Greenwashing is a portmanteau word combining the tactics involved in a "whitewash", that hides the actual conditions, and the co-opting of the word green to signify environmental sustainability.
The Wikipedia article on greenwashing points out that this phenomenon is also called "green sheen":
Greenwashing is a form of marketing spin in which green PR (green values) and green marketing are deceptively used to persuade the public that an organization's products, aims and policies are environmentally friendly and therefore ‘better’; appeal to nature. Common examples present in the marketing of food products, alternative medicine and natural medicine.
Evidence an organization is greenwashing often comes from pointing out the spending differences: when significantly more money or time has been spent advertising being "green" (that is, operating with consideration for the environment), than is actually spent on environmentally sound practices. Greenwashing efforts can range from changing the name or label of a product to evoke the natural environment on a product containing harmful chemicals to multimillion-dollar marketing campaigns portraying highly polluting energy companies as eco-friendly. Greenwashing is therefore a "mask" used to cover-up unsustainable corporate agendas and policies. Highly public accusations of greenwashing have contributed to the term's increasing use.
While greenwashing is not new, its use has increased over recent years to meet consumer demand for environmentally friendly goods and services. The problem is compounded by lax enforcement by regulatory agencies such as the Federal Trade Commission in the United States, the Competition Bureau in Canada, and the Committee of Advertising Practice and the Broadcast Committee of Advertising Practice in the United Kingdom.
Critics of the practice suggest the rise of greenwashing, paired with ineffective regulation, contributes to consumer skepticism of all green claims, and diminishes the power of the consumer in driving companies toward greener solutions for manufacturing processes and business operations. Many corporate structures use greenwashing as a way to repair public perception of their brand. The structuring of corporate disclosure is often set up so as to maximize perceptions of legitimacy. However, a growing body of social and environmental accounting research finds, in the absence of external monitoring and verification, greenwashing strategies amount to corporate posturing and deception.
Mark Sweney reported this story for the Guardian (Wed 5 Feb 2020):
UK watchdog bans advert claiming lowest CO2 pollution of any major airline
Ryanair has been accused of greenwashing after the UK advertising watchdog banned an ad campaign claiming that the airline has the lowest carbon emissions of any major airline in Europe.
The budget airline, which was named last year as one of Europe’s top 10 carbon emitters in an EU report, later ran a TV, press and radio campaign claiming it was “Europe’s lowest fares, lowest emissions airline”.
The ads claim that Ryanair has the “lowest carbon emissions of any major airline”, based on CO2 emissions per passenger per kilometre flown, because it has the youngest fleet, highest proportion of seats filled on flights and newest, most fuel-efficient engines.
However, one of the charts Ryanair presented to the Advertising Standards Authority to back up its claims was dated 2011, which the watchdog said was “of little value as substantiation for a comparison made in 2019”. The ASA added: “In addition, some well-known airlines did not appear on the chart, so it was not clear whether they had been measured.”
The ASA also said that the ads failed to factor in seating density – the number of seats per plane – which it considered “significant information that consumers needed in order to understand the basis of the claim”.
The ASA banned the ads ruling that they were misleading because the airline had failed to substantiate its environmental claims.
“The ads must not appear again in their current forms,” the ASA said. “We told Ryanair to ensure that when making environmental claims they held adequate evidence to substantiate them and to ensure that the basis of those claims were made clear.”
The environmental group Transport & Environment accused Ryanair of greenwashing instead of tackling its emissions.
The airline ran the low-emissions ad campaign just over five months after it became the first non-coal company to be named in the EU top 10 carbon emitters list.
“Ryanair should stop greenwashing and start doing something to tackle its sky-high emissions,” said Jo Dardenne, the aviation manager of T&E.
Ryanair remained defiant, claiming it had abided by the UK advertising code.
The Ryanair boss, Michael O’Leary, has suggested shooting environmentalists and has repeatedly denied that the climate crisis is driven by carbon emissions, which aviation produces in abundance.
Welcome to a "Through the Looking Glass" world . . .
The word portmanteau was first used to describe a made-up word by Lewis Carroll in the book Through the Looking-Glass (1871), in which Humpty Dumpty explains to Alice the coinage of the unusual words in "Jabberwocky", where slithy means "slimy and lithe" and mimsy is "miserable and flimsy":
"You see it's like a portmanteau - there are two meanings packed up into one word." Humpty Dumpty
In Lewis Carroll's day, a portmanteau was a suitcase that opened into two equal sections.
For the Marx brothers a portmanteau provides a scene for unpacking, creative word play and double meanings . . .
The Egg Man . . .
I am the egg man They are the egg men I am the walrus Goo goo g'joob
Is the egg man the vestige of humanity as integrated and whole with the cosmos - a sort of cosmic Humpty Dumpty? The Walrus originates in Lewis Carroll's poem "The Walrus and the Carpenter" (from the book Through the Looking-Glass). Lennon later expressed dismay upon belatedly realising that the walrus was a villain in the poem.
