Back to the future

Mystic Meg, NASA climatologists, Arthur C Clarke: all share one common interest - predicting the future. Whilst computer models tend to offer more accurate simulations than speculative sci-fi or images in a second-hand crystal ball, it's still very difficult to see far into the future - and harder still to plan for different eventualities. Meanwhile, humanity continues to use up natural resources and degrade ecosystems as if there was no tomorrow: peak oil by 2010, some say; less than 10 years to avert a climate tipping point, warn others. Some have argued that our entire way of life is short-termist. We have to get a longer-term perspective, and fast.

And therein lies the crux of the problem. In the absence of a crystal ball, how do you make good long-term policy? And how do you override the inherent short-termism of our electoral cycles and attention spans? (If you've read this far, then at least there's some hope.)

George Monbiot has recently made an intriguing suggestion to address this very problem. Working with fellow environmental campaigner Matthew Prescott, he's proposed a 100-Year Committee, which would sit in the UK House of Commons and debate the effects of current policy over the coming century. Monbiot states that its "purpose would be to provide a voice for those who have not yet been enfranchised" - a nod towards the concept of intergenerational equity - and that it would help entrench concern for problems not readily addressed by governments with a five-year time horizon.

The idea has drawn a lot of scorn in the forums of Comment is Free (a reaction which is, at least, very predictable). But amidst the rants some criticisms stick: surely our current perspective will be useless to people a century from now? Aren't our predictions nearly always wrong, anyway? Don't we run the risk of entrenching equally misguided policies in the name of long-term thinking?

Before responding to these criticisms, it's worth mentioning that Monbiot's suggestion is pretty tame compared to other proposals out there. If you a think a century's a long time, then you'll balk at the remit of the Long Now Foundation, which was set up in 1996 - or rather 01996, to use their preferred formulation - to "foster long-term thinking and responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years." One of their projects is to build a 'ten thousand year clock', which, one of its proponents hopes,"would do for thinking about time what the photographs of Earth from space have done for thinking about the environment. Such icons reframe the way people think." Progress on the clock remains... slow, but let's give them a chance; they've got a while. After all, even the Long Now project pales in comparison with the propositions of environmental writer Colin Tudge, who argues that "we cannot claim to be taking our species and our planet seriously until we acknowledge that a million years is a proper unit of political time." (The Time Before History: 5 million years of human impact, 1996.)

For now, let's stick to the question of a hundred years; a million years might just be stretching things a little too far, noble though the sentiment is. If we can plan for a century, we'll be doing quite well.

To help us look forward, I'd argue that first we need to look backward. The premise of this blog is that the history of the environment, and of environmentalism, are seldom acknowledged. Looking at past instances of 'long-term thinking', we can get some idea of how successful the notion is.

Let's ignore the prophecies of Nostradamus and the innumerable sci-fi visionaries, and focus instead on the environmentalists who have tried to forecast the future. I'll be honest: some have been piss-poor. The C19th population theorist Thomas Malthus and the 1960s Malthusian Paul Ehrlich both managed, in fits of bad luck or simply bad judgement, to time their predictions just before the facts would totally invalidate them. Malthus outlined his theory that population growth, advancing geometrically, would always outpace the merely arithmetic growth of productivity, in the last decade before the industrial revolution really took off in Great Britain - and after which agricultural and industrial productivity would comfortably outpace population. Perhaps we can forgive Malthus for not seeing this coming; but Paul Ehrlich should have had enough evidence in the 1960s to see that his predicted 'population bomb' would be at least partially defused in the 1970s with the onset of the Western 'demographic transition'. Rising living standards, movements for womens' rights and the increasing availability of contraception have since depressed fertility rates around the globe.

But other greens have seen far, and been proved right. Svante Arrhenius, a Swedish chemist, first predicted manmade global warming as far back as 1896 (although he thought that it would be a rather good thing, because more carbon dioxide equals bigger plants, right?). M. King Hubbert, an American geophysicist, predicted in 1956 that US oil production would peak around 1970; he got it spot on. The jury is still out, of course, on the wider application of 'Hubbert's Peak' to global oil production (though even Shell now acknowledges that demand will outstrip supply by 2015 - fifteen years out from Hubbert's own predictions).

But it's one thing to predict something - another to actually act on those predictions, and stop the prophecy from coming true. Have these few far-sighted individuals actually had any effect on society's overuse of planetary resources? Most have been dismissed in their times as doomsayers or fantasists. Others have garnered polite respect, but had their thoughts ignored, because their predictions seemed to lie comfortably far in the future. For example, Monbiot's article cites the issue of phosphorous depletion as being a ticking timebomb threatening future famines. But ecologists have known about the finite nature of phosphorous since at least the 1930s, and still no-one has acted upon their warnings. No less a luminary than HG Wells voiced his fears about phosphorous depletion in his bestseller The Science of Life in 1931. Aldous Huxley, another early green, mentioned the problem in his books Antic Hay and Brave New World; proposing in the latter a novel, if macabre solution - reclaiming lost phosphorous by recycling human corpses. (Perhaps the 100-Year Committee should take note.)

Phosphorous might still be a distant problem, but global warming clearly is not; and we have started to put in place very long-term policies to address this. Within the last week the British Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, Ed Miliband, announced that the UK would commit itself to 80% cuts in greenhouse gases by 2050, and would write this into statutory law. A law that commits future governments, of all stripes, for the next forty-two years, to totally transforming the British economy. That's what I call a long-term vision. It makes the old Soviet five-year plans look practically myopic. But you don't have to be a communist to see that some far-reaching targets and longlasting market certainty are vital to achieve such a fundamental transition. The trick is not being too prescriptive: lay down the overarching goal, and leave the means of getting there to successive generations.

The impression persists, that as a culture and as a species, we just don't seem to be totally cut out to think long-term. Our impulse is to gorge ourselves today, leaving nothing for tomorrow; our political systems are geared to short time horizons; our media outlets flit from crisis to controversy, whilst our fashions are fickle to the extreme. And yet, and yet... society is also replete with individuals who have a knack for thinking beyond the here-and-now. We have historians who act as the 'social memory' of our culture. We have visionaries who try to extrapolate from past and present trends to guesstimate what the future holds. Getting those individuals into positions where they can share their skills with society is the challenge.

For these reasons, I'd like to endorse Monbiot's recommendation for a 100-Year Committee, but with an amendment: that on the committee there should also sit a Historical Advisor. This idea is not my own, but taken from the lobby group History & Policy, which campaigns to improve the recognition of history in policymaking. Leading supporter of the group, David Cannadine, argues that "historians and politicians bring very different perspectives to bear on the contemporary world, and greater dialogue between them would be beneficial to the policy process. Historians can suggest, on the basis of past precedents, what might or might not work and counsel against raising public expectations that policies will be instantly effective." What better application of this skill than to the question of our future existence on the planet?

Crunch or climate?

Will the environment suffer thanks to the global Credit Crunch? That's the question on every Green's lips at the moment:

• The chair of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), Yvo de Boer, expressed his fear that the financial crisis might undermine international action on climate change;
  
• Italy and Poland have attempted to wriggle out of their 2020 emissions targets using the credit crunch as an excuse;
  
• Professor Ross Garnaut, author of Australia's recent Garnaut Review of climate change economics, warned recently that it "would be a really serious mistake if we saw the financial crisis as a reason for going slow'' in tackling global warming.

History doesn't appear to bode well for Greens. At times like these, when the going gets tough, society usually ditches its concern for the environment.

Take 1992, for example. The world had just thrown its biggest-ever green get-together at Rio de Janeiro, inaugurating both the Convention on Biological Diversity and the UN climate process. The media had spent the last three years lavishing ever more column inches on exciting new ideas like 'the greenhouse effect' and 'the ozone layer'. What Jonathan Porritt had predicted in 1988 - 'the coming of the greens' - seemed to be coming to pass.

And then... along came Black Wednesday. The UK, forced to withdraw the pound from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism, lost an estimated £3.4bn. Public attention shifted away from environmental concerns and refocused on cold, hard cash. Even the left-liberal Guardian cut down on its environment coverage after 1992, as the graph below shows (click on it for a larger image):

Or look back to the 1970s. The early years of the decade - when the economy remained strong and Keynesianism reigned supreme - saw huge public and political attention devoted to environmenal issues. Earth Day 1970 drew millions of students from across the US to demonstrate about pollution and species loss. The first Greenpeace protests against nuclear tests in the Pacific generated headlines around the world. But all this was eclipsed by the 1973 OPEC oil crisis, the 1973-4 stock market crash, and the resultant onset of 'stagflation' and rising unemployment levels. Environmental activism of course persisted; but it sank beneath the public radar, and no longer preoccupied politicians like it once had.

So is the climate movement headed the same way now - destined to be buried under what some predict will be the worst recession for a generation? Will history repeat itself yet again?

My answer is a cautious 'no', for several reasons. One, because history rarely repeats itself. It can contain some striking parallels; it can show that people are forever people and, as such, follow general patterns of behaviour. But history should also show us that the context in which social movements operate changes all the time. Our society's concern for the environment in the 1970s, 80s and 90s was, compared to now, relatively fragile. We lacked most of the environmental regulations that are now in place, and the levels of public awareness were generally at a lower level overall than they are today. There's now an 'institutional momentum' around many environmental issues, and around climate change most of all. In other words, it will be pretty difficult to derail the political processes already set in motion.

Let's be clear: there will be casualties. The squeeze on people's wallets from higher fuel and food prices has already cut short the meteoric ascent of Organic produce, with UK sales peaking at £2bn last year, only to flatline and start falling in 2008. A similar thing may happen to other premium green products. But the flip side of people economising is conservation: sales of fuel-efficient cars are up, whilst 4x4s are languishing, and the manufacturers of gas-guzzlers - like General Motors in the US - are in dire financial straits. (Toyota, maker of the Prius, is meanwhile doing very well.)



And conservation may have a larger economy-wide impact on our carbon emissions, with some industry analysts predicting that EU emissions will fall by 100m tonnes in 2009 compared to 2007. This obviously isn't much of a long term solution - it's about as helpful as China's ploy to clear the air during the Olympics by shutting down factories around Beijing - but considering that the breakneck economic growth of the past eight years has seen emissions climb higher than even the IPCC predicted in its worse scenarios, a slight slowdown could buy us some more years. As a precedent for this, after the 1970s oil shocks, Western nations were kicked into improving the efficiency of their industries and transport systems to the extent that GDP growth started to decouple from energy use.

However, it's not this economising that makes me optimistic despite the Credit Crunch. Rather, it's the many signs that this time, at last, concern for the environment is high enough to weather a financial storm. Finally, the three planks of the triple bottom line (economy, society and environment) are starting to share an equal footing.

Where's my evidence? I call to witness the facts:

• Despite the attempted mutiny of Poland and Italy last week, European leaders did reaffirm their commitment to their 2020 emissions targets;
  
• In the same week, the Minister of the new UK Department of Energy and Climate Change, Ed Miliband, said in his inaugural address to the Commons: "Mr Speaker, in tough economic times, some people will ask whether we should retreat from our climate change objectives. In our view, it would be quite wrong to row back, and those who say we should misunderstand the relationship between the economic and environmental tasks we face." At the same time, he announced that he would introduce a new feed-in tariff, a radical piece of policy that will give British renewable microgeneration the support that it needs;


• In the US Presidential debates, both Obama and McCain have continued to refer to the need to deal with the energy crisis as well as the financial crisis (with Obama's energy plan looking particularly hopeful: plenty of new investment in renewables and a commitment to firm emissions targets).

Some observers (like John Vidal in the Guardian) have drawn attention to the amounts being spent on the bail-out of the banks, and questioned why this level of spending hasn't already been lavished on decarbonising our economies. It's a fair point. But it's worth remembering also that the $700bn US bail-out package contained $17bn in tax rebates for the renewables industry and Carbon Capture & Storage technologies. And whilst the recent calls from the British Left for a windfall tax on the utility companies (to scrape a little off their profits from record fuel prices and invest it in social and environmental causes) have not yet been taken up by the government, the proposal remains on the agenda.

Perhaps the most promising development of all has been the way the environmental movement has responded to the Credit Crunch. Rather than simply keep on repeating, in leaden tones, how important climate change is, there have been real moves to weld such messages to policies that will rebuild the economy. In July 2008, a coalition of groups calling themselves the Green New Deal came together to call for a package of new policies, modelled on Roosevelt's New Deal in the 1930s, to address the 'triple crunch' of financial crisis, climate change, and skyrocketing energy prices. The group, including Andrew Simms from the New Economics Foundation, Larry Elliott, economics editor of the Guardian, and Jeremy Leggett of SolarCentury, proposes, amongst other things:

• Green investment and green jobs - the training of a 'carbon army' of workers for a vast environmental reconstruction programme (echoing Roosevelt's public works programme, which included a Civilian Conservation Corps);


• Making 'every building a power station', through support for microgeneration (such as a feed-in tariff);


• A windfall tax on the profits of the utilities companies;


• Much tighter regulation of finance, including demergers of banks, more stringent rules around lending, and the breaking apart of retail banking from merchant banking and securities dealing.

In the US, Thomas Friedman - NY Times columnist and author of Hot, Flat and Crowded - has been making similar calls for regenerating the US economy through massive green investment.

The folks over at sustainability recruitment agency Bright Green Talent have got the right idea when they say: "As the financial crisis clearly demonstrates, it doesn't pay to panic. Instead, we need to commit, daily, to greening the world in which we live as we grow our companies and economies; some even see this as the solution for getting us out of this mess."

The green blogosphere has also been writing about the credit crisis - such as this blog by social entrepenuer Jamie Andrews - showing a willingness to propose solutions to economic problems that greens have, in the past, tended to view as outside their remit.

Most promisingly of all, the UN has become a champion for 'green jobs', with a major recent report from UNEP and the ILO forecasting that millions of new 'green collar' posts could be created with the rise of the renewables and energy efficiency industries.

The UN report picks up on the idea of 'Just Transition' that's been doing the rounds in the US coal-mining and rustbelt states, and now has found its way into the UK anti-coal debate. The concept in a nutshell says that the decarbonisation of our economies must be done with sensitivity for the jobs it makes defunct - such as fossil fuel recovery - and offer reskilling and replacement jobs. It's been good to see greens get to grips with these knotty problems at the most recent Climate Camp at Kingsnorth in Kent - a community whose inhabitants will not take kindly to their power station being closed, if it means no more jobs.

How does all this debate shape up against past green performances in the face of economic downturns? Immeasurably better, in my opinion. In previous recessions, environmentalists have done little to make themselves relevant to the economic pains being felt by most people. As a result, they have frequently been sidelined until times get better. To take one example, in 1973 - the year of the OPEC oil crisis - a brilliant economist, EF Schumacher, published the classic green text, Small is Beautiful. His notion of 'Buddhist Economics' has inspired generations of greens and remains an elegant, alluring idea. But to the man on the street in the crisis-hit mid-Seventies, Schumacher's book must have seemed not merely obscure, but irrelevant. It contains few practical suggestions for how to build a green economy, and offers little succour to those most affected by the failings of markets. In hard times, we need plans, not philosophy.

Bill Clinton's pearl of wisdom about what voters really care about in elections - 'It's the economy, stupid' - looks set to hold true in the US in 2008, with support for Barack Obama surging after the deepening of the credit crisis in September. Climate change has not received anything like the attention that Wall Street has on the campaign trail. But despite this, both politicians and public, I believe, now realise the underlying significance of saving the climate, as well as the economy. This time round, it's also the ecology, stupid.

Shades of Green #1: The Eighties

In the first of a series looking at environmentalism decade by decade, we start with the Eighties. In between glam rock and Dallas, some people were trying to save the planet...

The Eighties began as a bad decade for the environment. Reagan removed Carter's solar panels from the roof of the White House, threw out any notion of energy conservation, and reignited the cold war by placing cruise missiles in Europe. The fragile European and American environmental movements, whose protests against civil nuclear power had escalated during the later Seventies, were forced back into campaigning against nuclear weapons. Peace and green movements fused, as they had during the late 1960s.

CND (Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament) was revived in the UK and roared into life, reaching new peaks of membership. The government pamphlet Protect and Survive, detailing how to survive a nuclear attack (including the extremely useful tip of painting one's windows white) was subverted by the anti-nuke movement. Raymond Briggs crystallised it all in When the Wind Blows (1982).

