Would you describe yourself as an "environmentalist"? I would, mainly to annoy greenies, but also because its true. If your definition of an environmentalist is someone who loves immersing himself in the natural world, makes a study of its ways and cares deeply about its future, I am at least as much of one as English broadcaster and naturalist David Attenborough. But I can see why many fellow nature lovers might balk at the term. That would explain the recent Gallup poll - it was taken in the US but I suspect it applies to Britain too - showing how dramatically this label has plunged in popularity. In 1991, the majority of Americans self-identified as environmentalists - 78 percent of them. Now, it's just 42 percent: less than half.
Why has the term so fallen out of favour? Well there's perhaps a clue in the fact that the decline has been far more precipitous among Republicans (down to 27 percent) than among Democrats (down to 56 percent). In other words, where 25 years ago the environment was considered everyone's domain, it has since been hijacked by the Left.
If you believe the greenies, the blame for this lies with an intransigent right so imprisoned by ideology that it stubbornly denies "the science". Actually, though, I did say it has more to do with the militant left using environmentalism as a cloak for its war on liberty, and small government.
Note the tactics. Like the Viet Minh or the Taliban, the environmental movement has become hugely skilled in the art of asymmetric warfare. The number of true believers is much smaller than you did think - but they have managed in recent years to punch massively above their weight by infiltrating all the key positions.
challenge the "consensus" - whether you are a scientist like Willie Soon or even a cuddly TV presenter like David Bellamy or Jhonny Ball - and these people will stop at nothing to try to destroy your career. This is the tactic that the Marxist urban revolutionary Saul Alinsky advised in his manifesto Rules for Radicals.
Which goes some way towards explaining, I think, why in private people tend to be more vocally sceptical about stuff like global warming or the pointlessness of recycling or carbon taxes, etc. than they are in public. No one wants to be caught speaking out of turn by the green Stasi, for fear of the consequences for their reputation or their job prospects.
Look at what happened to Matt Ridley when he applied for the chairmanship of the Natural History Museum. A distinguished, Oxford-educated scientist and a brilliant communicator, Ridley would have been perfect for the job. But Ridley's mild climate scepticism ruled him out.
When you write about this sort of thing, you run the risk of being tarred by the green lobby as a paranoid conspiracy theorist. Again, this is very much part of the environmentalist modus operandi. Activists like Bob Ward of the Grantham Institute and Richard Black of the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit are paid handsomely to pour ridicule on "deniers", make noisy complaints to the press regulator Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO) and concoct letters like the one recently sent to the editor of the Times warning that by giving voice to sceptics he was turning his paper into a "laughing stock".
The letter was signed by no fewer than 13 members of the House of Lords, several of them scientists, who had held offices ranging from Astronomer Royal and president of the Royal Society to chairman of the Financial Services Authority. Any casual observer might naturally assume that such pillars of the establishment must have a point.
It's only if you are familiar with the territory that you realise how often the same names - Lords May, Rees, Stern and Deben; Sir Crispin Tickell; Sir Paul Nurse, et al - recur with regularity. Probably in their fields they were once rather good. But since then prestige has gone to their heads and they have turned into professional political activists.
This is precisely the strategy that one of the progenitors of cultural Marxism, Antonio Gramsci, was advocating when he talked about the "long march through the institutions". In order to dominate the political argument, he realised, you don't necessarily need to be in government. You just need to make sure you have nobbled all the influential posts in academe, the media, the arts and big business.
Not all these figures are on the Left. Nor are they all necessarily political. Some are in it for the money, some are in it because all their mates are; some because they have taken the environmentalists at their word.
But regardless of their motivation, the result is always the same; bigger government, higher taxes, less freedom. Ordinary people can smell a rat. They just know something's rotten in the state of environmentalism; they don't want to be tainted by it. -- Based on an article by James Delingpole published in The Times of India dated 09th May, 2016, By arrangement with the Spectator --
No comments:
Post a Comment