The song finally came together when John Lennon's friend and former fellow member of the Quarrymen, Pete Shotton visited, and Lennon asked him about a playground nursery rhyme they sang as children. Shotton recalled the rhyme as follows: Yellow matter custard, green slop pie, All mixed together with a dead dog's eye, Slap it on a butty, ten foot thick, Then wash it all down with a cup of cold sick
The Beatles' official biographer, Hunter Davies, was present while this song was being written and wrote an account in his 1968 book The Beatles. According to this biography, Lennon remarked to Shotton:
"Let the fuckers work that one out."
War and Peace in the Global Village is a 1968 book by Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore. It contains a collage of images and text that illustrates the effects of electronic media and new technology on man.
Marshall McLuhan used James Joyce's Finnegans Wake as a major inspiration for this study of war throughout history as an indicator as to how war may be conducted in the future.
Joyce's Wake is claimed to be a gigantic cryptogram which reveals a cyclic pattern for the whole history of man through its Ten Thunders.
Each "thunder" below is a 100-character portmanteau of other words to create a statement he likens to an effect that each technology has on the society into which it is introduced.
In order to glean the most understanding out of each, the reader must break the portmanteau into separate words (and many of these are themselves portmanteaus of words taken from multiple languages other than English) and speak them aloud for the spoken effect of each word. There is much dispute over what each portmanteau truly denotes.
McLuhan claims that the ten thunders in Finnegans Wake represent different stages in the history of man, that begins with bababa . . . speech and that ends in murky mood-mud:
Thunder 1: Paleolithic to Neolithic. Speech. Split of East/West. From herding to harnessing animals.
Thunder 2: Clothing as weaponry. Enclosure of private parts. First social aggression.
Thunder 3: Specialism. Centralism via wheel, transport, cities: civil life.
Thunder 4: Markets and truck gardens. Patterns of nature submitted to greed and power.
Thunder 5: Printing. Distortion and translation of human patterns and postures and pastors.
Thunder 6: Industrial Revolution. Extreme development of print process and individualism.
Thunder 7: Tribal man again. All choractors end up separate, private man. Return of choric.
Thunder 8: Movies. Pop art, pop Kulch via tribal radio. Wedding of sight and sound.
Thunder 9: Car and Plane. Both centralizing and decentralizing at once create cities in crisis. Speed and death.
Thunder 10: Television. Back to tribal involvement in tribal mood-mud. The last thunder is a turbulent, muddy wake, and murk of non-visual, tactile man.
of a once wallstrait oldparr is retaled early in bed and later on life down through all christian minstrelsy. The great fall of the offwall entailed at such short notice the pftjschute of Finnegan, erse solid man, that the humptyhillhead of humself prumptly sends an unquiring one well to the west in quest of his tumptytumtoes: and their upturnpikepointandplace is at the knock out in the park where oranges have been laid to rust upon the green since devlinsfirst loved livvy."
. . . and it all leads to the fall of man!
Humpty Dumpty, shown as a riddle with answer, in a 1902 Mother Goose story book by William Wallace Denslow
David Attenborough with UK's Prime Minister Boris Johnson at the Science Museum launching a government response to the climate crisis at the Science Museum, London
PM takes charge of COP 26 as ex-minister hits back at her sacking as president of talks
. . . and Steve Bell excels with his acute perception of the ongoing culture wars (in media res) when it comes to climate change!
Steve Bell and the fall of man . . .
And just as Fiona Harvey reports:
Boris Johnson has promised “urgent action” on the climate crisis, taking personal leadership of this year’s UN climate talks after a blistering attack by the sacked former minister who was to lead them.
Part of the Johnson "greenwashing" tactic in this instance of Johnson's perrenial posturing and deception was to associate himself with the cultural icon David Attenborough.
On the side of "accountabilty"Steve Bell's strategic tactic in the image above occurs on two fronts of this culture war.
As Fiona Harvey reports:
In a boost to Johnson as social media buzzed with criticism of his handling of the climate talks so far, Sir David Attenborough signalled his strong public support at the launch.
Steve Bell in this political artwork quotes the episode of the Life on Earth broadcast by the BBC in 1979 that included Sir David’s encounter with Rwanda’s mountain gorillas. This scene has engaged over 500 million viewers worldwide and is regularly voted one of television’s most memorable moments.
This story of "Gorillas nearly missed" by Adam Sherwin at the Independent looks at how the values of the BBC producers nearly resulted in this sequence not being broadcast because of its "triviality":
It is the most famous sequence ever captured on a natural history film – the unforgettable moment when Sir David Attenborough becomes the plaything of a baby gorilla.
Now it has emerged the scene was nearly left on the cutting-room floor because BBC producers thought it was too trivial for the landmark series Life on Earth.
Sir David’s encounter with Rwanda’s mountain gorillas has entranced 500 million viewers worldwide. The series was first broadcast in the UK in 1979 and is regularly voted one of television’s most memorable moments.
Sir David had wanted to use the gorillas as a backdrop while he talked about the evolutionary advantage of the opposable thumb. But he came face-to-face with the adult female and won the gorillas’ trust by standing his ground and whispering an ad lib to camera. When Sir David returned the next day, the female and two young gorillas began to groom and play with him, pawing his face and taking his shoes. In his memoirs, Sir David described it as “one of the most exciting encounters of my life”.
