The Environment – Who Cares?

It is understandable that people living in cities sometimes forget that human life is dependent upon the natural world of which we are just a small and relatively insignificant part, but residents of rural regions, such as Central Brittany, cannot help but be aware of the importance of nature. The question is, who is caring for the environment and are they doing a good job?

Environmental Campaigners

The first time that I became aware of environmental issues was back in the early 1970s, when I was studying science at school. Like  many young people of the time, I was drawn to the emerging subject of ecology, and in particular to the Ecologist magazine which published a ‘Blueprint for Survival’ which outlined a radical set of proposals for saving the planet. Back in those days, it was fun being an environmental campaigner, at least partly because it seemed easy to distinguish between the ‘goodies’ and the ‘baddies’. Environmentalists tended to be young, poor, underfunded and idealist; the people who did most to pour scorn on our ideas were big businesses, governments, university departments, and everyone with a vested interest in the current system.
Things have moved on considerably since that time: the argument that something has to be done to protect the environment has been won, and people no longer try to discredit environmental thinking, but instead vie with each other to appear to be more environmentally correct than each other. It is now commonplace to see banks advertising their environmental awareness, and newspapers producing guides telling people how to make their lifestyles more eco-friendly; oil companies now promote themselves as being good for the environment, and, in the UK, even the Conservative party now claims to be the party of the environment.

As someone with a long-term interest in this field, I am not convinced by these recent converts and do not believe that their proposals go any way to addressing the real reasons why the modern Western lifestyle is so at odds with the world of nature. If anything, they are a distraction, leading people to believe that something is being done, while, in truth, the fundamental problem remains unaddressed.

Central Brittany as a Self-Sufficient Unit

One thing that is lacking in most discussions about the environment is a sense of historical perspective. In the case of Central Brittany, for example, it is seldom acknowledged that up until the coming of the railways in the early 1900s, the region was almost completely self sufficient. This is something that is quite hard to grasp from a modern perspective, but it means that not only did the region produce almost all its own food, but that its inhabitants also spun and wove their own cloth, made their own clothes, made their own shoes, built their own homes from local materials, made their own furniture, and used locally-grown fuel for their cooking and heating. The environmental impact of this way of life was effectively zero, and it could have been continued indefinitely without doing any harm to either the local environment or to any other part of the world.

It is not true to imagine that this mode of life could not support a modern population – there were more people living in Central Brittany a hundred years ago than there are today – or that it was necessarily less healthy than a modern lifestyle: people living in the country in the past had just as great an expectation of reaching their ‘three score years and ten’ as people do nowadays.

In a sense, it may have actually been the self-sufficiency of this society that proved to be its undoing. Other areas of Europe had embarked on a more aggressive mode of life some centuries earlier, and provinces such as Brittany were expected to be not only self-sustaining, but also to yield a surplus that could be paid to a central government in the form of taxation. Over a long period of time, this proved ruinous to the region, as it did to other rural areas of Europe, and no doubt contributed to its moving away from an ecologically-sustainable way of life to one in which little heed is paid to the future.
Nevertheless, it should still be possible to use the way that people lived a hundred years ago as a reference point, enabling us to determine which aspects of modern life are compatible with an eco-friendly way of living, and which are not.

Technology

Environmental problems go hand in hand with greater use of technology – the first environmental problems to be identified, for example, were the city smogs caused by burning coal, and the pollution of rivers by factory discharges. Now that technology has become more sophisticated, and its use more widespread, so have the environmental problems, and we are threatened by global warming caused by the burning of fossil fuels. Similarly, agriculture has only become a threat to the environment since the development of agricultural chemicals, genetic engineering, and the use of industrial-scale machinery in the fields. To give an even clearer example, we would not be under threat from problems related to nuclear radiation if scientists had never developed nuclear technology.

When studying the catalogue of environmental problems, one is tempted to conclude that we would all be better off if no one had ever thought of inventing any sort of machines – but people have lived for thousands of years with the aid of all sorts of simple machines which have contributed to making human life easier, and which have posed no threat to the environment. The problem seems to be not so much too much technology, but the wrong sort of technology, or technology being used in the wrong sort of way.

A Tree – The ultimate technology

It is perhaps the lack of humility in modern scientists and scholars that poses one of the biggest threats to the environment. Even now, when we are confronted with innumerable problems brought about by the indiscriminate use of modern technologies, there is still a reluctance to admit that human technologies fall far short of the technologies that exist in nature. To illustrate this point, consider the example of a tree:

A tree is the ultimate source of renewable energy. It is far more efficient at capturing the energy of the sun than any man-made devices, and unlike human inventions, it is so sophisticated that it is capable of capturing the energy when it is in plentiful supply – on a hot summer’s day for example – and converting it into a form in which it can be used when the sun is at its weakest: which is why you can burn logs on a cold winter’s evening and they will still keep you warm.

