Do environmentalists secretly hate people?

“When people like you fly over Africa you want to see wild animals. When I fly over Africa, I don’t want to see dead Africans.” I still remember this statement from one of my former bosses at the UN, about 20 years ago. I was shocked at his idea that caring about the environment meant caring less about people. It seemed an attitude born of an urban life, forgetting the need to sustain the environmental basis of the livelihoods of billions. It showed me how hyper-modernist some leaders from Africa could be – perhaps from too much time flying over things to talk to people who fly over things. Since then, I always thought it a baseless form of rhetoric to claim that environmentalists prefer nature to people. Even if some might be like that, their lack of power on this planet means critiquing their psyche was a distraction from serious policy discussion.

However, there is indeed another form of misanthropy, or people-hating, which can arise in environmentalism, as people become more anxious about the state of the planet. It is more subtle, involving a general denigration of humanity or the human condition, so people conclude we need to be controlled for our own good. This sentiment is not marginal to power and is facilitating the recent growth of authoritarian views within parts of the Western environmental movement. In my book Breaking Together, I explain how it is a fear-driven and illogical response which risks making matters worse as we go deeper into an era of societal disruption and collapse. The following is an excerpt where I explore this phenomenon. In it I mention various terms and chapters – if interested, the book is now free as a pdf from my University (clearly I haven’t got the hang of that ‘doomer grift’).

Subscribe / Support / Study / Essays

—

After decades of reformist failures on the environmental front, some people argue we do not have time for attempting revolutionary change and must try to grab and use the existing levers of power. Others propose authoritarian forms of revolutionary change, where power is seized by a new elite, rather than shared and transformed.[i] Others mistakenly ignore Imperial Modernity to assume that modern humans have freely chosen to destroy our planet, and therefore argue that concerns about protecting us from totalitarianism are rendered secondary by the environmental crisis.[ii] Each of these perspectives either supports authoritarian responses, or undermines any challenge to them. Such perspectives can be seductive for people seeking a feeling of personal agency in response to their eco-anxiety. But much psychological research that I have chronicled elsewhere suggests any painful emotional ‘experiential avoidance’ within people could lead them to abusive forms of authoritarian behaviour.[iii]

More deeply, eco-authoritarian sentiments can arise from an attachment to the ideas of control, order and progress that Imperial Modernity has inculcated in all of us in service of the money-power. Attached to such ideas, we are tempted to regard environmental problems as an annoying mess that needs tidying up through better management. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt advanced the argument that totalitarianism comes less from a desire to dominate others than from a conviction that all life can be controlled. As life is inherently complex, ambiguous and uncontrollable, then the modernist sees life as something to be tamed. That includes taming human creatures, with our own thoughts and feelings on how to live. Therefore, a totalitarian impulse can arise from a deep fear and rejection of the true nature of life.[iv] As people become more anxious about our world becoming less hospitable for us, then this nature-phobic tendency towards authoritarianism will grow in some: which can lead to some very stupid and counter-productive policies, as we will see in Chapter 13.

Eco-authoritarian sentiments can also arise from a misanthropic view of human nature as inherently selfish and destructive. This negative view of human nature might be interpreted from the commentary by British environmental journalist George Monbiot. In a written debate between him and another British environmental journalist, Paul Kingsnorth, he wrote the following: “You maintain that modern industrial civilisation “is a weapon of planetary mass destruction.” Anyone apprised of the Palaeolithic massacre of the African and Eurasian megafauna, or the extermination of the great beasts of the Americas, or the massive carbon pulse produced by deforestation in the Neolithic must be able to see that the weapon of planetary mass destruction is not the current culture, but humankind.”[v]

Given the research I undertook on ancient societies for Chapter 9, I was somewhat suspicious of any blanket condemnation of humankind’s relationship with nature, so I looked more closely at the evidence for these claims. I found the evidence for a “Palaeolithic massacre of the African and Eurasian megafauna” is not so conclusive. He is referring to an era called the Pleistocene in the geological record. Various theories have been advanced on the cause of species extinctions. As George indicates, hunting by humans (and pre homo sapiens) is one theory. But there is also evidence for other causes, including climate change at the end of the last glacial period,[vi] disease,[vii] an impact from an asteroid or comet,[viii] and even a solar radiation event. This last theory includes how bursts of unusual levels of radiation from the sun may have caused genetic mutations which led to extinctions.[ix] Many of the extinctions coincided with the Younger Dryas period of climate change, which possibly might have been caused by a comet or asteroid impact. It is therefore a subjective choice to pass a verdict on humankind.

