Technology will not save us; how the new environmentalism is doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past | Charlie Goulbourne
In recent years, the focus of conservatism has shifted. An ideology that once placed its primary emphasis on maintaining our most important institutions and customs has come to an all too sudden realisation that its proponents have lost control of the institutions they aim to protect. The exclusion of traditionally minded thought is almost ubiquitous, from the removal of England’s greatest literature from university courses to our police forces investigating innocent people over online ‘misgendering’. With this in mind, conservatives are now tasked with reclaiming and restoring our traditions, families, and communities. If we are to succeed, we must first endeavour to precisely understand the successor ideologies that have monopolised our politics and our thought.
We have been in a state of desperate chaos, proposing countless approaches to re-establish everything from our sense of national identity and public unity to our churches and communities. Emerging from this, an increasingly influential body of conservatives have risen. Although these conservatives are still far from forming a unified and coherent opposition to the current progressive orthodoxy, there is a hope amongst many that a mismatched alliance of thinkers, inspired by Christian tradition, may stand a chance of doing so. Central to their thought is the unapologetic rejection of secular liberal ideology and an embrace of the pre-enlightenment traditions upon which our civilisation was founded.
However, there is one issue that has been so consistently misunderstood and overlooked that it may prove to be a fatal blind-spot in their lofty aspirations- the environment.
Our inability to make a reasonable case for a faithfully conservative form of environmentalism appears to be two-fold. Firstly, we do not know what we are up against and secondly, we have forgotten what environmental stewardship ought to be. In this article, I hope to be able to go some way to resolving the first of these issues.
If you pay attention to media coverage of political environmentalism you may be fooled into thinking extinction rebellion and their intersectional social-justice ideology surely form the environmental successor ideology. Their parent organisation, “Rising Up!” have stated their aims as “revolution, meaning a rapid change in wealth distribution and power structures, preventing rich elite from perpetuating a self-serving ideology”. They are certainly reading from the same script as their comrades in control of the rest of our institutions.
This is precisely where conservatives have become mistaken. While organisations like extinction rebellion are surely subversive and sinister, they are mostly made up of naïve teenagers with little or no influence amongst our national or global ruling class. While the creed that defines progressivism in matters of politics was dreamt up in the vain minds of philosophers and social theorists, their environmental equivalent was birthed from the minds of the most ambitious scientists. That is perhaps what makes recognising the environmental status-quo such an impossible task for modern conservatives- they have been virtually unchanged, in evolutionary stagnation for centuries, and their dogma sits at the heart of liberalism itself.
“A new “science of politics” was to be accompanied by a new natural science – in particular a science that would seek practical applications meant to give humans a chance in the war against nature,”
Patrick Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed
The fathers of liberalism felt it was their duty to liberate men from the arbitrary and irrational constraints of tradition and allow them from the moment of their birth, with a tabula rasa, to freely pursue their own happiness in the absence of natural law itself.
As religious belief waned and communities were dismantled, the once deeply held values that exalted man’s submission and subjection to God’s will were displaced by the belief that there was no will greater than that of our own. With the newly found tools of economic liberalism and cultural secularisation, prosperity and liberty became the spiritual ends of human existence.
There would be no better target of the now virtuously unrestrained appetite of the West as nature itself.
The industrial revolution was the first great experiment of liberalism, undertaken in the hope that the nature we were once subject to would now bend to our will. In this sense, it forms the founding myth of modernity. The progenitors of liberalism have consistently recognised this, Friedrich Hayek even described those who criticise the industrial revolution as guilty of “discrediting the economic system to which we owe our present-day civilisation”.
Accompanying the first great liberal experiment was unsurprisingly the first great modern environmental crisis. With their blind trust in the supremacy of rational scientific knowledge and motivated by a freshly uncovered and unchained realm of wealth, the great innovators led (or pulled) us all down the path of industrial capitalism.
