Paul Watson and reactionary environmentalism

Conservative politics has entrenched deeply in the environmental movement bringing on disturbing programs

by Reed Eurchuk <reurchuk@republic-news.org>

Vancouver environmentalist Paul Watson was identified this week as a supporter of a group seeking to gain control of the Sierra Club in order to bring an anti-immigration perspective to the group. Well-known in Vancouver as a co-founder of Greenpeace and CEO of the Sea Shepherd Society, Watson is also a board member of the Sierra Club. The faction, which calls itself Sierrans for US Population Stabilization, seeks immigration controls to slow the growth of that country's population.

Watson's position on population questions is blunt. In a recent interview published in the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives paper, The CCPA Monitor, Watson said that, "I regard the diminishment of ecological carrying capacity and the extinction of plants and animals as the most important problems facing the future evolution on Earth. Both problems are the result of out-of-control population growth."

The idea of "carrying capacity," common among environmentalists, takes on an ominous spin in the hands of the conservatives. For example, writing in the May 1994 Bulletin of the Carrying Capacity Network, Garrett Hardin, a star in the right-wing firmament, wrote that, "Many Americans can be shamed into sending food to the starving. But whatever else may be a poor country's problem, a closer look shows that it already has too many people for its environment. In most cases, soil is being eroded and forests destroyed. Tragically, gifts of food that save lives increase fertility-which increases the mistreatment of the environment. . . . Each country must assume the responsibility to adjust its population to the carrying capacity of its own land and abilities."

The idea is ridiculous-there are many wealthy countries with people starving, but the simplistic argument seduces many. Rather than place the question of environmental degradation in the context of larger social and structural questions, the formula ascribes environmental problems to personal culpability-one's choice in having a child. Politically, this brand of environmentalism ignores or minimizes questions of poverty, the organization of production and distribution, forms of housing and transportation, and instead focuses on population. Rhetorically, this perspective brings forward a crude opposition-humans versus nature-as the root of environmental problems. Most population researchers agree that population growth quickly slows with a level of relative affluence.

The historical and philosophical basis for the narrow view of the relationship of humans to nature can be quickly sketched. According to economic historian Karl Polyani, "Traditionally, land and labour are not separated; labour forms part of life, land remains part of nature, life and nature form an articulate whole. Land is thus tied up with the organizations of kinship, neighbourhood, craft and creed-with tribe and temple, village, gild and church. One big market, on the other hand, is an arrangement of economic life which includes markets for factors of production."

So with the rise of the modern market system, nature becomes one of these "factors of production," what Polanyi calls a "fictitious commodity," fictitious because it is treated as commodity, but not produced by humans, as it occurs naturally. The modern separation of humans and nature occurs together with the rise of privatized large-scale production and the dominance of the market in the 18 th Century.

Not coincidentally, the romantic reaction to the modern market system originated as that system became dominant. Raymond Williams, in Keywords, finds the use of the word "nature" as including "selective senses of goodness and innocence," "the countryside," the "unspoiled places" in the 18 th Century . In England, the birthplace of the capitalist market system, the "commons," once a space shared by all members of a local community for pasturage, crop rotation, and scavenging, were enclosed and privatized to make way for thousands of sheep, whose fur was crucial to the growing textile industries. The rise of fast growing slum quarters in cities, foul smelling, pestilent, disease ridden places where workers lived out short lives while working long hours, swelled with the dispossessed tenant farmers. At this point, nature, which had previously been a place people worked and lived, became a place apart from the "real world" of production, a place of innocence, a place for contemplation.

The point is that these positions-nature as a factor of production, and nature as pristine, unspoiled wilderness-which at first glance seem so opposed, actually arose together. They are opposite sides of the same coin. This opposition continues to set the parameters of mainstream environmental discourse to this day.

Humans and nature live in a reciprocal relationship, each conditioning the other. Hungarian philosopher George Lukacs wrote that, "Nature is a societal category. . . . Whatever is held to be natural at any given stage of development, however this nature is related to man and whatever form his involvement with it takes . . . are all socially condition ed ." The only solutions to our environmental problems are social solutions. Alex Cockburn promotes a "political ecology," "to redefine the environmental agenda in terms that address more fundamental questions of resource distribution and access, political rights and processes; [and] consider larger philosophical issues regarding the nature of property . . . the nature of nature . . . and technical and development alternatives."

The alternative to that is to look forward hopefully to the ecospasm. Watson adopts this rhetoric of extinction in the interview: "We are the Titanic sinking slowly into the darkness of extinction due to our own stupidity. . . . And as the ship sinks ever deeper we toss out other species to make more room in the life boats for even more human passengers." While Watson claims to be working to avoid such a prospect, the subtext and tone betray a wistful yearning for the apocalypse.

****