Michael Madden: thoughts on the current environmental crisis (3)

Michael Madden: painter, sculptor, restorer, environmental campaigner and Hastings resident, talks with HOT’s Chandra Masoliver about the planet, the environmental crisis, the big corporations and human nature.

CM:  Hello again Michael. This week I’d like to ask for your views on Nature and the current environmental crisis. Let’s start with Greta Thunberg’s recent speech to the UN Climate Change Conference in New York. What were your feelings? https://text.npr.org/s.php?sId=763452863

MM:  She was right to say: “How dare you?” to adult politicians who were expecting her to tell them what to do. As she said, “I should not be here. I should be back at school (in Sweden).” But I’m concerned that she’s being made into an exception – a child celebrity – when she’s the unwilling spokesperson of a generation. Politicians should be acting, but they don’t. So she did. Good for her.

Peaceful direct action has a good track record – Gandhi being a great example. But government isn’t really listening and is planning to further restrict protesting rights. I mean the ice caps are still melting and the Amazon is still burning but business continues as usual. I think protesters should be targeting huge business interests, because they are more powerful than governments.

CM: What else do you think can be done?

MM: In my opinion everyone should listen to the scientist who foresaw all of this, James Lovelock, and do as he advises. He is the 100 year-old Gandalf that can lead us away from the Crack of Doom.

If only this protest had happened 30 years ago – in 1989, after the publication of Lovelock’s  The Ages of Gaia. He said then that the biosphere was already in a “hot state” and that we had around fifteen years until the tipping point. He predicted everything that’s happened since, but the scientific establishment was slow to agree, because he didn’t present his theory as a peer-reviewed paper. Now other scientists see his predictions realised but few acknowledge him enough.

On TV, Nature is still presented as a fringe issue – a royal baby gets more press coverage. Lovelock said recently: “I don’t think we’re yet evolved to the point where we’re clever enough to handle as complex a situation as climate change,” and “The inertia of humans is so huge that you can’t really do anything meaningful.“…and…”One of the main obstructions to meaningful action is modern democracy”, “Even the best democracies agree that when a major war approaches, democracy must be put on hold for the time being. I have a feeling that climate change may be an issue as severe as a war. It may be necessary to put democracy on hold for a while.”

 CM: There is a lot of talk about carbon emission and its effects on global warming. What are your thoughts?

MM: Katherine Richardson, a scientist from Copenhagen University stated that: “We note that the Earth has never in its history had a quasi-stable state that is around 2C warmer than the preindustrial and ….there is substantial risk that the system, itself, will ‘want’ to continue warming because of all of these other processes – even if we stop emissions.”…. “This implies not only reducing emissions but much more.”

The UK produces only 1% of global carbon emissions and Sweden’s footprint is negligible. The real job is convincing China – responsible for approximately 27% of the world’s carbon emissions and the USA – around 15%. But the UK is £1.78,000,000,000,000 in debt, and tied into a global economic network that is still hell-bent on economic growth despite the evidence that it’s killing the planet. That growth is only for the richest 1%, so inequality and climate change are linked. Here is a link, https://www.visualcapitalist.com/all-the-worlds-carbon-emissions-in-one-chart/

 CM: As well as the need to curb the power of the oil and car corporations, are there other corporations that are a big part of the problem?

MM: The corporations who create and host the communication devices we use. And climate protesters are producing their own carbon footprint by using them.
sciencefocus.com/science/what-is-the-carbon-footprint-of-the-internet/

To quote: “Almost everything we do online increases our carbon footprint. As a perverse example, antivirus company MacAffee reports that the electricity needed just to transmit the trillions of spam e-mails sent every year is equivalent to powering two million homes in the United States and generates the same amount of greenhouse gas emissions as that produced by three million cars.

According to a recent Greenpeace report, Make IT Green: Cloud Computing and its Contribution to Climate Change, the electricity consumed by cloud computing globally will increase from 632 billion kilowatt hours in 2007 to 1,963 billion kWh by 2020 and the associated CO2 equivalent emissions would reach 1,034 megatonnes.”

Also, Google contributes to climate change denial – See here: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/oct/11/google-contributions-climate-change-deniers

I think the Internet is a Pandora’s Box. Many are bewitched by Facebook and Twitter, and think they represent progress and freedom. But there is a much darker side to the new technology, including legitimised misinformation, exploitative pornography, surveillance and political lies. The screens also act like narcissistic mirrors that nurture individualism rather than collectivism. I think the internet forums have aided the rise of the Alt-Right, and debased politics, which was bad enough already.

CM: What traits in human nature contribute to the problem?

