Race, Culture and Nation

The Local World

by
Geoffrey Dobbs

Part Five

Exploitation and Conservation

There is a real danger that many sensible people will reject the whole Green Movement as a hoax, because of the massive public misuse of Green propaganda and conservationist and environmental concepts by the very monetary and political agencies which are the main causes of environmental damage on a world scale. The constant mental bashing of the public with World Doom, Save the Planet, fear-propaganda, and the ruthless exploitation of Green language and images in advertising is producing its reaction.

There is indeed a monstrous hoax being practised on us, but most Greens are its victims rather than its perpetrators, although those who have become its willing agents have their responsibility. The hoax, in fact, preceded the Green Movement by at least twenty years, and was bound up with the engineering of the first World Threat (the Nuclear Holocaust) which is being replaced by the current World Eco-disaster now that the first is weakening. But most Greens are too young to remember this.

In my book "On Planning the Earth" (1951), of which this is a sequel, I gave a contemporary account of the first large-scale centralisation of power over people and the whole landscape in which they lived (the Tennessee Valley) by the financial and political use of environmentalist propaganda.

The sequence of events which has been followed ever since in one form or another, was as follows: first create a public scandal by monetary means. Then raise a great public outcry, blaming its victims as irresponsible and in need of 'taking over.' Then take over, amid tremendous propaganda about 'democracy,' conservation, the environment, etc. and perhaps carry out a few useful practices, but on a petty scale compared to the expenditure on the real purposes for which the whole project is undertaken. When this finally emerges and causes a public outcry, the whole business can start again.

The Tennessee Valley Authority (T.V.A.) was at once the proto-type, an example and a warning of the working out of this power policy, which is now fairly openly being applied to the whole world. It was an important part of the American New Deal, which was the name applied to what, elsewhere was called socialism, a name which aroused hostile feelings in the U.S.A. and therefore had to be avoided. **At the time of writing, with the breakdown of the socialist and communist style of control and surface ideologies in Eastern Europe, and a turning towards more open monetary control under the name of democracy, the example of the NEW DEAL, and the T.V.A. in particular, is especially worth studying.

** This part was written in July 1990. It was in 1991 that the Soviet System imploded.

First Bash Them, then Blame Them, then Take Over
First of all came the Great Depression of the 1930's, a purely monetary event brought about by the banks, which gave rise, among other things, to the Dust Bowl of the American Middle West, mass unemployment and poverty throughout the world and the rise of Hitler in Germany leading to World War Two. In rural areas, including Tennessee, it resulted in extreme poverty and bankruptcy with depopulation and dereliction of the land.

This gave the excuse for the setting up of a centralised authority on what were described as new grounds of natural conservation, with control over the entire drainage area of the Tennessee River and its tributaries, thus over-riding State rights in no less than seven States. Conservation, flood control, and above all decentralisation, were the slogans under which the idea was 'sold' to Congress.

Vast sums of money were poured into the area, hundreds of thousands of jobs were created, colossal works of earth-moving were performed, world records in concreting, engineering and mechanisation were achieved, and so forth, and behold! unemployment was virtually abolished and prosperity descended upon the Valley. An enormous literature of propaganda and promotion was distributed, amounting to some 3,500 titles, of which the book entitled TVA - Democracy on the March, by David E. Lilienthal, the Chairman of the Authority, must be judged to have been the most widely read and influential.

What was achieved in the name of flood control was the permanent flooding of the fertile soil in all the main valleys, the drowning of villages, of houses, churches, graveyards, and the moving of the valley people (56,000 of them) to create the Great Lakes of the South, with much advertised fishing, boating, and industrial navigation. What was achieved in the name of conservation was the destruction of the valley farms, with some tree-planting, terracing, contour ploughing etc. of the valley slopes. But above all the farming population was 'educated' with a high-pressure programme on how to manage their farms in a modern way, with demonstration farms to show what big crops they could get with quick-acting, soluble super-phosphates (provided free) compared to the old, slow-acting mineral phosphates.

Since a flood-control dam needs an empty reservoir and a power-dam needs a full one, their purposes are incompatible; which meant building their 21 dams to a double height-the largest job of engineering and construction ever carried out in American history up to that time. It also involved employing tens of thousands of men, clearing more than 175,000 acres of land, relocating more than 1200 miles of roadway and 140 miles of railway, excavating some 30 million cubic yards of earth and rock and pouring and placing 113 million cubic yards of concrete and rock fill-more, it was boasted, than twelve times the bulk of the seven great pyramids of Egypt.

People Management
More important still was the way in which the whole population was managed, their opinions and policies manipulated with the aid of almost unlimited money, into line with the policy of the TVA. Individuals, groups, institutions of all sorts found that it paid to co-operate enthusiastically with the Authority, and the example spread to other areas from which much of the labour was drawn. This was what Lilienthal called 'grassroots democracy.' Its essence was decentralised administration of a centrally imposed policy : and it is this which is the aim of those who seek for a World Government to 'save the planet.' From the start the whole operation was set up as an example to be copied, as it has been, in modified ways, first in the USA and later throughout the world.

