From Free Life, Issue 23, August 1995
ISSN: 0260 5112

The Green movement has been rightly perceived by many libertarians as a serious threat to both liberty and the market. It was getting into its stride just as socialism was collapsing in the 1980s, and it offered a second chance to those ubiquitous bossy-boots who want to tell other people what they can and can't do. But whereas socialism was at least nominally based on claims that it would improve the human condition by spreading "social justice", Greenery seemed to view human beings as a form of pox or vermin to be eliminated from the face of Nature. As Virginia Postrel said in her seminal article, "The Green Road to Serfdom", at least the socialists claimed to like people.1

Market advocates were initially hard-pressed to deal with Green propaganda. Used to defending capitalism as a source of wealth and rising living standards for people, it required a dramatic change of gear for them to enter a debate in which these things were seen as being, of themselves, bad. Of course the anti-Green backlash soon appeared, with authors such as Dixy Lee Ray and Michael Fumento exposing the junk-science which lay behind the Greens' extremist demands. These "revisionist" books appeared first in a trickle, but now in a flood, starting in the USA but now featuring the names of British authors in the lists.

The beginning of 1995 saw the appearance, within a few weeks of each other, of three titles from UK publishers which symbolised what the press dubbed the "contrarian" view: Wilfred Beckerman's Small is Stupid,2 Matt Ridley's Down to Earth3 and Richard D. North's Life on a Modern Planet. Not unnaturally, some newspapers reviewed the titles together, as if they represented a concerted right wing attack on the sacred cow of environmentalism.

Mr North is not entirely happy about being lumped together with the other "contrarians", partly, I think, because he regards Matt Ridley and some of the others as occupying a position somewhat to the right of his own. (Mr Ridley writes for The Sunday Telegraph, while Mr North was for many years the environmental correspondent of The Independent.) However, I found little in Life on a Modern Planet which the other "contrarians" would disagree with.

Mr North's position is eminently practical. He writes with a profound grasp of the issues, without losing the lay reader. He recognises that human beings can impact on the environment in ways which are damaging, but he believes that there are always sensible ways to resolve problems without resorting to the "humans are scum" mentality. He believes that human beings have a place in the environment, and that their well-being should be taken into account. He starts from the assumption that "what people want is very important" (p.278), and it says much about the nuttiness of the current Green debate that this statement would be regarded is some circles as controversial.

Mr North takes the reader through a number of issues such as re- cycling, the use of chemicals in agriculture, population growth, nuclear power and other Green shibboleths, pointing out that the pious Green assumptions are almost always wrong, and that their most beloved programmes may be counter-productive. For example, he points out that the energy saved by using two pounds of broken glass is about enough to take a car a mile and a quarter. So if the various depositors of that glass in the bottlebank drove more than a mile and a quarter between them, they used up more energy than they saved (p.167).

Mr North does not adopt a triumphalist, I-told-you-so attitude to imply that every attempt to improve the environment is a middle-class form of self abuse, he just wants to show that complex problems don't have off-the-peg solutions. One of the themes running through the book is Mr North's concern at the way in which public debate has been trivialised by the Greens into soundbites featuring goodies and baddies, with industrialists and politicians invariably wearing the black hats, leaving Greenpeace activists to appear in white hats (or perhaps the more apt analogy would be warpaint and feather headdresses) to save the earth. (His unrelenting attack on Greenpeace makes for joyous reading.) He regards the "victories" of the Green movement which have been won at the expense of rational debate as pyrrhic victories:

...some of their successes have been achieved at the expense of honesty of debate, and that matters because the cultural environment is as important as the physical environment. (p.8)

Mr North believes that we have to separate out the Greens from the greens. The former move around in an aura of apocalyptic predictions and messianic announcements, execrating the horrors of civilisation. These people tend to live in wild and natural spots like Cheltenham and Richmond-upon-Thames. The greens just want to have the best possible life for the largest number of people.

The future lies with boosting the pragmatic green wing of the movement and weaning ourselves from the charms of the purist Greens. (p.263)

He is contemptuous of those activists who want to stop the poor of the developing world from attaining a higher standard of living, on the basis that we know what is good for them:

The Third World is crying out for much which is at the heart of western civilisation. The poor of the world have, in particular, a greater need of western industrialists than of Western green dissent. (p.3)

Mr North is in favour of industry; he is not afraid of population growth, and he recognises the importance of the market:

...if a farmer can reduce costs, and sell food into markets cheaply, that will do the farmer and the economy and the customers far more good than rigging things so that the consumer pays, and farmer is paid, falsely high prices. (p.59)

Life on a Modern Planet is well written and thoroughly researched. Richard North has shown that you can be concerned about the environment without being a misanthropic, Earth- worshipping Green loony. This is no small achievement.

Robert Whelan

Notes

1. Virginia Postrel, "The Green Road to Serfdom", Reason, April 1990.

2. Wilfrid Beckerman, Small is Stupid: Blowing the Whistle on the Greens, Duckworth, London, 1995.

3. Matthew Ridley, Down to Earth: A Contrarian View of Environmental Problems, Institute of Economic Affairs, London, 1995.

Robert Whelan has written and spoken widely on population and environmental issues. His monograph Mounting Greenery was published by the Institute of Economic Affairs, and his book The Cross and the Rainforest, a study of the relationship between Christianity and the Green movement, will be published by the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty at the end of 1995. He is Assistant Director of the IEA's Health and Welfare Unit.