BBC Earth Unplugged on YouTube on May 8, 2016 celebrated the 90th birthday of Sir David Attenborough with this collaborative project with Aardman Animations including the imagined memory of the Gorillas encounter with the TV presenter.
Greenwashing?
While the cultural capital embedded in this iconic episode has been co-opted by Prime Minister Johnson, this attempt at "greenwashing" through a public relations excercise is easily undermined by the way Steve Bell plays with the dynamics of the original encounter. Such an interpretation suggest that the "beast" is still the "beast" of old, and the attendance of the observer and commentator, while creating a useful "green sheen" by association, is essentially a necessary but marginal and momentary attraction.
Q. Why
A. Because Boris Johnson doesn’t get climate change . . .
The planning inspectorate recommended to ministers that the 3.6GW gas plant was to be refused permission because it “would undermine the government’s commitment, as set out in the Climate Change Act 2008, to cut greenhouse emissions” by having “significant adverse effects”. It was the first big project rejected because of the climate crisis. Advertisement
However, Andrea Leadsom, secretary of state for business, energy and industrial strategy, rejected the advice and gave the go-ahead in October. Now ClientEarth has been given permission by the high court to sue ministers, with the case expected to be heard in about two months. The environmental lawyers have previously inflicted three defeats on ministers over their failure to tackle air pollution.
“With scientists ringing the alarm bells for decades, we shouldn’t need to take the government to court over its decision,” said Sam Hunter Jones, a lawyer at ClientEarth. “[Leadsom’s] decision is at odds with the government’s own climate change plans. As the planning inspectorate found, if this plant goes ahead the public risks a carbon budget blowout, or a huge stranded asset that would require propping up by the taxpayer, or a combination of the two.”
. . . and two years ago!
Adam Vaughan reported for the Guardian (Mon 29 Jan 2018) that:
Despite this seemingly gloomy picture for big gas plants, companies are either keeping them running or exploring building new ones.
SSE looks likely to keep Scotland’s last fossil fuel power station open at Peterhead in Aberdeenshire, after it generated fears from unions by announcing a review of the plant a year ago. It also hopes to build a new plant in North Lincolnshire if it can secure a contract in the capacity market.
Drax Group is looking to convert its coal power units in North Yorkshire to a huge 3.5GW gas plant. RWE is consulting this year on plans for a major new 2.5GW gas power plant at its former biomass power station at Tilbury, Essex.
What were they worrying about when they are so clearly protected, supported and subsidised by this UK government?
A year ago Damian Carrington reported (Wed 23 Jan 2019) on the fact that the UK government sustains fossil fuel companies with the biggest taxpayer funded subsidies in the European Union rather than invest in with equal measure in sustainable energy projects:
The UK leads the European Union in giving subsidies to fossil fuels, according to a report from the European commission. It found €12bn (£10.5bn) a year in support for fossil fuels in the UK, significantly more than the €8.3bn spent on renewable energy.
The commission report warned that the total subsidies for coal, oil and gas across the EU remained at the same level as 2008. This is despite both the EU and G20 having long pledged to phase out the subsidies, which hamper the rapid transition to clean energy needed to fight climate change.
Germany provided the biggest energy subsidies, with €27bn for renewable energy, almost three times the €9.5bn given to fossil fuels. Spain and Italy also gave more subsidies to renewable energy than fossil fuels.
But along with the UK, France, the Netherlands, Sweden and Ireland all gave more to fossil fuels. The report is based on 2016 Eurostat data, the latest available, and found that across the EU renewable energy received 45% of subsidies and fossil fuels 33%.
The commission report said policies were being pursued to cut carbon emissions and meet the Paris climate agreement goals of limiting global warming to well below 2C above pre-industrial levels. “However, despite this and the international commitments made in the context of G20 and G7, fossil fuel subsidies in the EU have not decreased,” it said. “EU and national policies might need to be reinforced to phase out such subsidies.”
And last summer Damian Carrington reported (Thu 1 Aug 2019):
Redirecting small portion of subsidies would unleash clean energy revolution, says report
Damian Carrington writes:
Switching just some of the huge subsidies supporting fossil fuels to renewables would unleash a runaway clean energy revolution, according to a new report, significantly cutting the carbon emissions that are driving the climate crisis.
Coal, oil and gas get more than $370bn (£305bn) a year in support, compared with $100bn for renewables, the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD) report found. Just 10-30% of the fossil fuel subsidies would pay for a global transition to clean energy, the IISD said.
Ending fossil fuel subsidies has long been seen as vital to tackling the climate emergency, with the G20 nations pledging in 2009 to phase them out, but progress has been limited. In May, the UN secretary general, António Guterres, attacked subsidies, saying: “What we are doing is using taxpayers’ money – which means our money – to boost hurricanes, to spread droughts, to melt glaciers, to bleach corals. In one word: to destroy the world.”
The new analysis shows how redirecting some of the fossil fuel subsidies could decisively tip the balance in favour of green energy, making it the cheapest electricity available and instigating a rapid global rollout.
