Is enviromentalism really a leftist trait?

[RadioRaheem84]

I for one do not really care for a lot of what enviromentalists in our camp rant about when it comes to global warming. Yes, I think it's a serious message and US corporations should be held responsible for inflicting major damage on the enviroment, but I do not think these concerns trump economic concerns and the growing gap between rich and poor.

Most of my liberal friends, though, cannot stop talking about this stuff and do more with this cause then anything else. It sickens me sometimes that they do not even care about the economic issues facing our world today. I guess I am just not 100% convinced in the total destruction of the planet. I am not denying global warming, I am just not convinced of the dire catastrophic consequences of unsustainability. I think the planet can survive, it is WE that have more to worry.

Anyways, the point is that yes, I love animals, plants, whales, the planet, but the obsessive nature over these elements by some of our comrades scares me when they forget about the people's struggle to put food on the table. It's like economic concerns do not even cross their minds as much as helping out some endangered species of insect in the swamplands of America.

Any thought?

[politics student]

Only way to cut down pollution and wasted resources is with a planned economy. So I would say its a left position.

[GPDP]

It is very much in the left's interest to address the environment. But yes, I know what you are talking about. My cousin is a typical liberal, bordering on lifestylism. He volunteers to do trash pick-ups and plant trees. He has strong opinions on global warming.

However, when I tried to explain radical politics to him, including anarchism, he basically dismissed it all as unworkable, but didn't really argue against me. He just didn't seem to care. And of course, when I tried to explain that things like oil depletion could lead to major wars and famines, and potentially kill billions, he was indifferent. He basically said "sorry, but I care more about the planet's well-being than humanity's", as if he held contempt for the human race. It pissed me off.

[Joe Hill's Ghost]

Your argument falls into the "Growth forever" trap. As much as we may like to talk about the need for "Economic growth," we should realize that any short term gains won by ignoring detrimental effects to the environment, will be erased once the long term damage caused by the pollution comes to fruition.

For example, China is growing at a breakneck pace, and polluting like a soot filled chimney. That pollution already shaves off about 10 percent of China's yearly growth, though the impending costs are enormous. In just a few decades, China wont have any fresh water. Beijing is already sinking into the ground becuase of the depleted water table. 16 of the top 20 most polluted cities are Chinese. The air quality is so bad that it makes LA look clean. The whole country is poised for an ecological meltdown, and no one seems to notice.

[giev]

Yes, environmentalism really is a leftist trait. It's part of taking responsibility for yourself as an individual and a society. It's part of the burden of being on the right side.

[Decolonize The Left]

I for one do not really care for a lot of what enviromentalists in our camp rant about when it comes to global warming. Yes, I think it's a serious message and US corporations should be held responsible for inflicting major damage on the enviroment, but I do not think these concerns trump economic concerns and the growing gap between rich and poor.

Environmentalism ought not to simply focus on corporations and easy targets. The destruction of our natural resources, biological ecosystems, native plants, etc... is on all of our backs for we all take part in the socio-economic system which causes such rampant destruction.

Furthermore, there is little difference between the major ecological concerns and major economic concerns. They are propagated by the same system, sustained by the same attitudes, and dealt with in the same incompetent fashion by elected officials.


Most of my liberal friends, though, cannot stop talking about this stuff and do more with this cause then anything else. It sickens me sometimes that they do not even care about the economic issues facing our world today. I guess I am just not 100% convinced in the total destruction of the planet. I am not denying global warming, I am just not convinced of the dire catastrophic consequences of unsustainability. I think the planet can survive, it is WE that have more to worry.

Obviously any environmentalist who puts the 'planet' above 'humanity' is either naive, uninformed, or insane. The 'planet' is a hunk of rock, it will continue to be so for billions of years until the sun expands and engulfs it in fire.

If your friends are referring to the 'nature world' - that is, the plants and animals that are not human beings - then they have still missed the point. Humans are not going to disappear, and therefore we live in a closed system with all other beings/things. Hence we live in a reciprocal relationship with these beings/things, and to prioritize one over the other is to ignore the interdependency of all.


Anyways, the point is that yes, I love animals, plants, whales, the planet, but the obsessive nature over these elements by some of our comrades scares me when they forget about the people's struggle to put food on the table. It's like economic concerns do not even cross their minds as much as helping out some endangered species of insect in the swamplands of America.

