The real environmental crisis
by Noel Rooney
[ bookreviews ]
This book opens, and continues, on a bizarre thesis: it is affluence which makes us environmentally conscious - attaining a level of relative affluence apparently triggers a green epiphany. Thus the affluent world is not really consuming a vastly disproportionate amount of the world's energy, mostly on leisure and luxuries, and emitting a concomitantly disproportionate amount of hazardous waste; no, we are in fact warming ourselves into awareness.
So if we are not the main factor in the environmental crisis (I take this as a tacit admission on Hollander's that there is actually a crisis), who is? The poor, of course. It's not their fault, poor things. It's just that, being poor, they are inherently un-green. All we have to do (we, the environmentally conscious, aka the rich) is to trickle down some of our wealth, and consciousness will surely follow, just like Christianity after the food aid; and luckily for us, globalisation is already on the case, spreading green affluence in its characteristically benign and egalitarian way.
The central logical flaw in this eccentric slant on utilitarian aspirations - that the amount of energy and resources required to inculcate environmental awareness in a majority of the world's population may just be a tad costly in environmental terms, to the point of gleefully undermining the desired outcome - ought to have struck the author at about the same time as the palm of his hand made contact with his forehead.
But there's more. Hollander, in a sweeping act of almost comical casuistry, equates contemporary poverty (that would be economic deprivation through exploitation then, Jack?) with traditional patterns of living. Thus he can suggest that most of humanity has always lived on the brink of starvation. The distance between this remarkable assertion and the anthropological and archaeological evidence is happily bridged by Hollander's globalising liberal optimism.
The elements missing from his argument (economic exploitation causing pressure on resources; displacement causing hopelessly uneven demographic shifts; remote polluters affecting local environments; traditional life chances fatally undermined by land and resource grabs - by us; even, dare I suggest, the less benign effects of globalisation?) are immaterial to Mr Hollander - these uncomfortable and pessimistic facts sit rather awkwardly in the framework of a liberal fantasy.
The example he uses to demonstrate his theory of wilful poverty, the Dinka, were driven by proxy wars (our wars, that is) from Sudan to Ethiopia and back again; relocated regularly by foreign NGOs with little or no local knowledge; and constantly harassed by proxy warriors (our boys again) carrying modern Western weapons.
This does not exactly add up to a traditional nomadic existence, viable or otherwise, and would make a poor benchmark for assessing the viability of nomadry in general; but the facts are not especially material to Hollander. Rather than engage with the anomalies, he blithely ignores them in favour of his utopian fluff.
Another example: African hunter-gathering is untenable, not because colonists have stolen land and resources, and forced huge numbers of people into cash-crop farming on poor, marginal land; no, it's because Africa is hot and sticky, and there are a lot of flies. In retrospect, it's a wonder our ancestors survived to produce us (the environmentally aware, that is); constantly hungry, leading unviable un-green existences, bereft of liberal notions of freedom and democracy to shelter under.
Hollander's attitude to overpopulation is similarly breezy. He takes the John L Simon approach to population growth: more babies equals more geniuses; and the more geniuses we have, the quicker we can solve all our problems. More geniuses! (and more sociopaths, cretins, bigots and gulls, Jack; where do they fit in the brave new crowded world?)
In one gloriously weak moment (when my lips had tired of moving involuntarily at each new tranche of horseshit) I wondered if Jack M Hollander is actually a fifth columnist, who has slyly constructed a grand Borgesian fiction; but it seems that he is sincere, and he really believes in a liberal La-la land (where facts never bother the righteous, and irony has been banned from the garden). This is the fantasy doctrine which animates the liberal consensus, and Hollander simply drops it onto the environmental debate, blanketing uncomfortable evidence (doom-mongering propaganda, according to Jack, who seems throughout the book to equate hard fact with subversion and pessimism) with distant aspirational niceness.
A final irony. The front cover photograph shows a few of the inhabitants of a Manila shanty town trawling through a huge landfill site looking for things to reclaim (isn't that recycling, Jack? And by poor people?). And that great malodorous mountain of muck where these desperate individuals are trying to find some sort of living? We made that, Jack; it's our rubbish ruining their world.