“Almost everywhere, renewables are so close to being competitive that [a 10-30% subsidy swap] tips the balance, and turns them from a technology that is slowly growing to one that is instantly the most viable and can replace really large amounts of generation,” said Richard Bridle of the IISD. “It goes from being marginal to an absolute no-brainer.”
The transition from polluting fossil fuels to clean energy is already under way. Annual investment in renewables has been greater than that in fossil fuel electricity generation since 2008 and new renewable capacity has exceeded fossil fuel power each year since 2014.
What Humpty Dumpty said before the fall . . .
"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less."
"The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things."
"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master—that's all."
The matter of environmental sustainability has its own history, and its own propositions, some of which may be questionable, and where Humpty Dumpty's question to Alice remains to be answered, "which is to be master"?
Population Matters, formerly known as the Optimum Population Trust, is a UK-based charity that addresses population size and its effects on environmental sustainability. It considers population growth as a major contributor to climate change, environmental degradation, and resource depletion. The group promotes ethical, choice-based solutions through lobbying, campaigning and awareness-raising.
HERE'S WHY 2020 COULD BE A 'SUPER-YEAR FOR NATURE
The Population Matters website presents a pristine nature, necessarily devoid of the human presence, except in the process of image making. The images of crowds of people are suggestive of a cause and a threat to this pristine condition.
Population Matters obviously consider human population is the problem! What about the stumbling block of those ruthless global interests embedded in actually existing capitalism?
Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (German: Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer), is an oil painting circa 1818 by the German Romantic artist Caspar David Friedrich. It has been considered one of the masterpieces of Romanticism and one of its most representative works, currently in the Kunsthalle Hamburg collection, Hamburg, Germany.
According to the Wikipedia article on Romanticism though not essential to Romanticism;
but so widespread as to be normative, was a strong belief and interest in the importance of nature. This particularly in the effect of nature upon the artist when he is surrounded by it, preferably alone.
In contrast to the usually very social art of the Enlightenment, Romantics were distrustful of the human world, and tended to believe a close connection with nature was mentally and morally healthy.
The Romantic poet Byron's Childe Harold’s Pilgrimageincludes in Canto III verse LXXII the following lines:
I live not in myself, but I become Portion of that around me; and to me High mountains are a feeling, but the hum Of human cities torture: I can see Nothing to loathe in nature, save to be A link reluctant in a fleshly chain, Class’d among creatures, when the soul can flee, And with the sky, the peak, the heaving plain Of ocean, or the stars, mingle, and not in vain.
High mountains are a feeling, but the hum / Of human cities torture
There is, without doubt, a thread of the anti-human in the aesthetics of the sublime, of romanticism, and of the kind of modernism that considers that the forms of art should be clear, pure and singular. So, perhaps the subversive hum, emanating from within the background of the crowd scene, represents the demand that all human beings on our planet be seen as a part of the solution and not the problem
Population Matters has had questions to answer in the recent past, and has proved not so forthcoming. Adam Ramsey writes on the Open Democracy website on 23 September 2015 about Population Matters under the headline:
Meet the neo-Malthusians campaigning against refugees and for child benefits to be scrapped.
In January last year, there was a minor kerfuffle about Syrian refugees. It largely took place within the environmental movement and, at the time, a few of us got hot under the collar about it. Reasonably enough, most people didn't notice. It feels now, though, it's time to start asking again the questions which some of us were posing then.
Specifically, the questions relate to a charity you may well not have heard of called Population Matters - formerly the Optimum Population Trust. In late 2013 and early 2014, it published on its website stories arguing that the UK should accept no refugees from Syria. Britain, they believe, is full. Neighbouring Arab states ought to deal with the problem (never mind that if any country in the world is approaching “full”, it's Lebanon – and they haven't let that stop them accepting their fleeing neighbours).
Population Matters has a number of high profile patrons, including David Attenborough, Chris Packham and Jane Goodall. At the time, I contacted the latter two asking if they were aware that the organisation which they have given their smiley faces to is campaigning against people fleeing a brutal war being offered safe sanctuary in the UK. Packham got back promptly expressing his concern, and making clear that his worry about population relates only to global numbers of people and saying that he would quickly get to the bottom of the issue.
A few days later, I got an email from Open Democracy's then editor-in-chief, Magnus Nome. He had received a complaint about me from the charity. They didn't like being asked questions, and certainly didn't like their patrons being confronted with the views they had (I suspect inadvertently) signed up to have big photos of their faces beside (nothing makes an attack on migrant rights more palatable than putting it next to a big image of history's most travelled human). Magnus wrote them a polite reply explaining that it's my job to ask questions, but I never quite got round to writing the piece.
Of course, their comments about the Syrian crisis didn't come out of nowhere. Population Matters has long called for “zero net-migration” to the UK: essentially, “one in, one out” - a position more extreme than the BNP. It's not just them. Last year, the Swiss organisation Ecopop (as in “ecology” and “population”) launched a referendum campaign calling for net immigration to be cut to 0.2% of the country's population. Swiss people need, as they put it, “lebensraum”. In their January 2015 magazine, the Swiss referendum campaign was the top item in Population Matters “international movement” section.