Any thought?

Well, that insect may be very important - you, and I, can't know for sure.

While I sympathize with your position, and have already elaborated on several arguments in your favor, I would like to offer a small thought for you to consider.

We, as a species, are experiencing a major overpopulation problem. The planet, as in the natural world, cannot sustain our growth (in terms of numbers). Hence while considering the impoverished and suffering in the world, one must also temper this sympathy with measures to reduce the population. This is of vital importance to our survival as a species. Should we not reduce our growth and population, the world will reduce it for us (all species encounter limits when the grow beyond their carrying capacity).

- August

[communard resolution]

Is enviromentalism really a leftist trait?

Not at all. I'd say it's beyond left and right. There's even green Nazis. In fact, there always have been:

http://www.spunk.org/texts/places/germany/sp001630/peter.html

[Vendetta]

I've met plenty of/read about Republican environmentalists/conservationists/type folk.

[giev]

To be a leftist, you must be an environmentalist. This goes hand in hand with understanding the finite nature of material reality. It is possible to be environmentalist and not be leftist, it just isn't logically consistent.

[Jaccob]

Left or right, it's in everyone's interest, whether you're a communist or a fascist, what's the point in taking any type of political stance if you're not willing to fight for the world which you want to change? So yes, it's a leftist trait, but it's also (or should also be) a factor of the right aswell.

[shorelinetrance]

Not really communism/socialism is very anthropocentric.

BUILD FACTORIES EVERYWHERE EXPAND TECHNOLOGY AUTOMATE EVERYTHING.

I'm not a primitivist, but i am biocentric and humans are equally worthwhile as the natural environment because at the end of the day we are just a product of nature, so we should be careful about ruining the world for purely human gains.

[RadioRaheem84]

For the record, I am not denouncing environmentalism or arguing that we should'nt care for the planet, but I am not in favor of putting these concerns over the needs of the people/workers. Some of the more radical environmentalists think that having economic concerns is spurious because of the dire need to save the planet. Sometimes I see the liberal bougie concern about being green isn't even connected to our struggle because a lot of them believe in market solutions or charitible communities as an answer to the problem. Many liberal free market enthusiasts are very "green" and are sometimes considered leftists.

[Plagueround]

I was going to post something regarding Freeman Dyson's green technology/grey technology theories, but when I go to search for it all I can find is stuff about the Green Lantern fighting Batman, so I'll have to settle for my own thoughts on the subject.

I don't think environmentalism is strictly a leftist position, but it seems to associated most with the left because it's the popular position amongst many people likely to vote for what passes for the left these days (Democrats and the like). Browsing these boards I've seen several people who would probably get labeled right wing by the mainstream for their environmental beliefs.

I personally think that the belief of the left must remain closely aligned with sustainability and pushing toward "green" technologies. If the idea is to provide the most comfortable and beneficial society for people to live in, we aren't going to accomplish that by ignoring environmental issues. If we destroy our water, air, and land (the previous example about China is a good one) to the point where it is no longer livable, what good will creating a socialist or communist society do?
The problem with trying to accomplish environmentalism in this day and age, however, is it does often conflict with the interests of the proletariat and the poor. Because our society is so driven by money, and because those that don't have much often need to hold on to what little they have to get by, enacting strict measures to try and fix the mess we've made (China's attempt to clean the air for the Olympics comes to mind...I'm not a blind angry China hater, I swear) can leave people jobless, poor, and homeless. Much of the resentment toward environmentalists I've seen in this country is an example of this; people without a lot of money expressing bitterness at bourgeois lifestylists ridiculing them because they literally cannot afford "green" products, leading to apathy about environmental issues. In a society where this would not be an issue, I suspect it would be much easier to convince people to be concerned about the impact they have on their environment.

Oh hey, I found Dyson's thoughts. Now you can all see how poorly I expressed my ideas. :D

"All through our history, we have been changing the world with our technology. Our technology has been of two kinds, green and grey. Green technology is seeds and plants, gardens and vineyards and orchards, domesticated horses and cows and pigs, milk and cheese, leather and wool. Grey technology is bronze and steel, spears and guns, coal and oil and electricity, automobiles and airplanes and rockets, telephones and computers. Civilization began with green technology, with agriculture and animal-breeding, ten thousand years ago. Then, beginning about three thousand years ago, grey technology became dominant, with mining and metallurgy and machinery. For the last five hundred years, grey technology has been racing ahead and has given birth to the modern world of cities and factories and supermarkets. The dominance of grey technology is now coming to an end.