When Monbiot describes “the extermination of the great beasts of the Americas” he is giving an interpretation on the collapse of megafauna in that region which also occurred at the time of the Younger Dryas climate period. That was tens of thousands of years after humans first arrived in North America and spread across the region, living alongside those “great beasts” for all that time. Extensive research points to the role of climate change in their decline.[x] Other research also identifies the likely role of asteroid or comet impacts in the changes.[xi] When Monbiot describes the “massive carbon pulse produced by deforestation” during Neolithic times (10,000–4,500 BC) he is asserting certainty where there is ongoing scientific discussion. In some regions, the agricultural expansion certainly involved deforestation. However, some research indicates that changes in temperature and rainfall patterns during this period affected the carbon cycle.[xii] That included changes in monsoon patterns that led to increased aridity in some regions, which affected vegetation patterns and carbon cycling.[xiii]

Journalists like George Monbiot might be overlooking certain data and analysis to unequivocally state that homo sapiens has always been extremely destructive to nature. That could be a case of projection, and importantly it does not help us to identify the root causes of our current predicament. Other environmentalist attempts at identifying such root causes also risk distracting us from our lack of freedom within Imperial Modernity. Professor William Rees is a ground-breaking scholar in the field. He argues that “despite millennia of evolutionary history, the human brain and associated cognitive processes are functionally obsolete to deal with the human eco-crisis. [Homo] sapiens tends to respond to problems in simplistic, reductionist, mechanical ways.”[xiv] Such a view risks downplaying or deeming irrelevant the evidence of millennia of non-destructive or only temporarily semi-destructive human societies (Chapter 9), and how modern humans have had our thought and behaviour shaped by the money-power (Chapter 10). Humans can, did and do think and act systemically. Therefore, not only is it incorrect to claim that humanity is generally incapable, at a biological level, it might also provide an ideological basis for elitist and authoritarian measures from people who think they have achieved a better state of consciousness or intelligence than the rest of us. That is why there is a movement against eco-authoritarianism which reacts badly to statements like this from Professor Rees, in the same article: “The ultimate goal should be a human population in the vicinity of two billion thriving more equitably in ‘steady-state’ within the biophysical means of nature.” He might be right, but when combined with views that render humanity as an inherently destructive force that is biologically incapable of acting intelligently, there is an understandable fear of where such ideas could lead.

One destination for such negative views about human nature is towards views that resemble eco-Stalinism. That is where people think a small group of talented and courageous people should seize power to control the rest of us for our own good. They sometimes even regard personal freedom as an aspect of modernity that is past its relevance, rather than recognising how we have been unfree within a system of Imperial Modernity.[xv] Instead of the misanthropy that lies under the surface of many justifiably terrified, frustrated and panicking environmentalists, there is another way to respond. It begins by recognising that it is our unfreedom that drove us into being so destructive. As an indigenous scholar Lyla June put it, “the Earth may be better off without certain systems we have created, but we are not those systems.” Drawing on her cultural heritage, she explained the concept and experience of ‘Hózhó’ which she believes we need to recover as we shift our relationship to nature. That “is the joy of being a part of the beauty of all creation. When we understand that humanity is an expression of the earth’s beauty, we understand that we too belong.”[xvi]

The dominant focus on technology as offering the path to salvation is also aligned with existing capitalist authoritarianism and emergent eco-authoritarianism, as it demands massive sums from corporations and governments, and displaces critique of the current system (as we saw in Chapters 3 and 8). Some ecomodernists reframe the current breaking of societies as an opportunity for a vanguard of investors and elites to ‘snap forward’ society into a new situation. That story is seeking to retain a heroic view of human agency in an era when we must accept failure.[xvii] One problem with such a view is that it avoids a reckoning with what caused that failure and can promote more of the same in response. Another problem is that it can frame massive suffering as simply an unavoidable part of the necessary ‘snap’. If authoritarianism offered the opportunity for elite entrepreneurs to ‘snap forward’ society then proponents wouldn’t offer a coherent resistance.

