmentalism is a new form of conservatism, which deploys the politics of fear to control or at least sway how people behave. What’s really happened is that the practical problem of pollution has been moralised – super-moralised, in fact. What should be treated as a specific problem in need of a few solutions – whether that be going nuclear, investigating renewables or reshaping our climate – is instead turned into a new organising principle of politics and morality.
Environmentalism, far from encouraging us to transcend the everyday, tells us to rummage around in our dustbins or to tot up how much carbon we used while driving to the shops; it implores us to obsess over everyday shit and nonsense. And it offers no redemption whatsoever, no promise of a better life in return for recycling our rubbish and never flying abroad. Instead, you live, you pollute, you try to pollute less, and then you die. And when you die, you carry on polluting, according to the misanthropes, through the toxins you emit while being cremated or buried in the earth.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment