Rubbish! The Oratorical Politics of the Environment
Rubbish! is a tirade against the Blair Government but also by extension any British Government since all governments are essentially the same crew whatever the party. Environment policy is seen here through the eyes of a senior
specialist journalist whose text ostensibly majors on 'rubbish' but who
also covers the degradation of land and water resources, the collusion
between government and business at the expense of everything from food
security to clean air, and waste itself (especially hazardous waste). There is anger at the incompetence of policy-makers at every
level - but largely at those at the top.
One chapter is a genuine
eye-opener, about the scale of the traffic of Western waste into the
developed world. A picture emerges of a pre-credit crunch global economy
that trafficked sex slaves and skivvies in one direction and the
detritus of growth in the other. It is a shame that the baby of
a theory of imperialist exploitation has been thrown out with the bath water of
Marxist criticism. Of course, this was in 2005. The book has now
to be seen through the years since of credit crunch and thence into the current era of total administrative chaos and breakdown. In
theory, the deflationary tendencies of 2008/2009 should have reduced waste but, of course, this was merely a hiatus. Governments hoped that there would be an
eventual resumption of a system in which they had invested their
careers. From this perspective, more waste would be a sign of good news! Yes, attitudes have changed somewhat in the last eighteen years but still policy-makers want their cake and to eat it - a vigorous capitalist economy and a veneer of environmental concern.
The essential problem for the UK and the world
has not been resolved and it cannot be resolved while public policy is
based merely on exhortation, guilt trips, 'nudge' and the use of ill-considered
environmental diktats to deal with the symptoms of system breakdown and of market mechanisms
designed to ameliorate only what other and larger scale market mechanisms have
created. Governments are still obsessed with growth and are still pondering bigger infrastructures - they have little choice. At the same
time, they deflect our eager beaver environmentalists
into projects that will increase cost pressures on industrial capital
acumulation rather than deal with the real cause of environmental
degradation - unsustainable population pressure on territory and the
desires and needs of 'ordinary' people to travel when and where they
want to, to eat aesthetically pleasing and excessively sanitised food
and to have as many different types of disposable clothes and cosmetics
as the system can produce. The idea is that because the rich can consume
conspicuously so may we all instead of questioning whether even the rich should consume so conspicuously.
Governments want their cake and to eat
it. Their system depends on democratic mandates from huge
accumulations of atomised individuals with little time for analysis,
with confused values and under a very clear pressure to consume regardless. This is
just an observation not a value judgement. It may be that we, as the
'rats of the universe', just have to accept that the vast majority of us
can live quite happily accumulating things in a dung-heap of a planet whose smell
we can mask with appropriate technologies. Perhaps, instead of the cant,
if we just accepted this, we might relax a little and work to
ameliorate our decline as a species more consciously, rationally and effectively.
Environmentalists of any intelligence know that the reversion to clean water and land and indeed to sustainability in general requires either that we pauperise ourselves for the sake of the world (the dour Left) or that we pauperise the world for the sake of ourselves (the ruthless Right). What we have instead is a fraudulent middle ground in which costly environmentalist exhortation and the need to consume are squared through policy 'bodges' and rhetorical legerdemain. Any 'middle way' is, in fact, just batting the problem to future generations. It is easier to do this than do anything useful. Everyone moderate their behaviour but only as much as will not disturb political equilibrium.
Perhaps we just need to feel good about the fact
that we live as a species in exhausted slums, on the constant edge of
social collapse (for example, in our ability to supply cheap food from A
to B) and that our whole existence at the top of the pile is predicated on the exploitation of
cheap labour and other people's resources. We can feel good about this by
a) appearing to do something about it, b) 'caring' (which is a bit like
praying) and c) not noticing the sheer scale and implications of the
problem. Girling says none of this. His message is still
fundamentally conservative and a bit confused at times. The book
is nevertheless worth reading if you are interested in public policy yet the net
effect is typical of journalistic potboilers - impotent outrage. We are
being given the opportunity to huff and puff and to be excited by this
public policy horror story [Ben Elton is quoted on the cover: "Be
scared. Be very scared."] yet there is no framework for action, no
analysis of deep causes and consequences, no calculation of the costs of alternative options for action. We can feel the pain for a moment, take the pill and carry on as before.
