Michael Meacher

Labour Party | Oldham West and Royton

WHITHER THE ENVIRONMENTAL MOVEMENT? A PERSONAL PERSPECTIVE

We should not get dewy-eyed about the achievements of environmental activism.    It remains but one player in a crowded market, and a rather feeble and marginalised one at that, easily pushed aside when the going gets tough.   Its leverage is weak – vision rather than muscle – and it is tolerated rather than embraced.   But its time is definitely coming.

     When I was first elected to Parliament in 1970, the first environmental shoots were beginning to appear with the Stockholm Conference of 1972 on sustainability and the Club of Rome warnings about the limits to world industrialisation.   But the decade was dominated by the international turbulence unleashed by the quadrupling of the oil price, with the ensuing worldwide inflation paving the way for the Reagan-Thatcher monetarist kickback in the 1980s.   The long war of attrition with the trade unions, the launching of untrammelled market liberalisation, and the rekindling of the ‘special relationship’ with the US then took precedence over all other concerns. 

      But the gradual recovery of stability and prosperity in the 1980s allowed the first glimmers of concern over environmental externalities – first the recognition of the damage done to Scandinavian lakes by UK acid rain and then the Thatcher speech on the dangers posed by climate change.   I myself was active throughout this decade in several  environmental campaigns and in my book Socialism with a Human Face, published in 1982, devoted a chapter to the ecological crisis exploring the natural limits to growth, raw material shortages, and the inadequate Western political response to resource scarcity.   But economic recession 1990-3 rapidly brought the shutters down again.   The first political requirement for environmental progress – a favourable economic context – had been temporarily lost.  

     The long period of steady growth from 1993, however, opened up mew possibilities.   Concerns about climate change, pollution, GM, and the environment as an index of the quality of life were clearly growing and their salience on the political agenda was rising.   In my book Diffusing Power, published in 1992, I again in another chapter on the environment emphasised the finite limits to material growth, the risk of global climactic destabilisation, and the pollution brought by so-called prosperity.   The political response however was at best desultory.   Neither Thatcher nor Major was noticeably interested in the environment and the general feeling was shallow rather than committed.

     The watershed of 1997 offered hope of a new environmental era.   As Minister for the Environment for the next 6 years I would certainly want to claim that advances, even breakthroughs, were made on several fronts and that the environment moved strongly up the political agenda – as the dismay of some of my colleagues would testify!   Nevertheless I would also be the first to insist that the real political breakthrough was not made.   The major industrial vested interests – nuclear, chemicals, food and drink, air travel, cars, oil and gas, agriculture – used their close links with No.10 ruthlessly to protect their own position.   Blair, like his predecessors, does not care deeply about the environment and will always give priority to Big Business, though he is more adept at appropriating the cachet that rhetoric about the environment brings.  
     In fact, as I gradually discovered to my chagrin, New Labour’s view of the environment is not so much lukewarm as, at best, sceptical or, at worst, hostile.   For the ideologues of the Blair Project, the environment is seen as anti-business when they want to be pro-business, regulatory when they support voluntarism, and anti-aspirational when they want wealth-creation and enrichment to be the dominant drivers.   Regulation and taxing are out (except as a last resort), while coaxing and incentives are the order of the day.    What this means of course is that nothing will be done which significantly offends business – rather like saying the police must be persuasive and not do anything the burglars or muggers would seriously mind.   That doesn’t give a lot of leeway for environmental progress, as indeed we’ve all found out.

       It’s not of course formally presented like this.   The spin is that sustainable development is the governing ideology, and social justice, economic efficiency and environmental protection are equally important and can all be optimised together.   The same canard pervades the EU Lisbon Agenda.   The reality however in an international capitalist economy is that economic performance and competitiveness overwhelmingly take precedence.   Social and environmental justice are merely the greenwash to ward off charges of deepening social inequality and worsening environmental and atmospheric contamination.   In practice, whatever the rhetoric, the second requirement for environmental progress – that ecological sustainability must not be allowed to be suffocated or swamped by the economic vested interests – has not been met.

     This is not to say that progress has not been made at all.   Of course it has.   But it is far too little and perhaps too late.   Climate change cannot seriously be countered if the Government (or Prime Minister) dithers about extending the Kyoto Protocol (to try vainly to win over Bush), fails meaningfully to promote renewables (because it is still over-wedded to the fossil fuel industries), and builds new airports across the country and drops the fuel duty escalator on cars (because it panders to short-term consumerism over long-term environmental concerns).   No Government can claim it is prioritising the environment when it resiles on its future commitment to renewables and energy conservation in favour of nuclear, when it obsessively pushes GM without testing the health and environmental consequences, and when it abruptly abandons long-prepared plans to require leading industrial companies to monitor and report on their environmental and social impacts (to win a de-regulatory cheer at a CBI conference).  

     Need it inevitably be like this?   I think not.   A new energy and environmental world order is coming, its outlines are already clearly visible – it is just sad that it is going to be forced on us rather than eagerly embraced by us as a visionary and inspiring goal for the whole of mankind.   It is clear beyond any doubt that the current global regime cannot be sustained.   The exponential increase in demand on the Earth’s resources from the turbo-capitalism of unprecedented worldwide industrialisation is already leaving an ecological footprint that will require two Earths, not just one, by 2050.   A global population that took homo sapiens a million years to reach one billion has almost quadrupled within the last century to nearly 7 billion.   And climate change, most dangerous of all, could make large parts of the planet uninhabitable within this century.

     By 2050 oil, the foundation of modern civilisation – the driver of industry, mechanised agriculture, transport, and military capability – will largely have run out.   Half or more of the world will be water-stressed.   Fish stocks, a staple diet of a fifth of the world, already near-extinct in many regions, may have collapsed further.   The impacts of climate change in destroying croplands, exacerbating water scarcity, and unleashing environmental refugees on an unprecedented scale – let alone generating runaway feedback effects from Amazon dieback, Antarctic and Greenland ice-melt, and deep-ocean methane hydrate escape – will change the face of our world irretrievably.

     The role of the environmental movement is to prepare the blueprint for a different and genuinely sustainable world order and to mobilise the forces required to bring it into being.   It needs not only what we know – carbon rationing, renewable energy, conservation of energy, contraction and convergence for greenhouse gas emissions worldwide, demand management for an increasing range of resources, and stabilisation of populations, but other imperatives too only now coming dimly into view.   But above all, as the props of the old order wither and collapse, the configuration of present-day power structures will inexorably break down too.   The role of the political wing of the environmental movement is to harness the forces that will fill that vacuum.   It is a task we have hardly begun, yet it is the antidote to the blind, obsessive, self-destructive materialism that the Earth so desperately needs and so many in the world increasingly yearn for.