Production

A major problem with modern man-made machines is that they have to be manufactured in factories. These factories are often the cause of considerable environmental destruction and major producers of pollution. This can be a particularly embarrassing problem for technologies that are supposed to be eco-friendly, such as renewable energy generators, etc.

No such problems are caused by trees, which have the remarkable inbuilt quality of being able to produce seeds that grow into new trees with no detrimental impact upon the environment at all.

Disposal

Environmental problems associated with manufacturing machines, are mirrored by problems relating to their disposal.

Many items of modern technology have been made in such a way that there is no known method by which they can be disposed of without having at least some detrimental impact upon the environment. (Shockingly, it has now been the practice for some time for rich countries to ship container loads of defunct machinery to poor countries in Asia and Africa so that they themselves do not have to deal with this issue themselves.)

Trees do not pose any such recycling problems. Not only is nature fully capable of returning a tree to its natural elements, but in the process the decaying wood sustains a rich variety of flora and fauna which itself makes up a vital part of the natural eco-system.

Better than Trees?

Knowing what we know now, it is obvious that man-made inventions could never match the things in nature either in their efficiency or in their eco-friendliness.
Consequently, it was clearly a mistake to exchange the superior technology of nature for the inferior technology of man-made machines in any area where the two were both fulfilling the same function.

One hundred years ago, trees dominated the local economy: they fulfilled a multiplicity of needs, they did no harm to anyone, and posed no risk to the environment. Now, economic activity revolves around big machines, factories, and the use of chemicals – all of which are unsustainable, and which are having a potentially catastrophic effect upon the local environment. With the benefit of hindsight one can see that this was not a wisely-planned piece of economic development.

Another example is provided by walking: as a mode of transport, walking has few disadvantages; it is good for the health, it poses no risk to other road users, it is sociable, it has no negative impact on the environment, and it doesn’t take you too far from home: none of which can be said for the modes of transport with which it has been replaced.
One of the tragedies of this situation is that people are not being allowed to enjoy the advantages that modern technology could have brought them under different circumstances: no one doubts that motor cars, electric lights, computers, washing machines, radios and televisions are all marvellous inventions, each of which could do much to enrich the quality of human life – but if their use means that the water is not fit to drink, the air is not fit to breathe, the sound of nature is being drowned out by the noise of traffic, or if the soil is no longer able to yield healthy crops, then the benefits that they confer lose their relevance.

Who Cares about the Environment?

There are, of course, reasons why people never asked themselves whether the new inventions were really better than the technologies that they were replacing, before they started to use them.

The modern culture of commerce and industry grew up alongside the introduction of the new technologies, and, crucially, this process was made possible by systems of government which took power away from local people and devolved it to institutions that did not really care for the people who were affected by their decisions.

This is a process which continues to accelerate. In the early days of the Industrial Revolution, Bretons complained that decisions that affected their lives were being taken in Paris rather than in their own capital city, Rennes; more recently, people felt that is was bureaucrats in Brussels who were enabling modern agricultural methods to destroy the Breton countryside via a complex system of farm subsidies over which there was no local control; now, as far as one can tell, the decisions which determine how much we earn, what we can buy in the shops, and what sort of life we are expected to lead, are taken in the boardrooms of multinational companies, by people who may not even be aware of the existence of Central Brittany.

When I was young, people were considered as being slightly eccentric if they were interested in the environment: serious politicians were interested only in the economy. Now everyone who has had a chance to study the data, including even the serious politicians, knows that there will be no economy unless something is done to reverse the effect that human activity is having upon the environment.

Having had over thirty years to reflect on this issue, I have revised my ideas about who are the ‘goodies’ and who are the ‘baddies’ when it comes to the environment. It seems to me now that, as individuals, we are all goodies, but that the organisations that we create are invariably baddies. As individuals we care deeply about our environment – we care about our homes, our gardens and the villages in which we live, we care when we see an animal in distress, we care when we see a tree being thoughtlessly cut down, we care when we see banks being flattened by farmers and developers, we care when we can no longer hear the sound of bird song, we care about the quality of the water that we drink – basically, we care about everything, and if it was just us, we would care for and cherish our environment in just the same way as previous generations.

Unfortunately, we have managed to get ourselves into situations where we are not free to do what we want; we feel that our lives are in the grip of forces beyond our control -  organisations bigger than us and stronger than us make us do things which, left to our own consciences, we would never do.

These organisations, however, even though they may have been convinced by the logic behind environmental issues, cannot actually care about the environment. They are driven by the need to make money, to create employment, to retain power, etc. and they can only afford to take the environment into account in so far as it does not conflict with their primary objectives.

That is why, I believe, the current barrage of information about the environment is misleading. It gives the impression that the powers that be have taken the matter in hand and that, providing we do what they tell us, environmental issues will be resolved.
What is required is that ordinary people regain control over their own lives, so that local people can do what is right for the local environment, and sanity can be restored to the relationship that we have with the natural world, upon which we are so dependent for our well being.

GL