What then was the final product of this great organisation of 'Democracy on the March' to make the Tennessee River 'work for the people' 'by providing the second biggest source of electrical power in the U.S.A. and probably in the world? And why should a rural community need so much power? It was in fact completed barely in time for the Hitler war, and provided at one time about half the aluminium for the manufacture of American bombers, and, finally, from a vast industrial complex in the secret and heavily guarded valley of Oak Ridge, over which aircraft were forbidden to fly, the full flower of its achievement: one of the first two Atom Bombs, which inaugurated the era of Nuclear Psycho-Doom for a whole generation.

It should be mentioned also that Mr. David Lilienthal, the Chairman of the TVA and author of TVA-Democracy on the March, moved on to be Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission and stayed on to be one of the four members of the Committee which recommended the manufacture of the vastly more powerful H-Bomb. So much, then, for mass-produced, passionate and persuasive verbal 'conservationism' with big money behind it.

If the people of the Tennesse Valley had been allowed a small fraction of the vast sums expended by the TVA along with some genuinely informed advice from the Soil Conservation Service where wanted, all the real improvements necessary to restore and conserve the soil could have been carried out without any of the monstrous interference with land, 'water and people which was imposed upon them by central direction. The valley lands could have been retained, and the floods restrained, mainly by afforestation and conservation of the higher terrains; where necessary by a few flood-control dams.

There was not then, and there is not now, any secret about the measures necessary to restore the land and conserve the soil; but all over the world they are beyond the powers of the debt-enslaved farmer. Tree-planting, contour ploughing, terracing, legumes, careful choice of crops to suit the soil and real needs rather than urgent cash-return, sub-soiling, and so on: they are all perfectly practicable. The world's supply of rock phosphate is strictly limited, but this plant nutrient is present in most subsoils and needs only to be circulated. The TVA produced soluble and concentrated super-phosphate using electric power at central factories and then 'sold' it to the farmers to give them sudden lush growth ; but the so-called world-wide phosphate problem can be solved only locally, in every place, by adopting the correct methods which are too slow to 'pay' even the interest, let alone the capital, of borrowed money.

Scale is What Matters
There is nothing wrong with hydro-electric power on a scale which does not maul the landscape and its water-flow. It is an indirect use of solar energy, in itself pollution-free, but in so far as it involves interference with the soil and the course of the rainfall in and through it, it becomes entirely a matter of scale. Dams, also, are not for ever. They silt up. Large, centralised schemes are unavoidably destructive ; small, local, decentralised ones can be beneficial, as with everything else concerned with man's relationship with nature. Small is not only beautiful: it works! If it doesn't the 'harm it does is also small and can be put right.

For an earlier generation of socialists it was possible to be persuaded of the idea that the perverted policies of the TVA, because they were in 'Capitalist' America, were an inescapable accompaniment of what they called 'Capitalism' ; the private ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange, and the operation of 'free' enterprise within such a system. They believed that these would disappear under 'Socialism': collective ownership as represented by control by the State. But this never was very tenable, and now the economic near-collapse of the greatest of socialist systems in the USSR has demolished that belief.

First of all, the TVA itself was a system of control by a Super-state Agency, socialist in all but name and claimed as such by the socialists in the USA. There is no evidence that free enterprise in farming-free, that is, from control by debt-agencies, is unable to treat the land properly and maintain its fertility. On the contrary, the evidence is all the other way. And now that almost complete central control of information by State Agencies in some Socialist States has broken down, it is manifest that the misuse of the land and the soil in them has been even grosser than in the so-called 'Capitalist' States. The USSR has, in fact, behaved like a Super-TVA, in which mass-propaganda, and the carrot of money and career-control, has been supplemented by the whip of secret police and the gulags.

Democracy-on the March
Socialists, on attaining power, are even more prone than other people to promote large-scale, centrally devised schemes which are out of touch with the local reality. The idiotic ground-nut scheme for East Africa attempted by a British Labour Government is a notorious example.

In the first rush of revolutionary enthusiasm in the USSR enormous collective State-farms of the size of a British County (e.g. one named G 'ant) were imposed upon the farming communities. They were of course a complete failure, and collective farming itself has been a disaster which has transformed the 'granary of Europe,' as Russia used to be called, into a net importer of grain to feed its people, and that at a miserable level despite the control of the greatest area of potentially fertile soil in the world.

Here again, as in the TVA, it was all done under slogans of 'Democracy on the March.' The land was first distributed to the peasants, then followed the liquidation of all the not quite so poor farmers (kulaks) the consequent famine and the 'democratic' herding of the rural population into the collective farms. Even so it was eventually found to be desperately necessary to allow the collective workers to cultivate and sell any surplus from their own little domestic plots.