Our grey technology of machines and computers will not disappear, but green technology will be moving ahead even faster. Green technology can be cleaner, more flexible and less wasteful, than our existing chemical industries. A great variety of manufactured objects could be grown instead of made. Green technology could supply human needs with far less damage to the natural environment. And green technology could be a great equalizer, bringing wealth to the tropical areas of the world which have most of the sunshine, most of the human population, and most of the poverty.

I am saying that green technology could do all these good things, bringing wealth to the tropics, bringing economic opportunity to the villages, narrowing the gap between rich and poor. I am not saying that green technology will do all these good things. "Could" is not the same as "will". To make these good things happen, we need not only the new technology but the political and economic conditions that will give people all over the world a chance to use it. To make these things happen, we need a powerful push from ethics. We need a consensus of public opinion around the world that the existing gross inequalities in the distribution of wealth are intolerable. In reaching such a consensus, religions must play an essential role. Neither technology alone nor religion alone is powerful enough to bring social justice to human societies, but technology and religion working together might do the job.*"

*It should be noted that Dyson's belief is loosely Christian, but when he refers to religion he is including human psychology and ethics.

[Lost In Translation]

I for one do not really care for a lot of what enviromentalists in our camp rant about when it comes to global warming. Yes, I think it's a serious message and US corporations should be held responsible for inflicting major damage on the enviroment, but I do not think these concerns trump economic concerns and the growing gap between rich and poor.
Environmentalists are sometimes quite hypocritical. They get famous, write a book or two, and then protest against the Government's newest capitalist policy, and that's it. They aren't living examples of going green.


Most of my liberal friends, though, cannot stop talking about this stuff and do more with this cause then anything else. It sickens me sometimes that they do not even care about the economic issues facing our world today. I guess I am just not 100% convinced in the total destruction of the planet. I am not denying global warming, I am just not convinced of the dire catastrophic consequences of unsustainability. I think the planet can survive, it is WE that have more to worry.
At this point in time, I'm going to have to agree that human beings are in poorer shape than the planet is. However, that doesn't excuse us from lying on our backs on the issue of Global Warming either.


Anyways, the point is that yes, I love animals, plants, whales, the planet, but the obsessive nature over these elements by some of our comrades scares me when they forget about the people's struggle to put food on the table. It's like economic concerns do not even cross their minds as much as helping out some endangered species of insect in the swamplands of America.

Any thought?

Again, I can't see why communists, following an ideology mostly involving economics, would go out of line like that and become obsessive environmentalists. Environmentalism could be one of the left's platforms, but it certainly isn't synonymous to the left.

[Bilan]

It can be. It has a history of being both anti-leftist (Nazis) and revolutionary.

[JimmyJazz]

Any thought?

Capitalism is definitely unsustainable for ecological reasons. It simply can't go on and continue expanding indefinitely or it will use up the earth. This may even be the thing that brings capitalism down, since class struggle has proven disappointing and fallen short of establishing socialism in so many times and places.

some reading:
http://www.amazon.com/Socialism-and-ecology/lm/R3F3D3XUPOYFLJ/ref=cm_rna_own_lm

[jake williams]

Fuckbeans. I clicked something accidentally and deleted my long angry post. The jist of it was that there are very obvious and very severe ecological and environmental crises and there are many of them, and they are indescribably dangerous because if any of them are taken to their extreme - or even perhaps if a few of them are taken far enough - we'll basically lose everything. A number of things could be way worse for the working class and the majority of the earth's population than the current state they're in. Like billions of people could die and quickly. Capitalism obviously causes or exacerbates these problems, and prevents or impedes their relatively easy solution, but even capitalism is beginning to recognize that it needs to preserve something. So there is a left position on the environment - that capitalism is part of the problem - but there is also a sanity/basic decency position, that we need to save our natural environment from the many anthropogenic threats it faces.

And partly I say "our" because we need to preserve a natural environment that's useful for us. I don't imagine that bacteria living off of uranium radiation would be much affected by really any level of global warming, but billions of people could die if we had even a "little" bit.

