Clive Hamilton spoke in April last year at the
National Climate Action Summit at the
University of Melbourne below is what he said:
The difficulty
and importance of the global warming campaign is many times greater than every
other environmental struggle. Controlling carbon pollution requires a wholesale
industrial restructuring and defeat of the most powerful industry coalition
ever assembled.
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| Clive Hamilton |
Yet in the face
of this challenge, I think it is true to say that environmentalism in Australia
has lost its way. I have put forward three reasons for the failure of
environmentalism.
First, like most
Australians some environmentalists find it hard to accept what the climate
scientists are really saying. They do not believe, in their hearts, that things
can be as bad as the science indicates. Like all of us, they are prone to
engage in wishful thinking and cling to false hopes.
Secondly, some
environment groups have opted for incrementalism, the belief that small
step-by-step changes are the only way forward because the political system and
the public are unwilling to accept major changes.
Thirdly, over the
last two decades environmental activism has been professionalised. The
professionalisation of politics has seen a sharp decline in membership of the
mainstream parties and the rise of a “political class” of career politicians,
staffers, spin doctors and apparatchiks.
Some
environmental NGOs have simply adapted to this new landscape. The “political
class” have become the new targets of their activities, so NGOs have abandoned
activism for the techniques of lobbying and media management and are now
dominated by people with lobbying and media skills.
In other words,
they have become insiders. As insiders they are subject to all of the pressures
and inducements the powerful can mobiliseaccess to ministers, consultations,
the attention of journalists and so on.
In the face of
the failure of mainstream environmentalism to achieve
significant
progress on the biggest issue it will ever face, we need a new environmental
radicalism. Many in the environment movement are fearful of radicalism because
they believe it will turn off voters.
Yet given the
cavernous gap between the far-reaching actions demanded by the science and the
tokenistic actions the public is willing to support, Australians need to be
thoroughly shaken up.
I was watching an
episode of the TV serial Mad Men, set in New York’s
Maddison Avenue
in the early 1960s. Betty Draper is the beautiful and self-absorbed wife of the
show’s main character, advertising executive Don Draper. Betty arrives home to
find her black housekeeper Carla listening to the radio from which the voice of
Martin Luther King Jr can be heard giving a moving speech. Carla quickly turns
the radio off. “Who was that?” asks Betty. “That was Dr King speaking at the
funeral of the little girls”. In 1963 four black girls were killed in
Birmingham, Alabama when their church was bombed by white supremacists. “It’s a
terrible thing”, says Betty. “I am not sure America is ready for civil rights
just yet.”
After a strategy
in the first half of the 20th century emphasising public education, litigation
and lobbying politicians, in the 1950s the civil rights movement embarked on a
campaign of mass civil disobedience marches, boycotts, sit-ins, freedom rides,
and nonviolent resistance.
They directly
confronted racism in all its manifestations. Their activities alienated large
segments of the white population, who felt threatened and enraged. Their
protests and actions created crisis situations that the authorities didn’t know
how to handle, but which often played to their advantage. Like Betty Draper,
most white Americans may not have been ready for civil rights, but that did not
diminish the urgency or rightness of the cause and the strategy. Americans had
to be made ready for civil rights.
The same pattern
defined the early women’s movement. In Britain, after women’s suffrage bills
were defeated by the main parties in 1870s, 1880s and 1890s, many activists
became frustrated with moderation and reasonableness, of working within a
system controlled by men.
Some moderate
women’s groups, accepting that many people believed married women already had
the vote because “their husbands voted for them”, decided to be pragmatic, to
take one step at a time, and advocate voting rights for single women only.
Declaring a
commitment to “deeds, not words”, Emily Pankhurst and the suffragettes engaged
in direct confrontation with oppressive institutions at every turn. They
attacked the major political parties, and refused to become the lap-dogs of
powerful men. For their militancy, they were reviled by the defenders of the
old order, denounced by the press, and criticised by many who said they
supported women’s rights.