Air pollution levels in London were unsurpassed for at least 200 years, even by the standards of the modern industrial cities of India, only beginning to improve in the early to mid-20th century. Vast amounts of industrial and human waste from our ever-expanding cities filled our beloved rivers and lakes to brimming. The romantic landscapes of John Constable were for the first time, for many, confined only to the world of paint and canvas.
“Science will never be used chiefly to pursue truth, or to improve human life. The uses of knowledge will always be as shifting and crooked as humans themselves”
John Gray, Straw Dogs
The chain reaction of industrialisation was ceaseless- new, more efficient methods of production replaced the old, cities continued to grow larger and the environmental impacts of the ever more complex realms of industry and consumption became impossible to control.
Industrialisation has followed a naïve belief in linear progress and an assumption man can overcome natural limits.
Like all technological revolutions, the industrial revolution shaped the world in its image. The home of the British people shifted. Its social organisation transformed from one of robust local communities in disparate agrarian centres which were highly unequal but operated along the lines of reciprocity to modernistic megacities which were dependent on just a handful of industries for their economic sustenance and which were just as unequal and instead run on entirely (and often greatly asymmetrical) contractual relations. Eventually, this model of industry was exported across the globe, efficient railways and steamships were developed and a utopian attitude that scorned self-sufficiency became the fashion of the time.
Over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth century this led to the subordination of agricultural self-sufficiency in order to enable continued urbanisation and increased economic productivity. Population and prosperity surged like never before and, with this, the agricultural demand across the developed world was progressively becoming unsustainable. By the 1960s, the myth of a secure global agricultural network promised by global industrialism felt long shattered. So, it would be up to the scientists of the day to correct the short-sightedness of their long-gone colleagues.
The green revolution was well underway. The diverse varieties of crops that had been carefully selected and bred by our ancestors for thousands of years were soon almost completely gone. Our traditional practises of fallow periods or the famous Norfolk four-course rotation of wheats, turnip, barley, and clover were replaced with the scientifically named “high yielding varieties” grown exclusively as monocultures. These high yielding varieties together with innovative chemical fertilisers and efficient irrigation systems allowed farming that used less land, produced greater yields, and absorbed more nutrients. Most importantly however, they needed less labour, which could be better utilised elsewhere in the newly technologized economy. For a short time, you would have been forgiven for thinking our agricultural worries were solved forevermore.
However, the visions of the fathers of the green revolution were not to be. Far from birthing a world free from famine and agricultural failure, it only served to make our food system more reliant on unsustainable technology and so, more fragile. It furthered our hopeless dependence on fossil fuels to power our now mechanised farms and near wiped out any biodiversity left in our agroecosystems. The once genius intensification of global agriculture has now only left us with an unprecedented crisis that threatens to collapse the world’s food supply.
That’s not at all an exaggeration either. Today, mass desertification and degradation of land affects a quarter of the world’s terrestrial area. Once we lose our precious topsoils that have fed us for millennia, there is no getting them back. Yet again, it is up to the same scientists whose pride has led us down this destructive path to try to put us right. It is in this worldview which the scientific progressive believes they:
“... will at once reorganise the whole of mankind and in a single instant make it virtuous and free from sin… That is why they have such an instinctive dislike of history: “It’s nothing but a catalogue of outrage and follies,” they say – and it can all be explained as the result of stupidity.”
Razumikhin: Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
One of the largest projects of its kind is RIPE or Realising Increased Photosynthetic Efficiency. At the centre of the experiment is the claim that the 3.4-billion-year-old process of photosynthesis that forms the very foundation of life, is terribly inefficient and contains many errors such as the initiation of wasteful photorespiration. Through computer modelling, their mission is to alter the complex and poorly understood photosynthetic metabolic pathway to remove these supposed inefficiencies and improve crop yield to guarantee future food security.
Actions such as this can only be seen as radical and reckless, yet utterly in keeping with the innovations that they claim are constantly fixing. We require a recognition of our own incapacities, especially so when it comes to our attitude to something so delicate and sustinential as nature. The arc of history should give man more of a sense of his own limits.