But even under this nuclear cloud there were some silver linings. The German Green Party was founded in 1980. The Greenham Common Peace Camp, formed in 1981 to protest against the siting of cruise missiles in the Home Counties, became an icon of defiance and a meeting-place for feminists and environmentalists. Meanwhile, on the other side of the planet in Australia, an equally significant direct action protest began in opposition to the proposed Franklin Dam, which would have flooded a pristine forest valley. The Franklin Blockade, as it came to be known, halted the dam, helped usher the pro-conservation Labor party into power in 1983, and inspired activists for decades afterwards - including, much later, the decision by the UK Climate Camp in 2008 to stage a blockade against new coal.

But let's not get ahead of ourselves. Though by 2008 people were starting to mobilise properly about coal in the context of global warming, in the 1980s the only protests to do with coal were about keeping the mines open. Maggie's preoccupation in the early Eighties was breaking the power of the trade unions, rather than the environment (even if her decision to shut the pits and switch to gas was, inadvertantly, the main reason why Britain was able to meet its Kyoto emissions reduction targets over two decades later). In 1982 Thatcher, embarking on the Falklands war, muttered to an aide: "It’s exciting to have a real crisis on your hands, when you’ve spent half your political life dealing with humdrum things like the environment."

The early Eighties also saw the USA acquire a radical, direct-action wing to its green movement. Earth First!, founded by David Foreman in 1980, modelled itself loosely on the wilderness vigilantes of Edward Abbey's 1975 book The Monkeywrench Gang, and in a nod to these inspirations, took for its symbol a monkeywrench.

Lying in front of bulldozers must have seemed more exciting, but arguably one of the most successful environmental campaigns of the 1980s was conducted along more humdrum and traditional lines. CLEAR, the Campaign for Lead-Free Air, started in the UK in 1982, calling for the banning of leaded petrol, arguing rightly that it polluted air and was a health hazard. (Lead, incidentally, had been introduced into petrol in the 1920s as an anti-knocking agent.) Patient lobbying saw the government and car industry cave in to CLEAR's demands, and by the end of the decade lead emissions from cars were 70% lower than when they started campaigning.

Lead was in the air, and the rain was turning acid. Though the problem of acid rain had been identified back in the Victorian era (the term was coined by the first Alkali Inspector, Robert Angus Smith, in 1872), it had not been taken seriously for over a century, until in the mid-1970s Swedish studies showed that sulphur from coal power stations in northern Europe was acidifying Sweden's lakes and killing its forests. During the Eighties, agitation over acid rain intensified, especially amongst German Greens, when a 1984 report indicated that the Black Forest had been badly affected. New controls on sulphur emissions in the later 1980s significantly reduced the scale of the problem in Europe and America (though in China, the problem was only just beginning).

Temperate forests, however, were faring well compared to those in the tropics, which by the Eighties were coming under renewed pressure for timber and farmland. The assault on the world's equatorial forests became epitomised in the fate of the Amazon. The mighty Amazon, the 'Great Mother Forest', 5 million square kilometres of it: superlatives abound, and are matched only by those recounting its devastation - by 1985, it was being lost at a rate of 8000 square miles a year. Western greens reacted with horror and anger to such facts, and by the mid-Eighties it had become the quintessential pastime of the middle-classes to 'Save the Rainforests'. Friends of the Earth launched their rainforests campaign in 1985, Sting organised a charity concert in 1988, and by 1989 you could even buy a Rainforest Crunch ice cream from Ben & Jerry's (with proceeds going to conservation projects in Brazil). Of course the concerned citizens of Europe and North America were heavily implicated in the destruction: sales of ethical ice creams were as nothing compared to the demand for Brazilian beef (and soy) that customers would happily chow down in their local McDonalds (for more on which, see the forthcoming post on the 1997 McLibel trial).

Meanwhile, Australian environmentalists launched their own programme to defend native rainforests, the Wet Tropics Campaign, in 1985; whilst the agitation of the rubber-tapper, unionist and environmental activist Chico Mendes in Brazil led to his murder by ranchers in 1988.

A rare bright spot for Eighties greens came in 1986 when the International Whaling Commission (IWC) declared a moratorium on whaling. The ruling provided a successful conclusion to Greenpeace's Save the Whales campaign, which had been initiated in the mid-Seventies. The public outcry against the hunting of the world's largest mammals had manifested itself in some strange pieces of pop culture: in 1984, Star Trek IV burst onto the silver screen, going boldly to save some whales (which turned out to be representatives of a higher extraterrestial intelligence). It's endangered life, Jim, but not as we know it.