Members of the
Liberal Party assaulted Pankhurst and her supporters, blaming their radicalism
for a Conservative win in a by-election. So there were plenty of timid people
telling the leaders of the civil rights movement and the suffragettes that they
must not push too hard or demand too much because society was not ready for
change. But it was only by pushing hard that the civil rights radicals and the
suffragettes made society ready for change.
Naming Emily
Pankhurst one of the 100 most important people of the 20th century, Time
magazine wrote: “She shook society into a new pattern from which there could be
no going back”.
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| Emily Pankhurst |
That must be our
strategy. In the case of climate change, gradualism is fatal. For women’s
suffrage and civil rights the price of gradualism was perhaps two, three or
four more decades of discrimination. In the case of climate change the price of
gradualism is the battle lost, because a delay to doing what we must for
another one or two decades will lock in our fate for a thousand years.
The women’s
movement and the civil rights movement had history on their side and were
always going to succeed sooner or later. The environment movement also has
history on its side; and something more tangible, the relentless force of
scientific facts.
Yet
incrementalism reinforces a political system that acts above all else to
maintain the structure of power a system dominated by parties that always put
the interests of the economy, economic growth, and corporations first, parties
that have shown themselves to be dragging the chain at best, or actually taking
us backwards.
***
When Carla turned
off the radio after her mistress arrived home unexpectedly, Betty Draper said
“It’s OK. You can listen to your program”. I was reminded of this by an
astonishing headline in the business pages of the Sydney Morning Herald: “In a
blow to environmentalists, the International Energy Agency forecasts world
energy consumption will continue to rise sharply and CO2 emissions will jump …”
Sydney Morning Herald, 11 November 2010
As long as
newspapers think accelerating carbon emissions are “a blow to
environmentalists” we know we are losing. One thing is now very clear; in the
case of climate change the public has adopted a range of strategies to avoid
the truth. They don’t want real action on climate change; they only want symbolic
actions that require nothing of them.
Sometimes coaxing
the public to your point of view reaches an immovable barrier. Sometimes people
must be jolted out of their complacency by militancy, even if that means a
period of rancour, turmoil and danger. The task of environmental campaigners is
not to pander to public evasions but to make those evasions untenable, to blast
away the pretences people use to blind themselves to the science, to make them
see what is coming down the road.
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| Bob Brown |
A wave of
environmental radicalism, of uncivil disobedience, will have succeeded when the
conservative press begin praising Bob Brown and Christine Milne as voices of
reason and moderation, as indeed they are.
The most
committed defenders of the status quo are those who most fear environmentalism
the mining corporations, the defenders of the establishment in the Liberal
Party and the ALP, and their boosters and apologists in the media. These
conservatives see environmentalism as a profound threat to their world.
Unfortunately,
the threat posed by environmentalism is not nearly as great as they imagine,
and is diminished by the actions of pale greens everywhere who believe that
working within the system and massaging the public can save us from climate
catastrophe.
In the 1990s and
early 2000 there was some justification for an incrementalist strategy. But
climate science now shows that the situation has become so urgent, and the
forecasts so dire, that only radical social and economic transformation will
give us a chance of avoiding dramatic and irreversible changes to the global
climate.
So let me leave
you with a final thought. The historic responsibility of environmentalism
cannot be overstated. Beyond women’s suffrage, beyond civil rights, its mission
is nothing less than saving humanity as a whole. Today’s environment movement
is no place for the faint-hearted.
-
Thanks to Tatura’s Terry Court for pointing out Hamilton’s critical message.
(Environmentalism, as Hamilton claims, may
have “lost its way”, but its implacable enemies have not – human-induced climate
change, energy depletion and a collapsing global economy are certainly not confused
or lost and simplistic things such as changing our light globes or pay
lip-service to being “green” will do little to stop that trio taking humanity
straight to hell. Rhetoric won’t work, action will – Robert McLean.)
