Category: Commentary

In a recent Tyee article, Who, or What, Will Stop the Battle against Biodiversity?, Andrew Nikiforuk laments the failure of the environmental movement to prevent the onslaught of rapacious humanity against nature.

“You can’t read the UN’s recent biodiversity report on the imminent destruction of one million creatures by human economies and not conclude that the environmental movement has failed, and spectacularly so,” he begins.

Not too many people would quibble with that statement. Perhaps there are some who still believe the environmental movement may gain traction as the pending catastrophes of unabated consumerism and industrialism become more obvious, but two mindsets are taking hold that gainsay that desperate hope:

• increasingly the conversation around climate change is about how we, as a species (and to hell with every other living creature on the planet), can adapt to the unstoppable rise in temperature;
• there is an almost palpable sense that no amount of protesting, letter writing, recycling and electric biking is going to stop the juggernaut of ‘progress’ in the consumerist genre, and as more and more people on the planet demand their slice of American pie, we will continue to race toward the tipping point of catastrophe at an ever accelerating rate.

Nikiforuk goes farther than saying enviros have failed, though. By some circuitous trail of deduction I can’t fathom, he actually blames the environmental movement for the mess we’re getting ourselves into.

Citing the ‘brilliant Austrian cleric’ Ivan Illich, who said the environmental movement might not amount to much, Nikiforuk says: “In many respects environmentalism has allowed a civilization intent on hacking off its limbs one by one to properly record the loss of each appendage and then pretend the amputation isn’t all that consequential.”

Hardly a rallying cry for the exhausted troops under their green banners to keep up the good fight, despite the odds!

I’m still not convinced it’s a case of sloppy writing; or confounded logic that has led to this gloomy impression of environmentalism as a worse-than-ineffectual movement, but whatever the cause, I think Nikiforuk has weighed in on the wrong side of the balance… there has never been a greater need to muster green sentiments then right now.

What are the enviros up against? Reading the comments to Nikiforuk’s article will give you an idea of the kinds of attitudes that are prevalent, and which the Green movement has to be mindful of. Here’s a culling of thoughts taken from more than a hundred comments to his article:

• Humans are a pernicious species, separate from nature.
• The only solution to impending global catastrophe would be extermination of the human species.
• A knowing intelligencia is manipulating the economic and political process to perpetuate the capitalist, consumerist thrust of human growth and development.
• The motive for planetary pillaging is profit.
• Corporate entities have an overwhelming advantage when it comes to influencing public attitudes and opinion.
• The environmental movement has failed.
• We are doomed to a dark age of civil and social collapse which will entail unspeakable devastation and suffering.
• Science, which has brought us the standard of living we enjoy, will not be able to come up with solutions to prevent the planetary collapse our standard of living entails.
• Population growth combined with the ever increasing demands of consumerist modes of living are unsustainable factors that inevitably lead to disaster.
• Humanity cannot survive if the intricate web of biodiversity is degraded.
• The pre-industrial mode of living was more in tune with nature than the post-industrial.
• We could have achieved a higher standard of living without the kind of environmental plundering and social disruption that occurred.
• The democratic process can’t lead to the type of change that’s needed to prevent global catastrophe.
• Individuals, when it comes down to making the ‘right’ choices, will always choose the ‘wrong’ things: more consumer products that make life easier and more fun.
• There will be winners and losers no matter how the future unfolds: change, to harmonize our behaviour with nature, entails dislocations such as job loss, divestment and so on; the status quo will lead to untold suffering for many, new forms of consolidated power for a few.
• If people shared, we could attain a high standard of living without destroying the planet… but human beings are by nature greedy, self-centred, rapacious and destructive.

Knowing the mindset of thine opponents, and thine allies is fundamental to any sort of political success. Opponents words can (and must) be turned in your favour; supporters’ views can (and almost always will) be used against you. Nikiforuk has penned a strange sort of logic in his article about ‘the battle against biodiversity’, but he’s touched some important nerves in the process.