Although heaven may be thanked that the monster scheme for diverting the great 'Northern-flowing rivers to the South has not so far materialised, there has been enough large-scale central Planning in the USSR to create environmental disasters, especially in the Central Asian republics. The pollution of the Caspian Sea is a case in point, and the allocation of the region around the Aral Sea to permanent cotton growing under massive irrigation from the regional rivers is converting the shrinking Aral Sea into a swampy saline bog.

'Socialism,' then, is not the answer. But neither is 'Capitalism.' Nor is the excessive consumption of the people themselves in the 'richer' countries under 'Capitalism' the prime cause of environmental disaster, since that can be worst where consumption is lowest. In every case it is remote, central control which is responsible for the major damage, and it is evident that there is one, world-wide influence, tending always towards remote control, which over-rides all others whether Socialist or Capitalist, and is so all-prevailing that people take it for granted. As indicated clearly in the last Chapter, this can only be the universal Debt-money System. Events in Eastern Europe which show a confused merging of the two ideologies, all under the general dominance of Money, surely confirm this, though it has long been obvious.

Sane People Under Insane Money Pressure
Most people are fairly sane, unless wholly dominated by monetary pressures and worries. That is, they are conservationists at heart ; they would rather have a fertile soil than a 'barren or a poisoned one: they would rather eat and drink wholesome than contaminated food and water, and breathe clean rather than polluted air ; just as they would rather live in peace than war or revolution.

The ordinary city-dwellers' love for a garden or an allotment, for parks and woods and for 'escape' into the fresh-air and beauty of the countryside, is evidence enough of this. The ordinary, taken for granted, conservation work carried out without fuss by ordinary people has had little publicity, both before and after the label 'Green' began to be applied to it. All such work, which is the true work of the genuine 'Greens' as, indeed, it is a major part of the true work of mankind, is essentially local, as the land is local, the people who live on it are local, pollution and destruction are local.

Just as local pollution on an ever greater and more widespread scale can ultimately achieve damaging global effects, so also can local restoration and conservation, spreading here, there and everywhere, ultimately achieve global effects. There is no other way. The fantasy of starting at the Top with some wholesale Saving of the Planet by World Agencies employing super-clever scientists is just childish. Remote centralised interference can cause enormous, even global, damage ; it can never restore it. Growth is not of that nature. It is localised, not wholesale. You cannot 'grow' a tree, or a forest, in the time it takes to cut it down! The most that central governments and their agencies can do is to allow local restoration and right treatment of the land to give a reasonable living, as they should, and to discourage centralised agencies from imposing destructive practices, usually by financial means.

The Real Work, Decentralised
It is obviously impossible to give an account of all the decentralised work which is going on, especially in the more derelict areas of the great cities, for this would require some centralised record, which could then lead on to centralised interference. To start with, every town or suburban garden where the trees, shrubs and herbs are allowed to grow, every derelict patch or old bomb-crater where the soil, and the people, allow growth to take place, is making a contribution to the earth's healing.

There is now, of course, an enormous literature generated by the Green Movement, varying from the fringes of professional ecology, concepts and fashions in land-planning and landscape architecture, to fantasy, politics, economies, philosophy and religion ; and buried among it accounts by groups and sub-groups and individuals of their practical efforts to rescue and heal the patch of land over there or down the end of the road. It is a rich and living literature, often confused by abstract verbiage and the pounding we all get from the media, but behind it is this core of practical efforts.

Their variety is as great as that of the habitats: anything from simply protecting a self-sown patch, planting it with native species, digging up concrete and asphalt, making pools, mini-gardens, mini-parks, allotments, school nature reserves and nature trails, planting city heaths and woodlands, to making actual farms with livestock and arable fields on derelict land in a city. Most of this was done with volunteer labour and funds, which drew people together and restored hope and health and neighbourly spirit. Some of the most successful efforts were made in the places where city riots had occurred, notably in Toxteth (Livepool) and Bristol.

One great virtue of these small-scale, volunteer projects is that they are very cheap since they aim to conform with the natural, self-maintaining ecosystem of plants and animals, in contrast to the need to chop, clear, mow, spray, plough up, and perhaps apply herbicides in order to establish and maintain an artificial community, whether it is an agricultural or horticultural crop, or tidy civic park. After a time, however, in many places such local enthusiasm begins to change the attitude of local government and draw from public funds. The Manpower Services Commission might supply some of the labour.

More extensive schemes might be undertaken with an ecological approach. Certain sites, also, might be beyond reclamation without careful research which would attract the ecologists at the local College or University. The Upper Swansea Valley was such a site, and many dumps of raw, acid colliery waste or quarry tip-heaps. At Liverpool University Professor Tony Bradshaw and his colleagues have developed techniques for vegetating such sites, and it is probable that, given time and study, there will be few if any sites which it will be impossible to transform into a more natural, green habitat.

Such growth, from the Bottom Up,
has begun to transform some of our largest and most industrialised cities and in the process both the citizens who started with the local patch, and the city councillors and officials, are learning a lot about plants and animals and ecology and geology.
Birmingham and the West Midlands, for instance, are now penetrated by threads of greenery, wild life corridors and waterways. Manchester, also, has reclaimed some large areas (e.g. at Moses Gate, Farnworth) and the general official attitude to urban open spaces such as municipal parks, cemeteries, commons, etc. is undergoing an 'ecological' transformation.

This is an entirely different thing from the centralised imposition of some 'ecological' theory from the Top Down by Councils or Planning committees.

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The Local World

Part Six

by
Geoffrey Dobbs

Shades of Green

The word 'Green,' used as in 'The Green Movement,' has many meanings, 'but I propose to deal with only three of them.

First, there is the real, decentralized activity in co-operation with the environment of which I mentioned a few examples at 'the end of the last Chapter. It is carried out by innumerable people, singly, in families, in groups, mostly small but growing into larger ones. It includes everyone who lovingly and carefully cultivates a garden, or a plot or a farm or an estate along what, before the vogue for artificial fertilisers and pesticides, used to be taken for granted as normal, sensible lines.

There was no need to make a fuss about it, to call it organic, conservationist, or 'Green,' until the gross shortcomings of chemical farming under financial pressure for quantity for its cash return, reached scandalous proportions. Even to attempt to summarise such a basic activity of mankind would be impossible, and if it were not, undesirable, as it would involve reducing it to a thing seen from a single, central viewpoint.

Separate, but parallel, and ultimately converging upon the environmental movement, was the great growth of natural history societies and field clubs starting in the later part of the nineteenth century, and the detailed observations of the relationships between organisms and their environment, notably those of Darwin on earthworms and orchids, of de Bary and Schwendener on lichens, of Frank on tree mycorrhizas, and the beginnings of soil microbiology and of ecology as distinct studies about 'the turn of the century.

Haeckel, indeed, used the word 'oecology' as early as 1873, for what was called 'the oeconomy of plants and animals.' In 1879 de Bary coined the word symbiosis. But here I have moved on to the second meaning of the current word 'Green' as applied to a movement of thought and language, rather than practical activity, though of course the two are inseparable.

The direct precursor of the 'Green' movement was the movement for organic farming and gardening, notably associated with The Soil Association, formed in 1945, with its regular journals and other publications, but also its well-known research farms near Haughley in East Suffolk, England. One of these farms had been owned and farmed continuously since 1920 by Lady Eve Balfour whose book The Living Soil (1944) summarised much of the relevant practical and ecological work up to that time.

Those Practical Pioneers
All these pioneers of the organic movement were practical people. Their books and other writings, were based upon long experience and initiative, not just theory and a desire to promote their own views. It was Sir Albert Howard's An Agricultural Testament (1940) which opened the door to what is now called the holistic view of the soil, plant, animal and man: the health of all these beings in one connected chain.
With his Indore process he also initiated the widespread use of compost rather than either chemical fertilizers or farmyard manure. Howard started as a perfectly 'orthodox' official economic botanist concerned mainly with crop diseases, but found that the problems were insoluble along the usual narrow lines, yet when the situation was viewed as a whole, and when the traditional methods used by the local peasants which had retained the fertility of the soil were followed, the pests and diseases disappeared. Most of his work was done in India.

India, indeed, seems to have been a great training school for the pioneers of what is now referred to as human ecology. Sir Robert McCarrison, formerly Director of Research on Nutrition there, found the great variety of peoples, of health and physique, and of agriculture and diets, immensely instructive, and found that parallel results were obtained with experimental rats fed on the same foods as those eaten by the humans. Fertile, well-farmed land, he found, produced nourishing foods and good physique; poor, run-down land produced poor foods and poor physique. Dr. G. T. Wrench, who, like McCarrison, had been an officer of the Indian Medical Service, in his book The Wheel of Health described the Hunza people whose exceptional health and vitality he attributed to their careful return of all wastes to the soil and the wholesome diet obtained from their cultivation of it.

At home, Dr. L. J. Picton drafted a Medical Testament based upon the experience of 600 family doctors in Cheshire, which was published in 1939, and declared that "our daily work brings us repeatedly to the same point: that illness results from a lifetime of wrong nutrition." At Peckham in South London, Dr. Scott Williamson and his wife Dr. Innes Pearse set up the unique Pioneer Peckham Health Centre, a club for families in which they were able to study, not the ill-health, but the health of normal people, and its relationship not only to diet but to ways of living. They defined 'health' as a process of mutual synthesis of organism and environment.

It is a sad thing that the National Health Service took little notice of the Cheshire doctors' Testament, and gave no support to the Peckham Centre, which had to be closed down. The parallel growth of the movement for Nature Cure over the same period has had a powerful but unacknowledged influence on public thinking about health and diet. A booklet by the late Ralph L. Duck, The Nature Cure of our Social Disorder, provides a link between the two fields of individual and social health.

Stifled by War and Finance
The application of this philosophy to the cultivation of the soil in farming and gardening in Britain was so well established between the Wars that it looked unstoppable, but, as always, it was finance which crippled its spread, and especially the Second War with its urgent demand for food produced quickly and in quantity, irrespective of quality. Even so, composting in gardens and nurseries became widespread, and a number of farmers were driven by poor crops and diseased stock to abandon 'orthodox' for more natural methods to build up humus in the soil, which they developed along their own lines to fit their particular environment. The two whose names are best remembered because they wrote books about it were Friend Sykes and Newman Turner. Both obtained their original guidance from Howard.

In Wales Sir George Stapledon established the ley system of temporary, deep-rooting pasture which is then ploughed in to provide the fertility for other crops until it is sown again. At Aberystwyth he also bred the grasses and clovers which were the main basis of this grassland revolution, providing us with much of the fertility that fed us during the War. He was, however, much more than our greatest grassland specialist. His last book, Human Ecology was published posthumously in 1964.

The importance for the nutrition of trees of symbiosis with fungi on their roots (mycorrhizas) was demonstrated by Dr. M. C. Rayner and her husband, Professor W. Neilson-Jones, who showed that the association was markedly encouraged by the use of compost in forest nurseries. Though somewhat derided at the time, the importance of mycorrhizas is now widely acknowledged and the subject of much research.

Most of this work and writing took place in the 1920's and 30's. The Men of the Trees goes back to 1922 when it was founded in Kenya by Richard St. Barbe Baker and Chief Josiah Njonjo. No one else can have achieved so much in the planting and preservation of trees and the reclamation of deserts as St. Barbe Baker in his long lifetime, but only recently can it be said that these activities are regarded as 'respectable' by the Forestry Establishment, if they are yet!

This brief resume of some of the pioneers of the 'organic' movement who most impressed me or with whom I had contact in the years before their viewpoint became popular, is included because, though they were often called 'cranks' or 'fanatics,' they were, in fact, exceptionally sane and balanced people, of unusual originality and moral courage, whose theories were always based upon detailed and lengthy practical experience, and were always constructive, however critical of current ideas and practices. This was in contrast to a great deal of the 'Green' literature which has followed although the best of it, and notably Schumacher's, is clearly a continuation of the same sane and practical approach.

Well-founded Warnings
A book which might well have launched the 'Green' movement more than twenty years before Silent Spring if it had not been a generation too soon, was the survey of world soil erosion written by a soil scientist, G. V. Jacks, and the agronomist, R.O. Whyte, under the title of The Rape of The Earth. It was published in 1939 by Faber & Faber who brought out so many of these books just before or during the War. The emphasis here was on warning. Erosion is primarily caused by faulty land use, and the survey piles up the facts from every part of the world to present an ominous picture. When it comes to remedial suggestions these authors, like most who take a world view, favoured various forms of centralised control.

And so we come again to Silent Spring in 1962 - another survey of human ill-use of the environment, this time by pesticides, but it ends with a constructive chapter on biological methods of control. Why did we have to wait for this before the environment became a matter of world-wide, popular concern? We have to remember that the previous half-century had been devoted to two World Wars, separated by a disastrous monetary depression. Never was there time or money to give priority to the long view, or to deeper thinking on the scale required, and the seed which the pioneers had sown was not allowed to grow to maturity.

Moreover, during all this period, the concentration of money-power, media-power, and the control of mass-mentality had been growing with acceleration. In war, central control of information and morale is a part of the process and tends to create a habit of mental dependence, though the actual experiences of war do bind people down to reality. But a generation of town-dwellers whose 'wars' consist of print-marks, radio voices, films and, later, of moving spots of light on a TV screen which make a trompe l'oeil of reality is helplessly vulnerable to mass mental and emotional control, whether about wars, money, politics, jobs, goods, morals, nature or anything else.

Media-Conditioned Passion-Bashing
So, in the 1960's we have a generation of mass-protesters, slogan-shouters, demonstrators, banner-carriers, full of passionate feelings about the print-marks, the jabber-noises and the coloured images they have been fed - a generation enslaved by the threat of Nuclear Doom, passionately acting as the carriers and agents of fear, passion-bashing for communist victory in Vietnam, and still doing so in other parts of the world (e.g. Southern Africa).

I am not concerned here to blame them. They are the first generation to be subjected to almost continuous media-conditioning until they can scarcely distinguish the symbol from the reality, the reference from the referent. But it is these people who are now to a large extent our rulers, in executive and official positions, and the consequences of their actions - such as a million 'boat people' fleeing from communist Vietnam, or war, chaos, corruption and famine wherever debt-finance promotes communist control in Africa - is unreal to them compared to their long-ago induced feelings. Provided they felt right at the time, they feel no responsibility for the result of their actions in the real world which is so unreal to them.

And so we come to the third sort of Green Movement, that which dominates the media to-day, the Green Movement of Big Money and power politics, of ideology, words, slogans, print, images rather than action, which imagines it is succeeding because it has been found useful to the centralising power-hierarchy and its underlings.

While books such as The Rape of the Earth and Silent Spring seem to me to have been legitimate warnings based upon careful study and experience, the late 1960's and early 1970's saw the beginnings of a spate of alarmist literature which has continued to the present day. Much of this emanated from the universities and was largely speculative, expressing the attitudes of the Nuclear Doom generation transferred to the threat of Planetary Doom by eco-disaster.

Doom-Fear: a Technique of Control
There are certain attractions about being a Doomster. First of all it is sensational and attracts publicity and with that money and prestige. Then it gives a feeling of moral superiority which leads to a form of puritanism. The Doomster knows best; he is passionately convinced he is 100% right, so it is his moral duty not merely to warn but to threaten and scare, and to persuade Governments to coerce the wrong-headed masses to change their ways for their own good.

Of course, he can have much that is right on his side, but this has to be buried in a mass of home-made philosophy and under an alarming title, such as The Population Bomb, The End of Affluence, Blue-Print for Survival, and so on. And of course, there is a great variation in the quality of the writers and in what the popular media select for sensation out of their writings. If one out of hundreds of scientists who have been discussing a subject gives a Doomster's view of it, then he is represented as speaking for Science. A speculative opinion becomes a statement of fact.

So it is not surprising that the next generation of 'Greens' has inherited the same attitudes, including a strong dose of moral superiority and a plethora of advice and instructions to everyone on how to amend their lives and habits to avoid the threatened eco-disaster in ways which are impossible for most people without a radical change in the debt system and those who operate it. But to demand that, which is the key to the whole situation, is to confront the power which dominates Mankind and virtually 'to blaspheme against the World Religion. At the very least it means being excluded from even the remotest corridors of power and publicity. So far as I can discover, none of the leading pundits of the Green Movement has yet ventured to face the obvious and known facts about Money, though vague denunciations of Banks, Big Business, Multinationals and 'Capitalism,' along with human greed and acquisitiveness are fairly routine.

The Third Temptation of Christ: to acquire power over all the kingdoms of the Earth (i.e. megapolitics) in return for an act of worship of the Evil One (i.e. that power which corrupts politics) is a temptation impossible to resist by any person or group which sets out to improve the lot of Mankind in a big way. Indeed, few of those who automatically fall for it are aware that it is a temptation at all. It is taken for granted that if you want to do anything in a big way you must 'succeed' in attracting the favour of the Powers that Be, the greatest and most corrupting of which is the Money-Power.

Inevitably, therefore, that part of the Green Movement which has ample access to the media, which appears to be 'succeeding' in influencing both politics and big business and big-money advertising, is that which has already (in these terms) sold its soul to the Devil.

Just because money has always been the most powerful, and hence corruptible, invention of mankind, it has not been generally realised to what extent its more recent development into an abstract and symbolic form has favoured centralisation with its increasing domination of all aspects of human life, to the exclusion of the realities of this planet. That money should be the limiting and determining factor in virtually every activity is an experience so deeply embedded in most people's consciousness that even those, such as the 'Greens,' who are trying to concern themselves with the reality of nature, find it scarcely possible to escape thinking of money as that reality.

Is This Progress ?
Naturally enough, then, when Big Business and Governments go 'Green' and adopt the jargon of environmentalism, this is hailed as evidence of 'success.' When industry, commerce and banking, health and medicine, the theatre and cinema, the press and the written and visual arts, all clamber on the 'Green' bandwagon and provide jobs for young Greenies, they can be thrilled by the 'progress' the Movement is making. But is it really progress?

Is the enormous and growing volume of print, and meetings, conferences, broadcasting etc. devoted to 'raising the public consciousness' of Green issues really 'saving the environment' any more than merely acting as a cover for its accelerating destruction? Is ecology, the study and understanding of our environment, especially of living things, and of how to live with them, a matter for governments, for laws, for officialdom, and for remote, centralised control, whether direct or via the mass media?

There was a time, before 'ecology' became a political term, when this would have been a purely rhetorical question to anyone concerned with the environment, obviously and unnecessarily demanding the answer 'No! remote control of the land is always disastrous !' But now, alas! the answer we get from the most vocal elements in the Green Movement is 'Yes! How can anything be done fast enough and on a wide enough scale unless it is done by Governments and by the big agencies which influence public opinion?'