This is the same
literary-analytical style of the critique of mid-nineteenth century
society made by Dickens rather than by Marx. In the end, there is reliance on changes in behaviour that are really expectations, beyond
reason, of changes in human nature. What is needed is acceptance rather
than denial of the primal urges within the human condition and a debate
not about abstracts or ideals but about what it is that humans really
want and need, what is in their own interest within their
territories and what that means in terms of political action, struggle and the potential for violence. Then we can make hard choices. Our faux-democracy is certainly part of the problem. Small elites
circulate by competing for public approval in aggregate. There is no
direct link between decisions about the community and the environment
made by elites and the position of people who actually live in an area and lack full information on the scale of environmental problems. Elites are constantly bodging it. The disconnect between
local government and the population in order to sustain, first, the
ideology of liberal democracy and, then, that of the market is typical. Add in environmentalist rhetoric and we have a paradoxical mess - climate change has replaced waste and actual sustainability as priorities and allowed liberal society to live in a fug of rhetorical self-righteousness led by activists where action is political and destructive rather than considered and effective.
In
the end, globalists would sell nationalists down the river - and vice
versa. Similarly, generations sell each other out - as do classes. In
the 2008 crisis, our weak government simultaneously cut VAT
(which is an attempt to increase consumption and so waste) and yet
pulled money out of households by making demands that they take
increasing costs of household waste collection and plastic bags. The
government whined about high oil prices yet had the largest petrol tax on
consumers in the West, allegedly for environmental reasons - and
proposed an expansion of its largest airport. Europeans fear the
transfer of industry to the East and yet piled environmental costs onto
that same industrial base. Now the wealth required to pay for the European Green Transition is diminished because security-obsessed paranoics demand that cheap Eurasian energy should be abandoned in favour of de-industrialisation and more expensive seaborne energy that drives an increase in American fossil fuel profits. It is a public policy mess. It all comes down to
the fact that weak governments hold together domestic coalitions of interest in a
global economy - they can't challenge markets (even now) and they can't
challenge electorates - and obsess about the security of the State and their own jobs rather than the care of the people and of future generations.
In theory, the credit crisis in 2008 should
have provided an opportunity for adjustment but the massive problems of
environmental degradation and waste accumulation are now embedded in the
consumer price mechanism. If the oil price (an input) goes up or down,
packaging costs may rise or fall and consumers can relate to that
electorally but the resultant packaging as it is disposed of has no
relation to household costs except 'backwards' through the tax cost of
dealing with it. The Government takes minimal responsibility for inputs
(leaving them to the 'market') but has a political interest in avoiding
responsibility for forcing consumers or producers to pay for the cost of detritus
that really should be part of the 'input' cost from the very beginning. And what applies to detritus applies to all the by-products of each and every consumer process including the costs to the public of infrastructures and services that allow businesses to free ride society and the costs of the effects of pollution and poisoning on individuals and health services.
Government should be taking the total cumulative cost of
the waste and degradation and adding it to the costs of producers and so
to the costs presented to the consumer. But you can see immediately the
problem with that - it cuts directly into the growth mentality of our
political class, implies inflation, raises awkward issues about costs that can never be
wholly covered (such as nuclear waste as a charge on future generations)
and tends to create a culture of tax-driven subsidy (which is simply taking
from the consumers in a decision to support producers or producers to support consumers through higher taxes) and even
protectionism to ensure a level paying field against countries that will
not adopt such an approach. Whichever way you play it, liberal
capitalist democracy and real sustainable economics are at war. The only
justification for the former (from a 'green' point of view) might be
that liberal capitalist innovation can resolve many symptoms of itself
through technological innovation when directly compared with sclerotic
state-based systems. Indeed, a whole school of environmentalism has developed around so-called market solution and solutions derived solely from technology.
Girling in 2005 was only laying out the fact that we were in crisis in this book. I would argue that the UK is in a peculiarly dangerous
position in relation to food security and its psychological well-being
because it has become almost obsessively committed to the treadmill of
globalisation. He also laid out some devastating criticisms of how
Government actually works - or rather doesn't. What this book does not
do, because it is the usual breathless alarum-sounding of modern British
journalism, is present any way of doing more than the system claims to
do already. This is a crisis that requires much more than exhortation
and changes in values. It demands the exercise of power. And power must
have purpose and it must have authority and authority can only come from an educated electorate and not a mass manipulated by activists. Choices need to be presented in cold hard terms (like making clear exactly how sausages are made) and then made with eyes wide open with a voice for future generations because a society actively wants to have a future.
Government certainly needs to decide who it acts for - the
economic well-being of the generation that happens to vote it in or the
long term sustainability of the land and the nation which it serves. The abstraction of the planet simply helps politicians evade what is necessary at the level of the community and the nation. For some
time, government has claimed to have chosen the path of sustainable economic growth but has failed. Conditions are reaching that point
where some sort of systemic breakdown may force the UK into an
appropriate and benign neo-nationalism that will see future generations
and the defence and sustainability of the land as more important than
just one political generation's determination to be 'free' to choose fast fashion, strange foods and houses on farmland. It may be that
this will require a radical reformation of the democratic model so that
local conditions and community become the responsibility, in a much more
effective way, of the people who live in a particular place. But this
is radical stuff ... we'll see.