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GREEN FOR DANGER
You damage the earth just by living on it.' This was not the Ayatollah passing judgment on some hapless miscreant, but the Sunday Times apostrophising its read- ership. There followed a list of polluting activities, which included practically every- thing except the production of newspapers which are several inches thick with their numerous sections weighing several pounds.
The recent timely panic over the ozone layer, and the upsurge of concern over the fate of the rain forests of Brazil, must have brought comfort and a sense of vindication to those environmentalists who have been preaching in the wilderness for 20 years. They may harm their cause by indulging in Rousseau-like or other political fantasies.
For more than two centuries, Western man has from time to time longed to escape the complexities and ambiguities of his world for the simple, 'natural' life of the South Seas, the jungle, the desert, the tundra, the savannah. There, he believes, live men who, understanding the pitfalls of civilisation, have rejected it. Instead of trying to dominate nature they wisely consider themselves part of it, husbanding only what can be replaced. Next on the scale of virtue come peasants. These are men who live by the rhythm of the seasons, who do not use chemicals, who spend their spare time in ecologically harmless indus- try.
When we come to ourselves, how de- lightful to find that we are the guiltiest of all, despoiling the earth, polluting it, intro- ducing disease into the several gardens of Eden, creating desire where none existed before, luxuriating in vulgarity, wretched in our self-inflicted loss of contact with nature! The solution is to learn from nomads and peasants, build ourselves huts in the woods (if we can find any) and live off the land, freeing ourselves from the treadmill of getting and spending.
This vision has all the earthy political reality of a fete champetre painted by Fragouard. Offered the chance of getting and spending, even at a very low level, most men who have passed their lives in contact with nature accept it with alacrity. The shanty towns of cities in poor countries are testimony to this fact, inexplicable as it may be to devotees of the simple life.
There are, of course, countries in which the urge to consume has been restrained, partly by economic incompetence, partly by puritanical intellectuals who believe and are prepared to impose on others their belief — that there are worthier aims in life than consumption.
But these countries are not encouraging as models: Albania and Burma, for exam- ple. Part of Ayatollah Khomeini's inchoate hatred of the modern world is directed against the urge to consume what he considers corrupting trifles: but how much savagery has been required to try to curb that urge! A further fantasy of the environmental- ists, the steady-state economy in which there is no economic growth, would re- quire elaborate central control enforced by generous doses of political repression. Moreover, the record of centralised econo- mies in the matter of the environment is not encouraging. The worst pollution in Europe occurs not in the most efficient economies, but in the least. The Soviet Union has managed to combine low pro- duction and a low standard of living with vast open spaces utterly devastated by the rank indifference to environmental pollu- tion that inevitably occurs where there is no private or countervailing interest to consult.
As for the underdeveloped world, the sudden vogue in North America and West- ern Europe for environmental protection is likely to be interpreted as just one more plot against it. Not only do we export our pollution there by increasingly delegating the messiest production to its factories, but we blame the inhabitants for trying desper- ately to reach our standard of living. Having aroused expectations from life which we have come to take for granted, we now try to export the idea that these expectations are unsustainable. This does not mean, of course, that fears about the Brazilian jungle are unjustified; but it does mean that the Brazilians are the more likely to use the to quoque argument, with some justification.
We do not need a world authority to apply puritanical, self-denying and un- workable ordinances to the poorer nations. Rather, environmental regulation should be a stimulus to economic competition and technical investiveness. It was the price rise in petroleum that led to more fuel-efficient cars, not the arguments, however well- founded, of whole-earthers. The environ- mental peril in which we find ourselves should not be just another arrow in the quiver of aspiring totalitarians.
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