'Act locally, think globally' is a fine slogan, but the second half is much easier than the first. It can be done comfortably in an armchair, at a word-processor, a conference, a TV studio or a parliament and with a bit of talent with words can lead to fame, status and money. Acting locally, on the other hand, leads to none of these things, but quite often to an aching back, grubby hands, wet clothes, but also satisfaction and fellowship. So now we have Green Parties popping up everywhere, and the major Parties stealing their policies in order not to lose votes to them. Germany, of course, led the way in this, and has even gained a few members in Parliament, though their original electoral impetus seems to have been somewhat lost. In Britain the Green Party at present gets about 5% of the vote, but is certainly influencing the policies of the other Parties. Is this a good thing?

The Party Power-Game
A political Party is a group of people who share a sectional viewpoint which they are convinced is right and so they seek to gain power for themselves in order to impose it on others who disagree with them. This is quite incompatible with decentralised action, which it merely uses as a part of the propaganda means for attaining the power of government. All such Parties start off full of 'democratic ideals' which soon turn out to be impracticable and obviously incompatible with the seeking of centralised power over others.

The first thing that the Green influence seems to favour is the increased use of the Government's money-power to manipulate the lives of the people, whether by specific grants or differential taxation. Agriculture having been grossly distorted to produce 'mountains' of wheat, butter, beef, etc. by financial manipulation under the Common (Market) Agricultural Policy (C.A.P.) it now has to be money-bribed by grants to lay aside land for what is deemed to be less imbecile use. While it is true that farming has been rendered impossible without either debt or subsidy, it is the use of debt-mongered inflation for any sort of remote grant-control of the land which is objectionable and usually disastrous Anytime now we may be faced with shortages instead of gluts.

When it comes to taxation, that is, to increasing the deficiency of debt-free income, increasing the need to borrow, economic pressure and social conflict generally, as a means of forcing the money-slaves into a deep green consideration for the environment - this complete inversion of what is needed is just what happens when power-seeking takes over.

The natural course of centralised control confronted with a genuine protest against the results of its policy on the environment is to select some single objectionable item, make a great fuss about that -say, additive X in some food - then perhaps impose financial penalties for adding X to food, or make a fortune by advertising and selling X-free food.
For many avoidances of or substitutes for known dangers, wastes, poisons or pollutants there is an unknown price to be paid, a substitution of the unknown for the known. Take, for instance, the substitution of un-leaded petrol for leaded, as encouraged by a lower tax on the unleaded. This is a monetary inducement to burn more petrol, which may also have to be of higher octane and with other, non-lead additives such as 'benzene, said to be carcinogenic. More pollution, except for lead. So what comes next? A great industry using energy and materials to produce catalytic converters which also may cause another small loss of power? More petrol burnt, more CO2 etc. Can anyone work out the equation: less lead versus all this?

Selling Us Unknown for Known Dangers
Lead is reported to damage children - a powerful point. But a recent survey of lead hazards to children in Bradford does not mention lead from petrol but mainly lead from old lead pipes and lead paint in the dust of old houses, along with a cosmetic used by Asian women. We can all see that reducing lead pollution from traffic is a good thing, but until the real cost is known how can we decide that on balance it is not making things worse? The only certain gain would be from a general reduction in unnecessary traffic using much less petrol, which could only come with a drastic reduction in unnecessary employment undertaken to distribute wages.
What about double glazing, roof insulation, etc? Saves heat-loss, Yes! But what do we know of the effects of the resultant stuffiness due to lack of ventilation, and condensation, wood rot, etc ? Usually it goes with central heating accustoming people to a high indoor temperature all the year round, using more fuel in the end.

The domestic open coal or wood fire may be far less efficient in converting fuel into heat than the remote power station, and the smoke pollution it causes is clearly visible and local; but how far does it spread as compared with the pollution from the high stack of the power station, and how much of the station's output is lost in conversion to electricity, and from electricity to heat again and in its transport for long distances? The open fire not only warms but ventilates and gives psychological comfort which the remotely fed electric fire cannot. And how much fuel is burnt in power stations merely to keep up the voltage in the Grid and how often is it in excess of that needed for the actual amount of current beneficially consumed ? How certain can we be that the centralised method is more efficient and less harmful than the local one ?

Avoiding the use of wood from tropical rainforests may slow their destruction a little, but only in so far as our import of timber from those rainforests is still a factor in their degradation. Is it ? Which timber ? Which forest ? Japan and some other countries import huge amounts; but it needs looking into before any wholesale propaganda assault is made on the tropical timber trade. Logging is still destroying some forests, but it might turn out that, for us, the import of corned beef or soya beans is a more serious factor in the clearing of rain forest. Wholesale 'green' propaganda campaigns are mostly very crude and dubious in their effects.