MM: Until 8 years ago it was socially acceptable to see greed as good, AND also cheapness. Few protested, now everyone does – it’s the new norm – like tattoos. I never agreed with greed so I don’t like the idea that it’s all my generation’s fault (I’m 65), or the next generation after mine, because I don’t believe the kids of today would have acted differently under the same circumstances. There’s always been political denial, misinformation and a blind attitude to Nature. Many tried to do good things, but were always in a minority. Now a great movement is building and it’s great that kids are leading it. But they have to hit the real offenders (the 1%) where it hurts – in their pockets – people like the Danish retail magnate Anders Holch Povisen, who owns more British land than anyone; the Dukes of Buccleuch and Westminster, who also own very large tracts; Robert Mercer, billionaire and head of Cambridge Analytica; Jeff Bezos, head of Amazon – worth £110 billion; Jacob Rees Mogg, Leader of the House of Commons – worth over £150 million; Lord Rothermere, billionaire and owner of the Daily Mail; Steve Bannon, head of Breibart News – worth around around £40 million; and, of course, others.

I’ve been angry about the way people treat Nature since I was Greta Thunberg’s age. It was one reason why I never had kids. However, I’ve always tried to argue for change. I joined Friends of the Earth aged 14 and have been a member of it, Greenpeace, and sometimes both, for most years since. Environmentalism is the only cause that is not human-centric.

CM: Are there any books that have influenced you, besides Lovelock’s?

MM: Yes. The key book for me was Moby Dick – one of the greatest environmental books ever written. I was waiting for a major operation in hospital when I read it, and saw Captain Ahab as a metaphor for humanity in its megalomaniac quest to dominate Nature, which it doesn’t understand. I always felt humans were drawn to power (as Nietzsche said and Orwell showed in ‘Animal Farm’) over each other and over Nature. Before that I read some Native American predictions. They saw the future in dreams and said that we would make a desert of the Earth and choke on our own waste. ‘The Elder Brothers’ by Alan Ereira is a great book. Also, H.G.Wells predicted many problems that we face now in The Country of the Blind and The Time Machine, both are brilliant. The best book about technology and alienation is Guy Debord’s 1967 The Society of the Spectacle. And another essential book was Stephane Hessell’s Indignez-Vous (published as Time for Outrage in the UK).

CM: Back in the nineties Robert Ornstein wrote in The Evolution of Consciousness that time has run out on the clock of biological evolution, that through our technology we’ve transformed the world beyond our ability to adapt to it in the old ways. He said we have to bring our underused capacity for consciousness and self-awareness into play to save ourselves and the planet. We have to develop a universal group consciousness. Do you think that is possible?  Or do you think we have an inbuilt flaw?

MM: Our worst qualities are tribalism and cruelty to others – our best quality is the ability to love and care for others. When inequality leads to jealousy our worst aspects rise, which can lead to fascism etc. Another key flaw is that we’ve developed the ability to separate ideal from reality. We are a potentially aggressive primate species, but feel as if we are above Nature, God-like, and that we control Nature. In fact we’re just part of Nature.

I believe that the way forward involves keeping commerce and the state separate. At the moment, commercial interests dominate the state – even governments bow to them. After years of reacting to injustice, I no longer believe it’s good enough to react without alternative proposals. Today we need an educated population, informed by scientific knowledge, a reduction in human inequality and more care and respect for other species.

But getting the 7.7 billion people on Planet Earth today to agree on anything is almost impossible. People like to fire off and get angry, but few are prepared to do the work necessary to change things. I now feel I was probably wrong to think the Save Ecclesbourne Glen (SEG) campaign could be won by more democracy. One thing we also found out during the SEG campaign was that statutory bodies tasked with protecting nature were toothless, or unwilling to use their teeth because they had been cut back to the bone by government. Most of the campaigns I’ve been involved in have been lost, and for similar reasons – businessmen, politicians and even local councilors toe the line and have taken part in a massive pretence of democracy. So I believe that we need a different democratic system – a more inclusive, less oppositional model. Anyone who thinks that voting once every five years and having a referendum every forty or so is ‘democracy’ is too easily satisfied.

Our democratic representatives have lied to us. Many years ago I asked a neighbour who worked in the Lewisham council’s refuse department what happened to all our recycling. And he said “It all goes into landfill.” In fact I think it might be even worse. I worry that container vessel captains are instructed to dump it at sea by their paymasters. Otherwise, where did all the plastic in the ocean come from? It’s even been found in the Mariana Trench, the deepest part of the ocean. It’s such an immoral attitude, and yet councils and governments have covered this up and claimed for years that we are all doing our bit for the environment.

Our species is killing the planet because we are so uneducated about Nature, and see it as a free resource – and therefore worthless. We dump our waste everywhere, yet love to watch programmes about pristine wilderness. Until a few years ago, the few people who spoke out about the environment were often dismissed as alarmist, negative (including Lovelock) or arrogant. But they can’t say that about Greta, because she’s a kid – brilliant!

CM: How do you envisage the future?

MM:  Lovelock says it will be lawless, violent and chaotic if we don’t act now. I don’t think Brexit will help the UK either. European environmental laws are fairly good in comparison with what we’ll get after Brexit. I’d sooner trust Europe than Trump. Maybe we could produce more local foods, but that may be impossible amidst climate breakdown.

 

 

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