Coyote falling

A small protest is staged to try to save some forests. Only a small fraction of what is needed and environmentalists point this out and protest. I watch on tv as they unfurl their banners and others hold up glasses of poison to publicize the fate that awaits the native animals as forests are felled and wood-chipped and the land burnt and seedlings planted and wildlife destroyed with poison baits. And then I blink and there are forestry people protesting that their access has been restricted in any way to any forest, and farming groups chanting slogans about how their property rights are being taken away by any restriction on tree clearing, and then I blink and the environmental groups are back, trying to show how little forest is going to be left, then the foresters and farmers again, and on and on alternating until my mind grows dizzy and I must close my eyes.

There is no longer, if there ever was, an agreement on the basic facts about the environment but a disagreement on how, or whether, to respond to those facts. Now there is not only total disagreement on the facts but the opposing groups who alternate across our tv screens have no common frames of reference with which to even begin discussions on the facts. The fundamental proposition by environmentalists, that humans live in the environment and if we allow it to be destroyed we will all suffer, is not a view shared with far Right groups including farming and forestry and mining organizations, or with the Left wing groups of the union movement. Such groups believe that humans live outside of the environment, in something called the economy. That the environment is something to be exploited, not the process and structure which provides life support. That in fact the triumph of neo-conservative thought, of globalization, of capitalism, of fundamentalist religion, over all other forms of human organization, also represents a triumph over the view that the environment matters. By a sheer act of will the new right has declared human beings independent of the world they live in, rather in the way that the coyote in the road runner cartoons declares that he is independent of gravity as he briefly runs in the air before plummeting down a cliff.

On the other side of the new politics the environmentalists see the air filling with CO2 and the global temperatures rising, seas stripped of fish, lands stripped of forests, species extinctions quickening, land being ruined by salinity and erosion and drought. They see a disaster coming. They think if they point out these facts often enough then eventually the public will awake to reality and demand action. They are concerned that it is already too late. They think that while everyone is aware there is a problem, they are simply not aware of the scale or urgency of the problem. This is no longer true. The Right sees no problem.

George Lakoff characterized the new difference between the Right and the Left as between people who believed either in a 'strict father' model of the family or a 'nurturant parent' one. He saw these basic belief systems as extending across all domestic political questions such as social welfare, drugs, education, health, as well as international questions of war and foreign aid. He talks little about the environment in this framework, except to note that the Right believes that 'God has given man dominion over nature. Nature is a resource for prosperity. It is there to be used for human profit.'

This is certainly true, but the difference between the two sets of beliefs goes even deeper than this. It is not simply that humans are seen as having dominion over nature, but there is a view that nature must be managed by humans, to prevent it getting out of hand, becoming a wilderness, just as strict fathers need, apparently, to physically punish children (right from birth according to some writers) to prevent them becoming unruly. And, just as these stern parents refuse to allow any limits to their treatment of their children, the Right recognize no limits on what they should be allowed to do to the environment, up to and including the right to destroy it completely if they should so choose. No room for nurturant parents in the home or the forest these days. And that cliff is getting closer.

Like John Stuart Mill I believe that conservatives are 'by the law of their existence the stupidest party'. See me demonstrate that in many ways on The Watermelon Blog.

Follow David Horton on Twitter: www.twitter.com/watermelon_man