Some of the more radical perspectives on the environment have, until now, been somewhat ambivalent about defending human freedoms. Some ‘deep ecologists’ and people drawing from indigenous wisdoms are emphasising relationships and responsibilities more so than rights and freedoms. Whereas they rightly bring attention to the cooperative rather than competitive aspects of the natural world and the destructive impact of human exceptionalism and individualism, they can miss how the modern human has not actually been free. They can also miss the importance of freedom within nature, despite trying to ‘read off’ from nature lessons for human societies. One might imagine what would happen if Bill Gates and his billionaire friends emerged from a sweat lodge to claim the wisdom of Native Americans is that there are no human rights, only responsibilities. My own experience of sweat lodges and indigenous philosophy is that they invite context-specific and non-generalisable insight that arises from quietening the ego and the ‘languaged mind’—so it would be a modernist delusion to translate insights from that into ideas for how everyone else should behave everywhere, or to seek to impose that…

…Solidarity amongst the oppressed to achieve collective freedom was the origin of the workers movement and many anti-imperialist liberation movements. Given the history of left libertarianism, one might expect that swathes of the contemporary left-wing of politics would be supportive of ecolibertarian ideas on how to respond to the environmental predicament. Unfortunately, that was not the case in the few years prior to my writing this book—at least in the West. Instead, during the years of the Covid pandemic, we witnessed self-defined leftwingers demonise dissent and activism against those government policies that were negatively affecting the lives of workers and the self-employed. Such demonisation was heard from prominent environmental journalists and professionals. Their deference to corporate-profiteering agendas on the pandemic reflects the way contemporary Western environmentalism is rooted in the privileged classes, which research finds are more deferential to authority.[xviii] Their stance on Covid once again reveals the problem of the prominence of the Synthetic Left, which is not rooted amongst the working classes and small businesses (as we saw in Chapters 3 and 7). In a similar establishment-friendly way, the mainstream green left movement in the West is explicitly ecomodern, thereby offering no suggestion of an anti-authoritarian agenda.[xix]

So, what about the growing numbers of people who are either anticipating, witnessing or experiencing societal disruption and collapse? Are they more likely to support an ecolibertarian perspective? Yes, many do, as we will see in the following chapter. However, some of the so-called ‘doomers’ are middle class people in the West who have been attracted to those explanations of our predicament that absolve them of any feelings of guilt or urgency to change their lives or make sacrifices in the pursuit of fairness, justice and reduced harm. It can feel easier to adopt the argument that humanity was destined to destroy the planet, and therefore ignore the sustainability of past cultures and the destructive role of the money-power and how it affected, and affects, their own identity, worldview and behaviour in ways that are damaging to themselves, each other, and nature.

A more recent contribution to this de-radicalising framing of our situation is to regard modernity in general as the cause of our predicament, rather than the key role of the monetary system in creating an Imperial Modernity. Blaming an over-exuberant embrace of certain ways of thinking, rather than the psychological, cultural and material enslavement of peoples within an expansionist monetary system, has a number of counter-revolutionary implications. It means they can discuss our era of collapse without inviting any challenge to the establishment. It means they displace attention on how capital is distorting the useful aspects of modernity, as happens with the corporate hijack of science and technology (Chapter 10). Taken together, this mix of ideas invites privileged people in the West into processes of collective grieving and philosophising, rather than any overt political stance. As such, they offer no defence against the rise of eco-authoritarianism.

Because ecolibertarianism is explicitly against the use of environmental concerns to justify authoritarianism or the unaccountable use of state or corporate power, it is neither ‘splitting hairs’ nor ‘in-fighting’ to criticise those strands of contemporary Western environmentalism that I have just identified. Unless people adopt a deeper critique like I have outlined in this book, they risk becoming the anxious idiots of authoritarian power, and accentuating harm in this era of collapse. It is a topic I will return to in Chapter 13, when considering some of the ideas and initiatives we might choose to resist as societies continue to be disrupted and eco-authoritarianism spreads.

Discover more from Prof Jem Bendell

Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.

Discover more from Prof Jem Bendell

Share this:

Related

Discover more from Prof Jem Bendell