The Shot-Gun Hate Campaign
One is reminded of the general 'shot-gun' hate campaign against the wearing of furs, including seal-skin, which has deprived some of the northern Innuit of their livelihood and their traditional lifestyle as hunters. How many of its supporters have ever been in the arctic or have any clue to what they are doing ?

The question is: what animals should not be hunted, where and by whom ? which requires detailed local knowledge, not sentiment. But the massive and attractive television propaganda for saving what is called 'wildlife,' which usually means large and remote animals, to be 'saved' by doing something symbolic: wearing slogans on T-shirts or badges, indulging in sponsored runs, joining a club of elephant or rhino friends has about as much relevance to the problem as any other form of magic. It was recently reported (Oct. 10 1990) that 34 poachers had been shot for the loss of 28 rhinos. The poachers were, of course, trying to get money for the rhino horns. So far 100 poachers have been shot in the great Green 'war to save the rhino.' How Green is that ?

All this does of course save the trouble of actually doing something about the local ecology which primarily depends upon the plants and their habitat, as indeed does the whole of life on the planet. Most of that sort of work, in so far as it is unpaid, is not done by self-advertised Greens but by the old-fashioned people of the naturalist type, the members of the Naturalist Trusts, the Men of the Trees, and other conservation groups.

Real Ecology on the Wane
Despite all the propaganda about the Environment, the number of young people opting to study the plant sciences at universities has actually dwindled to an alarming degree. Even ecology as a serious study seems to be on the wane. Shouting 'Green' seems to have been substituted for doing it; which is not surprising when we consider the large part of most people's lives which is spent in the artificial world of words and images.

Re-cycling paper, glass, aluminium and other materials is a good idea. Many people are prepared to go to the trouble of sorting them out separately in their garbage, but find that no one will collect them. Like many other conservation measures, it doesn't pay in ever-inflating debt-money, though in real terms it may, in some cases, pay in terms of' recovering real wealth. Even here, though, there is a price. Recycled paper for writing or printing requires extra bleaching as well as removal of the short broken fibres. We cannot cheat the second law of thermodynamics!

The Vast Disruption of the Food Cycle
But even our household garbage, vast as it is, is a secondary matter compared to our excreta, much of which goes to pollute our seas and rivers, whereas its proper place is the land from which it was taken in the form of food. It is primarily the great cities which break the cycle of life, decay and renewal by sucking in the products of the soil into the great biomass of human bodies and passing out what they do not use into the sewage where it becomes something offensive and 'nasty,' instead of simply a natural part of the food-chain rapidly assimilated by innumerable smaller organisms on the way to become the food of the plants on which we live. And this disruption of the natural cycle has now spread widely wherever piped water and main drainage have spread over the countryside.

The treatment of sewage by bacteria in sewage farms and its return to the land as fertilizer is a step towards restoring the cycle though it is still not general, and there are complications, as there is with town garbage, due to the vast volume of toxic metals, pesticides; detergents and drugs which are poured down into our sewers. Even our bodies, when we have finished with them, mostly pollute the air instead of enriching the soil, while far too much of our organic wastes still go into the rivers and the sea. Why, then, this vast squandering of real wealth ? Money, of course! It would cost far too much in computerised accountancy not to waste it. It is futile to argue about population and food supply so long as this one-way pouring of nutrient from the land into the sea continues.

Our Collective Insanity
Most of the big-money-backed 'Green' propaganda to which we are being subjected resembles that of the T.V.A. (see Chapter V) in that it promotes a minor, particular act of very partial restoration which in no way interferes with the wholesale and relentless progress of the Debt-juggernaut with its insatiable appetite for centralised squander-growth. Also it carries a corresponding requirement for progressive control, restriction and interference with the lives of people caught in its trap.

In this respect those prominent members of the Green Movement who emit a strident and self-righteous demand that people should be forced or mentally manipulated into acting contrary to the mathematical demands of debt-money at the cost of personal loss and often poverty or bankruptcy, provide a useful tool for controlling the public, and doubtless enjoy the sensation of power and credit-status which goes with it.

That is not to say that, things being as they are, all possible effort must not be made to modify our lives to co-operate with our environment rather than destroy it, to act in support of those forces of recuperation which restore the balance of nature, to be symbionts rather than parasites and a part of that great mutualism which clothes our planet with life.

But as things are, all such efforts are crippled and limited by the constant money-need to mortgage the future and to seek continual economic 'growth' and 'money-jobs' as the main means of living.
If we take the long view, the efforts made by those who can afford to make them will be repaid many times in real terms. But the debt-ridden can never take the long view; they are always forced to go for the cash crop or the quick return.

Globally, even nationally, the effects of our present efforts can be only marginal, so long as the main cause of our collective insanity remains.