It's not just their extreme views on migration which are controversial. Among Population Matters' six policy proposals for the recent general election was a suggestion that child benefit and tax credits should be scrapped for third and subsequent children. With child poverty as high as it is in Britain, it must have been the only charity in the country celebrating as Osborne subsequently cut tax and universal credits for third and subsequent children. Many were surprised by the Chancellor's decision, but, as Polly Toynbee put it, “there was always a eugenic undercurrent in Tory thinking: stop the lower classes breeding.”
Of course, none of this is new. Malthusian arguments have been used to justify brutal policies ever since the British civil servant responsible for Ireland, Sir Charles Trevelyan, wrote that the great famine there was an “effective mechanism for reducing surplus population”.
This genocidal tradition is, of course, not represented in contemporary Malthusianism. But the broader questions of race and gender are uncomfortable for them. The organisation wraps itself in the flag of women's empowerment and concern for global poverty, and I am sure that for most of those involved in it, those are genuine worries. But any interrogation of these issues ends in a deeply problematic place. George Monbiot, as ever, puts it in the clearest terms: “People who claim that population growth is the big environmental issue are shifting the blame from the rich to the poor”.
If population growth is the cause of environmental problems, then by implication those primarily responsible are the people in the world who have the most children. The level of absurdity of this statement is revealed when we consider that women in Mali have on average 6.29 children each. Women in the USA have 2.1. Yet the average Malian family is responsible for 1/136th of the carbon of the average American family. As Fred Pearce has written:
“The world’s richest half-billion people — that’s about 7 percent of the global population — are responsible for 50 percent of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions. Meanwhile the poorest 50 percent are responsible for just 7 percent of emissions”. The problem, in other words, isn't the population growing, it's the behaviour of the wealthy."
The organisation, to be fair to it, does talk about population in richer countries as well as in more impoverished ones: hence its focus on immigration into the UK. But this doesn't change the basic fact that the issue they highlight, population growth, is one for which poorer people are more responsible. Telling people that overpopulation is the primary problem therefore functions to shift implicit blame for environmental destruction from rich white men, who in reality are mostly responsible for and profiting from a global system built on stripping the earth, to poor black women who have children within that system. And as if this problematic politics isn't already clear enough, they helpfully spell it out with their scheme of “Population Offsets” where, for example, people who can afford to fly can buy forgiveness by paying for other (usually poorer) people to be sterilised.
Likewise, claims of women's empowerment fall apart at the simplest questioning. In reality, most of feminism has long been deeply critical of neo-Malthusianism, for a simple reason. Whilst of course all women ought to have access to family planning, feminist academic Kalpana Wilson asks the vital question: “who is planning whose families?” You aren't empowering women to make choices about the size of their family if you have predetermined the outcome of that choice any more than you are enfranchising people if you give them the right to vote, so long as they vote for you.
This is a particular problem in the global south. Population Matters argued in its 2015 manifesto that the British government should “increase the proportion of foreign aid spent on family planning services and the empowerment of women”. Yet before we ask questions about whether we in the West are best placed to determine how aid money ought to be spent, it's important to examine what the money actually spent already does.
A 2012 Human Rights Watch report on forced sterilisation in India found that “authorities aggressively pursue targets, especially for female sterilization, by threatening health workers with salary cuts or dismissals”, and there are already serious allegations that UK aid money has been used to fund forced sterilisations in the global south. As the Observer reported, “many have died as a result of botched operations, while others have been left bleeding and in agony. A number of pregnant women selected for sterilisation suffered miscarriages and lost their babies.” Population Matters are against forced sterilisation. But their demand that UK aid money be shifted further into family planning programmes can only really be understood in this context.
14 women died last year sterilisation camps in Chhattisgarh, India. Buried on the Population Matters website is a blog from a doctor blaming and condemning “assembly line” sterilisations, but the language in their manifesto isn't qualified by the concerns he raises. More importantly, as Kalpana Wilson wrote at the time: “far from giving poor women in the global south much-needed access to safe contraception that they can control, these policies dehumanise them as “excessively reproductive” and set targets that make atrocities like those in Chhattisgarh possible. While these policies are rooted in deeply racist and patriarchal ideas, they are implemented in the name of reproductive rights and choice.”
There are vital organisations which genuinely exist to empower women to make reproductive choices. None of this should be seen as a criticism of them. The point is that if your starting point is not empowerment but that “they” do what “we” want, you will always end up in the wrong place.
When Population Matters have been confronted with these questions, their responses have tended to be worrying. At a debate about this subject two years ago, Green Party activist Sebastian Power explained that he was concerned that neo-Malthusianism functions to shift blame from rich to poor, white to black, men to women.
Roger Martin, the chair of the organisation, gave a telling response. He replied that he couldn't be racist (which wasn't ever quite the accusation), because his whole motive for caring about population was that when he was a diplomat, his local chef had got pregnant. When he had congratulated her, she had said that she didn't want another child. He took her to the family planning clinic, and she was grateful. It was, in other words, wrong to ask questions about the racial power balance intrinsic to his politics, because some of his domestic staff used to be black.