Mid-decade, and the cold war had begun to thaw, with a new Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev (who has green leanings), introducing policies of Perestroika (restructuring) and Glasnost (openness) into the Soviet Union. The new, more liberal political climate encouraged activists within the USSR to become bolder, and the ensuing years saw 'legitimate' protests about pollution and the environment advanced as covers for democratic agitation. Then in 1986, just as everyone was starting to worry a little less about nuclear weapons, Chernobyl reminded everyone why they should worry about civil nuclear power. The disaster underlined for many environmentalists why nuclear should never be an option, and has since made it very hard for the green movement to compromise on the issue, even in the face of climate change and the need for low-carbon energy sources. Chernobyl was prefigured, uncannily, in 1985 with the airing of classic BBC drama Edge of Darkness (starring Bob Peck, below), a six-hour epic with haunting music by Eric Clapton, which centred on the hazards of nuclear waste and wove a complex plot involving a Yorkshire detective, a CIA agent, civil servants, the nuclear industry and a green protest group called Gaia. Pure magic. Dee-dow-dow-do-do-doooo....

Yet perhaps the most defining environmental crisis of the 1980s, the real ticking timebomb, was not to be found in a heavily-guarded power station on the other side of the Iron Curtain, but in our fridges, deoderants and styrofoam burger-boxes. Collectively, the CFCs (ChloroFluoroCarbons)released by these staples of modern consumer society had increased to such a level that by 1985 a rapid thinning (or 'hole') could be detected in the Earth's ozone layer. No ozone layer, no protection from solar ultraviolet rays. More UV rays, more skin cancers. With such an obvious and direct causal link to human health - and, just as importantly, with replacements for CFCs being so relatively easy to find - the world moved with unusual speed to bring about the phasing out of ozone-depleting gases, leaving hardly any time or need for the green groups' consumer campaigns against aerosols. The Montreal Protocol of 1987 has to stand as one of the most successful pieces of environmental legislation ever (and for that matter, more effective than the Kyoto Protocol for mitigating global warming, too, since CFCs are also powerful greenhouse gases).

Ah, yes - global warming. Better known in the Eighties as simply 'the Greenhouse Effect'. But it wasn't until the late 1980s that the subject really got any public attention. That all changed when a certain James Hansen of NASA appeared before Congress to testify about the severity of likely future climate change in 1988. That certainly caught people's attention, and set the ball rolling for the formation of the Intergovermental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1990. But such events are quite another story.

For now, this account of Eighties environmentalism will stop at 1988. That's because 1989 (and 1990) deserve a special section of their own in Green History. They were the years when public environmental awareness rose to new heights, and when it seemed - just for a moment - that the greens might actually win...

Why a Green Museum?

'For most of us, even the committed activist, the Green movement has no history...'. So said Derek Wall, a historian and prominent member of the UK Green Party, back in 1994. Wall went on to disprove this statement with a book showing environmentalism has a centuries-old heritage.

Spin on another 14 years, and a lot more green history has passed under the bridge. A historian writing from the vantage point of the twenty-second century will look back on the Noughties as the time not merely of iPods, Heather Mills, and the Arctic Monkeys, but also the time when the world woke up to climate change.

So why study the history of environmentalism? Firstly, because it's one of the most important social movements to emerge from the modern era, with a rich story to tell and a cast of characters as colourful as they are radical. Secondly - and more importantly - because I believe that studying the history of green politics can offer some important lessons for the present. The environmental movement is, of course, alive and kicking - very far from being consigned to a museum. Yet without a museum to house its history, we risk forgetting where it's come from, what it's achieved, and where it's previously failed.

So this blog will sometimes indulge in history pure and simple - recounting stories and explaining events: from the decline of the Dodo to the rise of Greenpeace, via a survey of world food crises, what links tofu and Soylent Green, and the mysterious Men of the Trees. There will also always be plenty of pictures. But it won't merely be a cabinet of old curiosities. The bulk of my posts will take current events and try to place them in their historic context, or draw relevant lessons from history. Hell - we might even learn something from our past mistakes.

Enjoy - and welcome to the Green Museum.