Indeed, we appear to be proposing that we know better than God Himself or that it is our responsibility to perfect a process that has been evolving for billions of years, yet that we have only known has existed for a mere two hundred and fifty. Unforeseen consequences are not only inevitable but considering the scale and complexity of the biological and global systems we aim to alter, may be ruinous beyond our imagination. As Orthodox Conservatives author Adam Pollock has pointed out in a prior article, debate around ‘rewilding’ is totally blindsided to the immense loss of bird and insect species it would paradoxically cause as a result.
“Because of opacity, an intervention leads to unforeseen consequences, followed by apologies about the “unforeseen” aspect of the consequences, then to another intervention to correct the secondary effects, leading to an explosive series of branching “unforeseen” responses, each one worse than the preceding one.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile
An artist’s impression of London’s 19th century slums.
It is as if we refuse to see that we cannot use the same philosophy that got us in this mess to get us out again. Despite the consistent failure of these technical and scientific solutions to provide long term environmental security, we are continuing to attribute this failure only to its improper implementation. We prefer to remain blissfully ignorant of the limitations of technological progress and await the final salvation of humanity brought about by our own commandment of creation.
The same liberal philosophy, and its subsequent shaping of the modern world, has made us unthinkably wasteful not only by historical but also by global standards. One third of all food produced globally goes to waste and in the UK, household food waste accounts for over 70% of this. With our delocalised detachment from the source of our food and the modern illusion of everlasting abundance, this should be no surprise. Likewise, the wealthiest one tenth of the human population account for over half of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions. Yet, we would all be subject to the speculative experimentation of scientists, be it chemical atmospheric manipulation, a diet of bugs or food grown by AI.
There is another way. Increasingly, findings across all kinds of areas of environmental stewardship are indicating the same thing- the old ways are the best. Could it be that the ruthlessly rational pursuit of scientific truth has finally led us to the ancient wisdom of tradition?
There is little remotely traditional agriculture left in the West but the dogma of the Amish gives us perhaps the only good example. Amish dairy farms that practise age-old methods of using draft animals and traditional crop rotations showed increased milk yields and greater economic return per acre with far less energy usage than their modern, intensive counterparts. This is despite the fact that they rejected modern agricultural machinery and chemical fertilisers. The difference? Their farms were guided by time-tested methods and utilised the greater labour capabilities granted by locally centred communities. It must not go unnoticed that the only things that allow this time-honoured agriculture to persist here are the coherent culturally homogenous and spiritually mature traditions of the Amish.
A pioneering Swedish research project on the use of organically grown “heritage cereals”, cereal varieties that were in traditional use for centuries before being displaced by modern high yielding varieties, is also beginning to show surprising results. The heritage varieties are far more resilient against almost all kinds of environmental stresses and many of them show the same yields as the modern varieties with greater stability. Not only that, but consumers are even willing to pay a higher price for the higher quality produce that encourages native biodiversity to flourish and does not massacre it.
The much-loved liberal maxim “global problems require global solutions” may finally be proven false. The greatest global crisis of our time, climate change, is perhaps best tackled with local, not global, initiatives. Traditional environmental and agricultural practises of local agroforestry, intercropping, crop rotation and organic composting may be amongst the most effective ways of mitigating the effects of climate change. The other benefits are numerous: ecological restoration, robust food supply, connection with cultural heritage and physical and mental health improvements.
Research has shown teaching our children in natural green spaces improves their emotional stability and levels of physical activity, much needed in our sedentary age. Greater urban green space has even been shown to reduce levels of violent crime. The same changes that may be necessary to rescue our environmental woes may very well also help to spiritually nourish us.
If we are to enter into an environmental renaissance the aforementioned values of tradition, family, and community must be rekindled. The soulless philosophy that drove us away from nature must be rejected. After all, it is only in communities rooted in our faith and our families that our children will learn to become stewards of their small patch of God’s earth. It is not the commodified thought of the liberal nor the revolutionary instinct of the progressive that will serve our nature best. It is only by a return to true conservative principles that treated nature and friend, not foe, that our environment may blossom once again.
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