Last week, I contacted Population Matters' press officer. I asked if they wanted to comment on their sister organisation Ecopop and its rhetoric. Given the stories about their opposition to Syrian refugees coming to the UK seem to have been taken off their website, is this still their policy? Would Simon Ross like to say anything more about his former cook? They told me that they don't wish to comment. I contacted them again yesterday morning to ask if they wished to comment on the issue of DfID money funding forced sterilisations. They replied to say that didn't. If they want to write a response to this article, we'll be happy to publish it here.
Why do I mention any of this? Why pick on a small group of well-intentioned (which I'm sure they are) if misguided people, trying to take action on an issue that worries them?
I have been involved in the environmental movement for most of my life, and Population Matters (/the Optimum Population Trust) has always been hanging around. When I used to organise conferences for student activists, they frequently tried to book a stall. They spend a lot of time targeting members of the Green Party, and have recruited a group of universally popular patrons whose names they use as a teflon shield against any criticism. Various friends and I have often raised one or more of the above issues at stalls and meetings. The most common response has been along the lines of “are you saying David Attenborough's racist?”.
It is vital, therefore, that environmentalists and Greens have a clear understanding that this isn't a cuddly organisation if with slightly different priorities. Their concerns for the planet and for people are I am sure genuine. But it's because of these things that they present an acceptable face of hard-right policies like zero-net migration, stopping refugees from coming to the UK and scrapping child benefits. They potentially provide cover for a government steering funding into deeply worrying sterilisation programmes for people in the global South.
If there is ever an effective movement for these chilling policies, it will be led by kindly old men with fuzzy beards, not ranting skinhead twenty-somethings. It will, in other words, look much more like Population Matters than the EDL. Progressives should have nothing to do with them.
Weegee's (Arthur Felling) photo of people enjoying the beach at Coney Island, New York, in 1940 contrasts with the Romantic image of a pristine nature devoid of humanity.
There is a song on Bruce Springsteen's Album, Greetings from Asbury Park called Growin' Up, that has the lyric:
I hid in the mother breast of the crowd, but when they said, "Pull down" I pulled up
The Population Myth
George Monbiot's article The Population Myth (29th September 2009), referenced in the Open Democracy "refugees from Britain" article, includes another quotation from Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage:
There is pleasure in the pathless woods, there is rapture in the lonely shore, there is society where none intrudes, by the deep sea, and music in its roar;
I love not Man the less, but Nature more.
Man and/or nature? The literary critic Raymond Williams (Keywords 1983:219) famously ob served that the word ‘nature’ is perhaps the most complex word in the English language.
Nature remains a contested concept!
To quote from Nature: A Contested Concept by Franklin Ginn and David Demeritt, where they define Nature as a contested term that means different things to different people in different places. Generally, this contestation revolves around three main meanings: the ‘nature’ or essence of a thing; ‘nature’ as material place external to humanity; and ‘nature’ as universal law or reality that may or may not include humans.
Wilderness?
Albert Bierstadt, Among the Sierra Nevada, California, 1868, oil on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum
These authors make a connection between the racist evolutionary ideology essential to drive colonial expansion, accumulation of land and capital through dispossession, and the social, economic and artistic construction of "wilderness":
Drawing on late nineteenth-century ideas of evolution, geographers like SirHenry Harry Johnston, author of The Backward People and Our Relations with Them, argued that it was the ‘white man’s burden’ to govern less developed people and places until they becamecivilized enough to do it for themselves. Europeans projected their views of nature on to the new landscapes they encountered in the Americas, Asia, the Pacific and most powerfully, perhaps, Africa. For example,early settlers in New Zealand wrote of the South Island’s plains:
But this vast tract is unpeopled; millionsof acres have never been trodden by human foot since their first upheavement from the sea. It is a country fresh from nature’s rudest mint, untouched by hand of man.
This separation of rational man from ‘primitive natives’ helped legitimize the imposition of scientific management to bring order to and ‘improve’ the land. Where lands proved unsuited to cultivation and other economic use, they were often set aside as national parks or reserves, where nature was to be preserved in an unspoilt state for future generations to admire. But the ‘preservation’ of so-called wilderness areas was really a production of wilderness, in so far as it often involved the forcible expulsion of indigenous peoples. In Africa, Maasai were evicted to create the AmboseliNational Park and only allowed to remain in the Serengeti because they were viewed as ‘part of nature’; in the USA the Blackfeet continue to be accused of ‘poaching’ on the lands of Glacier National Park that originally belonged to them.
Wilderness, then,is a culturally and historically contingent expression of a certain colonialist way of seeing nature. It is, in short, a social construction:
Far from being the one place on earth that stands apart from humanity, [wilder-ness] is quite profoundly a human creation – indeed, the creation of very particular human cultures at very particularmoments in human history. It is not a pristine sanctuary where the last remnant of an untouched, endangered, but still transcendent nature can at least for a little while longer be encountered without the contaminating taint of civilization.
