In Defence of Viruses

Remember the other crisis? Only a couple of years ago, before it was all bailout this and subprime that, the buzzwords of the moment were all about the climate. The broadsheets produced travel supplements on the fifty places you simply must visit before they melt or disappear into the sea forever. “Carbon offsetting” websites started to pop up, offering concerned polluters the opportunity to feel better about the damage they were doing in exchange for a small fee. Low-energy lightbulbs went off above the head of every lazy sub-editor in the country, as they all simultaneously started looking for articles – usually bigging up some new designer range of useless but fashionable eco-tat – that would allow them to use headlines like “Green is the new black.”

Of course, that was last season, but while much of the media attention has gone away the problem hasn’t. Temperatures are still rising, crops are still failing, polar bears still have a lot to worry about and honestly, so have we.

And it’s on that cheery note that I’ll begin my article proper, with a rant against Agent Smith, the besuited bad guy from The Matrix, and his view of human nature. Human beings aren’t like other mammals which, according to the virtual villain, tend to find an equilibrium within their environment. We’re more like viruses. We consume and reproduce, consume and reproduce until there’s nothing left, and putting us in our place is the only way to save the world. In the context of the film it was pretty obvious that we wanted him to lose, but unfortunately views like Smith’s can be quite influential in the polemics of climate change.

The most extreme example was that of Phil Woolas, the former Environment Minister and (probably) the most racist MP in the Labour party, who tried to buy some environmentalist cover for his programme to crack down on immigration by saying that “you can’t have sustainability with an increase in population.” As with most attacks on migrants – and as with Agent Smith – Woolas’ diatribe assumes a pretty narrow view of what people are all about. With every new arrival, he sees another mouth to feed, another carbon footprint to reduce, and completely misses the fact that it’s also another pair of hands that could be put to good use making things greener.

Not every greenie is quite this dedicated a meanie, I hasten to add. Last time Woolas was at Manchester University, I was delighted to watch at close quarters as he got an anti-racist pie in face from far more consistent environmentalists than himself, and I generally find that attempts to blame climate change on overpopulation are given the cold shoulder they deserve. But the view of humans as consumers, not producers, persists.

Often this happens at an individual level. I lose track of the amount of times I’ve been instructed to reduce my carbon footprint, and as it goes that’s good advice. But it’s also very frustrating: most of what we can do feels like replacing the lightbulbs on the Titanic compared to what we can’t. We can’t all afford to live in a house that doesn’t piss heat out through every poorly-insulated wall, we don’t all have time to cook at home with ingredients bought at the farmers’ market. In fact, those of us who aren’t made of money have very little power over the things that determine our carbon footprints. We do need to sort out environmentally-sound housing, comprehensive public transport, cleaner energy generation and all the rest, but that’s a question of our priorities of a society and trying to make it about individual responsibility is a self-defeating exercise in disempowerment that Thatcher would have loved.

When we do get together against the big targets (against the government’s plans for massive airport expansion, or its plans to return to coal power now that the miners have been safely defeated) we’re on a much better track. But there’s still something missing from the more radical environmental movement, something quite important. From Kingsnorth to Stansted, our demands always seem to be about getting something closed down – usually something that really ought to be closed down, of course, but it’s still an emphasis that doesn’t go down well in times like these. “Bring on the recession” is the last thing you want to hear when you’re worried about holding onto your job, but that line has been taken by prominent environmentalists like George Monbiot. Factories pollute, after all, and in the final analysis we desperately need to stop polluting.

And that brings me back to Agent Smith. He’s wrong about the other mammals. Equilibrium is almost unheard of in Nature, which prefers to live in a constant state of flux. What sets humans apart is not that we transform our environment – squirrels, monkeys and whales do that too, as any acorn, banana or cuttlefish will tell you – but that we have the power to consciously determine what that transformation will be. We, and we alone, have the power to think it through, to make a choice. We have the power to retool every bankrupt car factory to make electric buses, to get every laid-off builder on the case of insulating our houses. We can make poverty history, covering the world’s deserts with solar panels and creating millions of jobs in the process.

That’s not what’s happening at the moment, but the solution isn’t to have fewer people on the world, and certainly not to have fewer jobs. The solution is a green revolution.

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1. This is all demonstrated in a very powerful and immediate way by the events at Vestas Blades on the Isle of Wight.

   One of the UK’s only wind-turbine factories is supposed to be closing down, kicking 600 people out of work as well as preventing the development of renewable energy – dooming us both to mass unemployment and environmental hell.

   Workers are now occupying the plant to prevent the closure. But, despite the government’s supposed support for both the environment and jobs, they have sent the riot police in!

   Send messages of support to savevestas@gmail.com

   — D · Jul 21, 02:12 PM · #