[Vanguard1917]

I for one do not really care for a lot of what enviromentalists in our camp rant about when it comes to global warming. Yes, I think it's a serious message and US corporations should be held responsible for inflicting major damage on the enviroment, but I do not think these concerns trump economic concerns and the growing gap between rich and poor.

Most of my liberal friends, though, cannot stop talking about this stuff and do more with this cause then anything else. It sickens me sometimes that they do not even care about the economic issues facing our world today. I guess I am just not 100% convinced in the total destruction of the planet. I am not denying global warming, I am just not convinced of the dire catastrophic consequences of unsustainability. I think the planet can survive, it is WE that have more to worry.

Anyways, the point is that yes, I love animals, plants, whales, the planet, but the obsessive nature over these elements by some of our comrades scares me when they forget about the people's struggle to put food on the table. It's like economic concerns do not even cross their minds as much as helping out some endangered species of insect in the swamplands of America.

Any thought?

As others in the thread have hinted, environmentalist ideas have historically been more prevalent on the right than on the left. Romanticising nature and rural life while opposing urbanisation and being hostile to industrial development - such sentiments only entered leftwing politics, in any significant way, fairly recently, in the last couple of decades, with the defeat of the working class movement and the consequent demise of progressive politics.

In its contemporary form, environmentalism can be most accurately understood as a capitalist ideology - the current ideology of the ruling class. In his book Green Capitalism, Marxist writer James Heartfield makes an interesting argument that modern environmentalism is the politics of a ruling class in retreat from production. Indeed, this could explain why it has been adopted most enthusiastically by governments in the West, particularly in Western Europe, as the centre of economic production has gradually shifted eastwards.

Some paragraphs from Green Capitalism about the origins of modern environmentalism:




The growth of environmentalism is not a case of radicals influencing big business. It is a case of big business influencing radicals.

Greens do not know their own history. The modern environmental movement was launched by big business (only turning 'anti-capitalist' later - and that was just a pose to wring a better deal from the suits).

Just to get this straight, we are not talking here about the old conservation movement. That has been about for centuries. Romantic Conservatives like John Ruskin, Thomas Carlyle, Martin Heidegger and Lady Eva Balfour all made reactionary protests against the modern world.

The modern environmental movement began about thirty-five years ago. The elite industrialists of the Club of Rome, led by Fiat's Aurelio Peccei, and British government scientist Alexander King commisioned the report The Limits to Growth. It was drawn up by MIT computer scientists Jay Forrester and Donella and Dennis Meadows who predicted economic collapse by resource depletion by 2100. In Britain, millionaire Edward Goldsmith launched the Ecologist in 1970, while the government launched a Save It campaign to cut energy use (and undermine the bargaining power of the National Union of Miners).

The background to this elite environmentalism was a fierce campaign by business to restore profits by cutting wages. By 'greenwashing' this campaign against working-class living standards as saving the environment, the business elite were trying to disguise their own pecuniary motives. Trade Union leaders must support 'cuts in consumption' wrote Margaret Laws Smith for the Conservation Society. The Worldwatch Institute's Lester Brown demanded 'labour union leaders exercise restraint'.

The environmentalists were not just exercised about rising working class living standards. They resented the very existence of the masses. Population control was one of their big campaigns. Richard Nixon's US National State Security Memorandum 200 called for 'contructive actions to lower fertility'.

Cutting working class living standards is still at the core of environmentalism today. 'I hope that the recession being forcast by some economists materialises', writes George Monbiot in 2007. 'I recognise that recession causes hardship', he explains, and 'that it would cause some people to lose their jobs and homes'.

[communard resolution]

I'm starting a campaign "UNITED AGAINST NATURE". Who's joining?

[apathy maybe]

Any "environmentalist" who claims to be a capitalist, fascist, feudalist or basically anything other then socialist is deluded and hasn't thought enough about the issues.

Basically, environmentalism cannot work with a large state or an economic system that promotes infinite growth (and assumes infinite resources).

Of course, just because environmentalism can only work with a left-wing system doesn't make all left-wingers environmentalists. Some left-wingers are stupid, ignorant or just plain strange.

Even if you don't support environmentalism from a position of caring about the animals and plants (the biosphere), you should support environmentalism from the position of caring about humans. After all, we would have a much poorer world if we didn't have dolphins, chimpanzees and forests.