The FT reports that David Attenborough is off to Netflix . . .
Critics say that the characteristic Attenborough feel-good approach, which focuses on awe and inspiration rather than a call to action, does a disservice to his viewers. Sir David started addressing environmental degradation in the year 2000, long after it had become evident to scientists. He first took on climate change in 2006, once he had been convinced that the science was incontrovertible, and advocates limiting human population growth.
George Monbiot, an environmentalist commentator, has accused the presenter of “creating a false impression of the world”. The programme-makers take a different view. Mike Gunton, a BBC film-maker who has worked alongside Sir David since the 1980s and is the executive producer of Dynasties, says: “We are trying to reflect the realities that we see, but not actively trying to campaign, because that is not our job.”
Mr Gunton says that one of the joys of working with Sir David is that he is the same character on and off-camera. “He does inspire us all because of his enthusiasm,” he says. “He has kept that childlike love of the natural world all through his life. He infects people with that.”
George Monbiot says in his Opinion piece (Wed 7 Nov 2018). Here are some of the more pithy extracts:
Knowingly creating a false impression of the world: this is a serious matter. It is more serious still when the BBC does it, and yet worse when the presenter is “the most trusted man in Britain”. But, as his latest interview with the Observer reveals, David Attenborough sticks to his line that fully representing environmental issues is a “turn-off”.
For many years, wildlife film-making has presented a pristine living world. It has created an impression of security and abundance, even in places afflicted by cascading ecological collapse. The cameras reassure us that there are vast tracts of wilderness in which wildlife continues to thrive. They cultivate complacency, not action.
In 1995 I spent several months with a producer, developing a novel and imaginative proposal for an environmental series. The producer returned from his meeting with the channel controller in a state of shock. “He just looked at the title and asked ‘Is this environment?’ I said yes. He said, ‘I’ve spent two years trying to get environment off this fucking channel. Why the fuck are you bringing me environment?’”
I later discovered that this response was typical. The controllers weren’t indifferent. They were actively hostile. If you ask me whether the BBC or ExxonMobil has done more to frustrate environmental action in this country, I would say the BBC.
We all knew that only one person had the power to break this dam. For decades David Attenborough, a former channel controller widely seen as the living embodiment of the BBC, has been able to make any programme he wants. So where, we kept asking, was he? At last, in 2000, he presented an environmental series: State of the Planet.
It was an interesting and watchable series, but it left us with nowhere to go and nothing to do. Only in the last few seconds of the final episode was there a hint that structural forces might be at play: “Real success can only come if there’s a change in our societies, in our economics and in our politics.” But what change? What economics? What politics? He had given us no clues.
Six years later he made another environmental series, The Truth About Climate Change. And this, in my view, was a total disaster.
It told us nothing about the driving forces behind climate breakdown. The only mention of fossil fuel companies was as part of the solution: “The people who extract fossil fuels like oil and gas have now come up with a way to put carbon dioxide back underground.” Apart from the general “we”, the only distinct force identified as responsible was the “1.3 billion Chinese”. That a large proportion of Chinese emissions are caused by manufacturing goods the west buys was not mentioned. The series immediately triggered a new form of climate denial: I was bombarded with people telling me there was no point in taking action in Britain because the Chinese were killing the planet.
If Attenborough’s environmentalism has a coherent theme, it is shifting the blame from powerful forces on to either society in general or the poor and weak. Sometimes it becomes pretty dark. In 2013 he told the Telegraph “What are all these famines in Ethiopia? What are they about? They’re about too many people for too little land … We say, get the United Nations to send them bags of flour. That’s barmy.”
There had not been a famine in Ethiopia for 28 years, and the last one was caused not by an absolute food shortage but by civil war and government policies. His suggestion that food relief is counter-productive suggests he has read nothing on the subject since Thomas Malthus’s essay in 1798. But, cruel and ignorant as these comments were, they were more or less cost-free. By contrast, you do not remain a national treasure by upsetting powerful vested interests: look at the flak the outspoken wildlife and environmental presenter Chris Packham attracts for standing up to the hunting lobby.
And, furthermore, George Monbiot says in ThePopulation Myth article that:
It’s no coincidence that most of those who are obsessed with population growth are post-reproductive wealthy white men: it’s about the only environmental issue for which they can’t be blamed. The brilliant earth systems scientist James Lovelock, for example, claimed last month that “those who fail to see that population growth and climate change are two sides of the same coin are either ignorant or hiding from the truth. These two huge environmental problems are inseparable and to discuss one while ignoring the other is irrational.”(Optimum Population Trust, 26th August 2009 Gaia Scientist to be OPT Patron) But it’s Lovelock who is being ignorant and irrational.
A paper published yesterday in the journal Environment and Urbanization shows that the places where population has been growing fastest are those in which carbon dioxide has been growing most slowly, and vice versa. Between 1980 and 2005, for example, Sub-Saharan Africa produced 18.5% of the world’s population growth and just 2.4% of the growth in CO2. North America turned out 4% of the extra people, but 14% of the extra emissions. Sixty-three per cent of the world’s population growth happened in places with very low emissions (David Satterthwaite, September 2009. The implications of population
growth and urbanization for climate change. Environment &
Urbanization, Vol 21(2): 545–567.).
