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Leaders of the Green Party have reached a coalition deal with the neoliberal political duopoly of Fine Gail and Fianna Fáil to defy the 2019 Irish election result.
Although this has yet to be ratified by party members, right now their election slogan “Want Green – Vote Green’ rings cruelly hollow and many are aghast and surprised.
Why would environmental angels make a deal with the devil? Well sadly, mainstream environmentalism has more in common with the devil these days than you might think.
Some caveats. Amidst the environmental movement in Ireland many pivot admirably around green values and will oppose this deal. Others will muse that it will influence government policy in the ‘right’ direction: logical if not realistic.
What I am talking about is the mainstream position and face of contemporary environmentalism. The bright eyed twenty-something foot soldiers of Extinction Rebellion (who have rejected this deal) can’t be expected to remember that environmentalism used to be principally about morals.
The morality of environmentalism was once clear – too many were consuming too much, becoming despoiling and murderous, it argued for a moral elevation and population reductions to reverse ecological vandalism.
Materialism, consumerism and economic growth were to be replaced with a life of spiritual and noetic development. We would remember our place in the ecosphere and stop being dominators and exploiters.
What happened to this environmentalism? Well it’s still there: the internal groups of Extinction Rebellion come closest at times, albeit beset with new age fantasies and Che Guevara posturings. Sadly, they aren’t grounded or coherent enough to be moral educators.
In its journey from fringe to mainstream, the ‘green’ movement has abandoned its old moral literacy: indeed it is not even seen to be about morals anymore.
What Greens talk about now is technology. Our domination of the earth is to continue albeit in a nicer more ‘sustainable’ way: little is said about overpopulation.
Nasty grey growth is to be replaced with whizzy ‘green growth’: coal plants for nuclear; fossil fuels replaced with solar panels and wind turbines; petrol cars for electric cars.
The new ‘green’ deal basically takes the dirty material engines of growth based materialism and suggests we ‘hot swap’ them for less dirty alternatives.
When the film ‘Planet Of The Humans’ pointed out:
- Contemporary environmentalism’s moral disconnect
- The issue of unchecked population growth
- Its newfound technological focus (fetish?)
- The galloping corporatization of the movement (Earth Day sponsored by Toyota, Caterpillar and Citibank?)
- and the industrial supply chain behind many supposedly ‘green’ technologies
there were were howls of outrage from many environmentalists. The emperors of the contemporary green movement had been exposed. They had no truly moral clothes and somebody had dared to say so.
Which returns us to The Irish Green Party and environmentalists shoe-horning neoliberals into power. Not really such a surprise after all.
Mainstream Greens are as ostensibly committed to ever increasing material standards of living as their neoliberal counterparts and happily chirrup about ‘green growth’ and ‘green investment’ .
I understand why the slide from moral imperatives to techno fixes has seemed so appealing. Scarred by the abuses of religion and other shadow conceptions of morality, moral arguments have become incredibly unpopular: even taboo in many left wing social circles.
Faced with a seemingly insatiable desire for consumption on the one hand and a visceral hostility towards moral arguments on the other, greens have largely given up opposing the morality of the materialist zeitgeist: preferring instead to try to de-fang the beast via gadgets, gizmos and a culture war.
Sadly, by avoiding moral arguments, contemporary greens are tacitly (but powerfully) enabling the very cultural behemoths that need to be exposed and confronted.
If those who purport to be critics of capitalism just advocate tinkering with the machinery, how are people to envision a future that places moral imperatives over blind materialism?
I don’t enjoy making this argument because the implications are bleak. Large chunks of modern environmentalism have led us down a blind alley. Before we stomp around demanding ‘system change – not climate change’ we need to be much clearer about the change being sought – and if it really represents any change at all.
The sad truth about efforts to deal with climate vandalism, biodiversity destruction and all the rest is that we aren’t even at square one: we are at square minus one. The necessary moral arguments are not being made.
We are being sold a fantasy that our amoral behavior and materialist lusts can be solved with technology, but this is absurd and dangerous.
No-one has ever made a gizmo to fix our moral failures and no-one ever will.
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Thank you in solidarity with all our readers. John Lynch, Editor.
Yes,a good piece.Although improved technology will no doubt be part of the picture if we are to survive,we must recognise that reducing the population, curbing peoples appetites for consumer goods and a much more even distribution of such wealth as sensible environmental policies will allow us, are a must.