As Lord Melchett joins a string of other ex-greens and crosses the floor to work with those who were once his enemies, Tony Wardle says…
I protest!
I once paid a fiver to hear Jonathan Porritt speak. How to save the world was the theme and the hall was packed with mostly greying, middle-class people listening politely. His thrust was simple – don’t blame industry, it’s doing its best. Oh, and keep on recycling your bottles!
What disturbed me most was to see a group of eager people – not natural revolutionaries but obviously keen to learn – sent from the hall with no action plan, no burning fire in their bellies and no understanding of the root causes of global degradation. It was not the exercise in empowerment I had hoped for but one of complacency – a drawing of stings, a filleting, a disenfranchising. Mr Porritt was the environmental knight on a white charger, we were merely the ostlers. We could scrub down the horses but the battle charge was all his.
In February, that tearer-up of GM maize and director of Greenpeace, Lord Melchett, resigned and joined Burson Marsteller, the largest public relations agency in the world. If you’re a ruthless dictator with an image problem or an environmental polluter determined to divert the spotlight, your first port of call is likely to be Burson Marsteller.
While most of us shook our heads in disbelief at this development, George Monbiot used his Guardian column to attack it. He maintained that greens who defect to the corporate world jeopardise the survival of environmentalism.
“Over the past 20 years, the majority of Britain’s most prominent
greens have been hired by companies whose practice they once contested. Jonathan
Porritt, David Bellamy, Sara Parkin, Tom Burke, Des Wilson and scores of
others are taking money from some of the world’s most destructive corporations,
while boosting the companies’ green credentials.”
Years ago, Des Wilson was head of Friends of the Earth, until he gave it all up, joined British Airports Authority and said: “I’ve done my bit for the environment.” He then went silent, until rising from the dead to attack George.
These people (protesters) have a better chance of promoting change, he said, “… by working with business and industry instead of engaging in the kind of invariably useless confrontational activity enjoyed by the punk end of the movement.”
He accused Monbiot of “…encouraging the petty abuse, stereotyping of business and unproductive, often juvenile demonstrating that are the real reason environmental victories have been too few and far between.”
He then laid claim to a string of personal successes, achieved by working inside the air transport industry – energy saving, recycling, the most efficient feeder railway in the country. However, what Des failed to mention was his bosses’ mission to encourage new runway construction wherever they can, helping to dramatically increase air transport (until September 11, that is), fuel consumption and high-level pollution of the most damaging kind He also forgot to say that the only thing which has delayed and obstructed these runways has been the very protests he now scorns.
It was like listening to a quack doctor proclaim a cure for acne while the patient continues to be gobbled up with cancer. But Wilson’s spiteful, self-serving invective is far more profound and damaging than even this. What leaps out at you is his utter contempt for ordinary people.
How do you – a mere clerk, driver, computer programmer or secretary – influence
a destructive corporation? Just try telling them at your job interview that
you intend to work from the inside to make them clean up their act. Having
been shown the door, what can you now do? Absolutely nothing, according to
Wilson. Confrontation is useless and protest is juvenile. Only he, who enters
the company at high level on a high salary, can save the world. Only he can
sit astride the white charger. You are redundant.
Of course, it was your standing in the rain protesting, your ‘juvenile posturing’ and your ‘petty abuse’ that built the environmental movement, provided the resources to employ Wilson and turned him into a highly marketable commodity. Having done that you’ve served your purpose. That is contempt of Olympian proportions!
So why do corporations employ these people? A few years ago Des ‘The Mouth’ Wilson was a regular on our TV screens as he fought to save the environment. Then he disappeared. And where is the Australian rainforest tree to which David Bellamy chained himself and captured world headlines? Long since chopped down, along with millions of others and Bellamy too, as a force, has been felled. Sarah Parkin headed the Green party when it offered hope and captured 15 per cent of the vote in European elections. She has also zipped her lip along with Jonathan Porritt as they dance a duet with industry.