Even this does not capture it. The paper points out that around one sixth of the world’s population is so poor that it produces no significant emissions at all. This is also the group whose growth rate is likely to be highest. Households in India earning less than 3,000 rupees a month use a fifth of the electricity per head and one seventh of the transport fuel of households earning Rs30,000 or more. Street sleepers use almost nothing.
Those who live by processing waste (a large part of the urban underclass) often save more greenhouse gases than they produce.
A trash picker carries a sack of recyclable materials she collected at the Ghazipur landfill in the east of New Delhi.
The first thing you notice, approaching the Ghazipur landfill, is a pack of emaciated feral dogs. Some of them are coughing.
That, and the stench — a putrid mix of rot, burning plastic and a dead animal somewhere close.
From afar, it looks like an arid plateau on the outskirts of India's capital. But this mountain isn't made of earth. It's made of trash.
It bakes in 100-degree summertime heat, emitting fumes and oozing toxins into the groundwater. At 20 stories high, and growing, it'll soon be taller than the Taj Mahal. (The Ghazipur mound is 213 feet; the Taj is 240 feet high.) Two years ago, a landslide of soggy garbage killed two local residents.
This is one big, smelly, dangerous example of how India is growing, getting richer — and generating more waste than it's able to handle. There are three other major landfills that ring the Indian capital, and hundreds more across the country.
A slum of trash pickers has cropped up alongside the Ghazipur landfill, gleaning a living from it — or just barely. They scavenge plastic to sell to recycling plants.
"This work is easier in winter," says Sheikh Rahim, 36, a wiry, compact man with one gold hoop earring.
"But I like it all right. I'm used it, and anyway, I don't have a choice." Rahim never went to school. He moved here 19 years ago from the city that was then called Calcutta. He married a local woman, and they have four children. The family lives in a slum sandwiched between the landfill and a modern new metro station.
Every day at noon, Rahim climbs the trash mountain — in sandals. He prefers to go at the hottest time of day, when there's less competition. Sometimes his 8-year-old daughter Chandini comes with him.
There's a switchback road, as wide as a highway, which dump trucks have bulldozed, zigzagging back and forth up the mountain. But Rahim can't use that. Foot traffic is forbidden.
He has to go the back way.
First he shimmies under coils of barbed wire, which police put up around the perimeter of the mountain two years ago, after the landslide deaths, to keep people like Rahim out. Then he fords a fetid creek that circles around part of the trash heap like a moat. Previously, he'd dropped cement slabs into the water as stepping stones. He gingerly checks to see if they'll still hold his weight. He doesn't want to fall into this inky water, he says.
Rahim says his hands get cut, and his back gets scraped by the barbed wire. He gets shots regularly, to ward off infection.
Atop the mountain, Rahim uses a rod to rifle through the mound. The garbage is mostly gray and decaying, bleached by the sun. Vultures circle above him and dive, plucking bits of plastic in their beaks.
Before dusk, Rahim descends with a sack full of recyclables. In an open lot between his slum and the mountain, he and his neighbors sort opaque plastic from clear plastic, and aluminum foil from paper. They pack the segregated trash into giant yellow bags discarded from a cement factory.
Most of India's recycling happens like this. Even if you sort your trash at home, municipal garbage collectors — if they even service your neighborhood — often toss it into the truck all together. It gets sorted again at a landfill — not by the municipality but by the poorest of the poor.
Rahim picks through rotten trash for about five hours a day, then sorts and sells a day's haul for 150 rupees, about $2 dollars — to middlemen like Mohammed Asif.
Asif, 22, is one step up in the garbage chain. He doesn't collect trash himself. He's got an army of local boys picking up recyclables for him.
They deliver it to Asif's workshop, which directly faces the trash mountain, separated from it by yet another creek of raw sewage, buzzing with mosquitoes. Asif weighs bags bursting with empty bottles, and sells them to truckers bound for recycling plants. He licks his fingers and peels bills off a fat wad of currency, then tucks it back into his pocket.
"I'm a businessman. I do this for money," Asif says with a swagger. But then he turns somber. "If I don't, our streets will fill with trash. We won't be able to handle it. It already stinks. Our eyes burn. In summer, this trash mountain spontaneously catches fire."
The fires are likely sparked by the release of methane and other gases as trash and organic materials break down.
A local doctor, Kumud Gupta, told a local newspaper she sees about 70 people a day, including babies, who are suffering from respiratory and stomach ailments linked to pollution from the landfill.
Across India, there are many thousands of people like Rahim and Asif, toiling in extreme conditions like this, on garbage heaps that are only growing taller.
NPR producer Furkan Latif Khan contributed to this report.
Greenwashing is not a recent phenomenon. Nearly seven years ago Scientific American provided readers with advice on how to find out who is greenwashing, and references Greenpeace. This is the ideological battleground. Science versus deception, fake news, massively resourced public relations businesses and advertising budgets for exploitative polluters.
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