Green Hell

Finally for today, I bring you this interesting article form the London Times by Antonia Senior, Blunt warnings about greens under the bed. She makes an analogy between the Communists of old, and the Greens of today. It is not a perfect analogy, of course, but it does bring up a point that I have made several times: that if the Environmentalists can't convince you, then you will be forced. If you can't be nudged in their direction, then they will put a gun to your head.

Ideologies often credit man with either more nobility or more venality than he deserves. In reality he is a mundane creature. He wants a home for himself and those he loves, stocked with food. And he wants to have the right to control his own destiny, own his own stuff, and to acquire more if he can without interference or fear of imminent death. Such low-level acquisitive desires support high concepts: property rights and the rule of law, without which there would be no foundation for democracy.

My desire to live a free, mundane life is a fundamental cog in our messy, glorious, capitalist democracy. It is built on millions of such small entrenched positions. Red-filtered, my desires are despicable and bourgeois and must be beaten out of me with indoctrination or force. Green-filtered, my small desires are despicable acts of ecological vandalism. My house is a carbon factory. My desire to travel, to own stuff, to eat meat, to procreate, to heat my house, to shower for a really, really long time; all are evil.

She also points to the religious nature of both movements, again with an imperfect analogy, but apt none the less. In a world without world views, nuclear power would be seen as the greenest of the practical alternatives, assuming that anthropogenic global warming exists. That it is not displays the rigidity that has come to dominate the Green movement. It is not about finding a way out of what some claim to be a pickle, but about forcing people to live the way others want them to live.

The old two-cow analogy is a useful one. You have two cows. The communist steals both your cows, and may give you some milk, if you’re not bourgeois scum. The fascist lets you keep the cows but seizes the milk and sells it back to you. Today’s Green says you can keep the cows, but should choose to give them up as their methane-rich farts will unleash hell at some unspecified point in the future. You say, sod it, I’ll keep my cows thanks. Tomorrow’s green, the Bolshevik green, shoots the cows and makes you forage for nuts.

If the choice is between ecological meltdown, or a more immediate curtailment of our freedom, where do those of us who are neither red nor green, but a recalcitrant grey, turn? Back to those small desires, and a blinkered hope that the choice never becomes so stark. If it does, I’ll take my chances with Armageddon.