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From: "George Monbiot" <[email protected]>
Date: Jun 17, 2015 3:02 AM
Subject: Channelling the Joy - monbiot.com
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Channelling the Joy - monbiot.com <http://www.monbiot.com>
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Channelling the Joy <http://www.monbiot.com/2015/06/17/channelling-the-joy/>
Posted: 16 Jun 2015 11:56 PM PDT
In defending the natural world, we should be honest about our motivations –
it’s love that drives us, not money.
By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 17th June 2015
Who wants to see the living world destroyed? Who wants an end to birdsong,
bees and coral reefs, the falcon’s stoop, the salmon’s leap? Who wants to
see the soil stripped from the land, the sea rimed with rubbish?
No one. And yet it happens. Seven billion of us allow fossil fuel companies
to push shut the narrow atmospheric door through which humanity stepped. We
permit industrial farming to tear away the soil
<http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/mar/25/treating-soil-like-dirt-fatal-mistake-human-life>,
banish trees from the hills
<http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jan/13/flooding-public-spending-britain-europe-policies-homes>,
engineer another silent spring
<http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jul/15/ban-neonicotinoids-another-silent-spring-pesticide-moratorium>.
We let the owners of grouse moors, 1% of the 1%, shoot and poison hen
harriers, peregrines and eagles. We watch mutely as a small fleet of
monster fishing ships
<http://www.thelandmagazine.org.uk/articles/selling-silver-enclosure-uks-fisheries>
trashes the oceans.
Why are the defenders of the living world so ineffective? It is partly, of
course, that everyone is complicit; we have all been swept off our feet by
the tide of hyperconsumption, our natural greed excited, corporate
propaganda chiming with a will to believe that there is no cost. But
perhaps environmentalism is also afflicted by a deeper failure: arising
possibly from embarrassment or fear, a failure of emotional honesty.
I have asked meetings of green-minded people to raise their hands if they
became defenders of nature because they were worried about the state of
their bank accounts. Never has a hand appeared. Yet I see the same people
base their appeal to others on the argument that they will lose money if we
don’t protect the natural world.
Such claims are factual, but they are also dishonest: we pretend that this
is what animates us, when in most cases it does not. The reality is that we
care because we love. Nature appealed to our hearts, when we were children,
long before it appealed to our heads, let alone our pockets. Yet we seem to
believe we can persuade people to change their lives through the cold,
mechanical power of reason, supported by statistics.
I see the encyclical by Pope Francis, which will be published on Thursday
<http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/13/pope-francis-intervention-transforms-climate-change-debate>,
as a potential turning point. He will argue that not only the physical
survival of the poor, but also our spiritual welfare depends on the
protection of the natural world; and in both respects he is right.
I don’t mean to suggest that a belief in God is the answer to our
environmental crisis. Among Pope Francis’s opponents is the evangelical
Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, which has written to him
arguing that we have a holy duty to keep burning fossil fuel
<http://www.cornwallalliance.org/2015/04/27/an-open-letter-to-pope-francis-on-climate-change/>,
as “the heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament proclaims his
handiwork”. It also insists that exercising the dominion granted to
humankind in Genesis means tilling *“*the whole Earth
<http://www.cornwallalliance.org/landmark-documents/the-biblical-perspective-of-environmental-stewardship-subduing-and-ruling-the-earth-to-the-glory-of-god-and-the-benefit-of-our-neighbors/>”,
transforming it “from wilderness to garden and ultimately to garden city”.
There are similar tendencies within the Vatican. Cardinal George Pell, its
head of finance, currently immersed in a scandal involving paedophile
priests in Australia
<http://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2015/jun/05/vatican-cardinal-george-pell-abuse-survivor-row>,
is a prominent climate change denier. His lecture to the Global Warming
Policy Foundation
<http://www.thegwpf.org/images/stories/gwpf-reports/pell-2011_annual_gwpf_lecture_new.pdf>
was the usual catalogue of zombie myths (discredited claims that keep
resurfacing), nonsequiturs and outright garbage, championing, for example, the
groundless claim
<http://www.theguardian.com/environment/georgemonbiot/2009/dec/16/ian-plimer-versus-george-monbiot>
that undersea volcanoes could be responsible for global warming. There are
plenty of senior Catholics seeking to undermine the Pope’s defence of the
living world; which could explain why his encyclical was leaked
<http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/15/pope-francis-destruction-ecosystem-leaked-encyclical>
.
What I mean is that Pope Francis, a man with whom I disagree profoundly on
matters such as equal marriage and contraceptives, reminds us that the
living world provides not only material goods and tangible services, but is
also essential to other aspects of our well-being. And you don’t have to
believe in God to endorse that view.
In his beautiful book The Moth Snowstorm
<https://www.hodder.co.uk/Books/detail.page?isbn=9781444792775>, Michael
McCarthy suggests that a capacity to love the natural world, rather than
merely to exist within it, might be a uniquely human trait. When we are
close to nature, we sometimes find ourselves, as Christians put it,
surprised by joy: “a happiness with an overtone of something more, which we
might term an elevated or, indeed, a spiritual quality.”
He believes we are wired to develop a rich emotional relationship with
nature. A large body of research suggests that contact with the living
world remains essential to our psychological and physiological well-being.
(A paper published this week, for example, claims that green spaces around
city schools improve children’s mental performance
<http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/jun/15/green-spaces-improve-school-childrens-mental-development-study-finds>
).
This does not mean that all people love nature; what it means, McCarthy
proposes, is that there’s a universal propensity to love it, which may be
drowned out by the noise that assails our minds. As I’ve found while
volunteering with the outdoor education charity Wide Horizons, this love
can be provoked almost immediately
<http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/07/education-children-not-feral-enough>,
even among children who have never visited the countryside before. Nature,
McCarthy argues, remains our home, “the true haven for our psyches”, and
retains an astonishing capacity to bring peace to troubled minds.
Acknowledging our love for the living world does something that a library
full of papers on sustainable development and ecosystem services cannot: it
engages the imagination as well as the intellect. It inspires belief; and
this is essential to the lasting success of any movement.
Is this a version of the religious conviction from which Pope Francis
speaks? Or could his religion be a version of a much deeper and older love?
Could a belief in God be a way of explaining and channelling the joy, the
burst of love that nature sometimes provokes in us? Conversely, could the
hyperconsumption that both religious and secular environmentalists lament
be a response to ecological boredom
<http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/19/opinion/our-ecological-boredom.html?_r=0>:
the void that a loss of contact with the natural world leaves in our
psyches?
Of course, this doesn’t answer the whole problem. If the acknowledgement of
love becomes the means by which we inspire environmentalism in others, how
do we translate it into political change? But I believe it’s a better
grounding for action than pretending that what really matters to us is the
state of the economy. By being honest about our motivation we can inspire
in others the passions that inspired us.
www.monbiot.com
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