What industry has bought from these people is silence and the right to display them like trophies in a cabinet, evidence of green credentials. It strengthens industry’s claim that it can ‘self regulate’ and helps it to avoid the only regulation that really works – legal regulation. Meanwhile, it can get on with its real business of making profits and screwing up the planet.
By becoming part of industry, these ex-greens become apologists for it, supporting the policy of constant growth which is tearing our home apart at the seams. It is what defines capitalism and so rampant has it become that the UN maintains we would require two additional Earth-like planets to plunder in order to continue our present, suicidal industrial policies.
Des Wilson says, straightfaced: “Yes, the environmental record of industry was until recently completely unacceptable…” – the implication being that Des has turned things around, saved the world single handedly and made industry’s record acceptable. How recent do you want, Des? Let’s start with the last US elections – boy, did that ever flush out the true intentions of global industrialists.
They threw everything they had behind George W., not because of his razor-like intellect but because he promised to give them what they wanted in return for their financial backing. And what was that?
An end to the Kyoto agreement and the right to carry on pouring out CO2, an end to nuclear missile control, a return to nuclear testing and a massive build up of armaments, a so-called missile defence system that will destabilise the world, a slashing of the environmental protection budget, placing energy companies demands above all else, cuts in research for renewable energy, the go ahead for oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, an end to rainforest conservation, a cut in the endangered species budget, promotion of oil drilling off the Florida coast and effectively placing environmental protection in the hands of Monsanto.
So that’s acceptable is it, Des? And what have you are your other
green champions done about one of the single biggest causes of global collapse – our
diet. With more than 45 billion animals slaughtered last year, it constitutes
a level of suffering and profligacy that overwhelms the senses.
Because meat production is so insanely inefficient, there is not enough land in the world to feed this number of mouths without resort to intensive farming of the worst kind. It is why the planet is awash with artificial fertilisers and pesticides and why rain forests are felled and whole eco systems grubbed out. It is why deserts are inexorably spreading, land is eroding and deteriorating in quality. It plays a major part in global warming, ozone depletion and acid rain. This addiction to animal protein is why all our oceans are on the brink of environmental collapse.
“Recent algal blooms in the sea and prospects of climate change, demonstrates that nature might be totally unpredictable if knocked out of balance. We are not able to destroy the earth but we might change the climate in an unpredictable direction – at worst endangering our survival as a species.” And this from a book written by meat industry vets. (The European Meat Industry in the 1990s) while the silence from Wilson and his great greens is deafening.
Are we supposed to leave this fight to those who won’t even acknowledge its existence? Had Viva! tried to work from within, we would have achieved none of our victories. Was Nelson Mandela supposed only to negotiate with the racists who controlled his country? Were the suffragettes wasting their time? Were those who fought against slavery misguided in the way they achieved victory? Gandhi – was he, too, wrong in the methods he chose? And Martin Luther King and those brave people who confronted racism in the US – was that, too, pointless? As for the millions who took to the streets of eastern Europe and brought Stalinism crashing to the ground – what of them, Des, what of them?
It is protest that has shaped the world and it is increasingly the only weapon we have at our disposal, as parliamentary democracy displays its contempt for those who elect it. Who knew anything about the World Bank and the IMF until 200,000 peasants took to the streets of Mexico and India and sparked a global protest movement which now has the bankers ducking and diving like criminals on the run?
Continue protesting my friends – and remember that the more successful you are, the louder will be the voices claiming you are wasting your time. Protest until your voices are hoarse, your arms weary and your feet aching because you are part of one of the most important movements the world has ever seen.
We are fighting for a society where compassion, care and concern weigh heavier than profit and self interest. The great and successful campaigns which went before have shown the way and we must learn from them because we are right – morally, emotionally and scientifically – and we should look upon those who wish to silence us as enemies. No matter how they justify their positions, they have betrayed us.
I think I’ll ask Porritt for my fiver back!