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Dissent, Dumbclucks & Disaster - Brian Turner writes from the heart, with deeply felt emotion and strongly held conviction!
DISSENT, DUMBCLUCKS & DISASTER
A fellow opponent of Meridian's proposed Project Hayes windfarm on the Lammermoor Range, recently sent me a piece entitled 'Climategate: Science is Dying'. It appeared in the Wall Street Journal.
Reading it I thought, some of this is screwy, but not all of it. Some of it states the obvious, and some is based upon the fallacy that science is in essence built on 'objectivity' in ways that the arts, for instance, are not. I won't engage in lengthy argument here about that except to say that it's my belief that subjectivity is an ineradicable part of what it means to be human. Subjective responses insinuate themselves and join forces with those traits - call them propensities if you wish - that sit and fidget on the bench supplied for the seven so-called deadly sins. Ideologies and religions sit there too.
I think there is usually a strong case to be made to act in ways that strike us as prudent. In part I think that's what my parents and grandparents meant when they spoke of the need to put something away for 'a rainy day'. That's where the argument in favour of the 'precautionary principle' comes from. And while I have always found it hard to believe that anything is 'settled', perhaps because there's something to be admired about contrarians and skeptics, nonetheless it is pretty clear that much of human activity has been, and is continuing to wreck this world we live in.
In almost every area there have always been, and always will be, dissenters and dissent. No one has ever been able to quell dissent for anything but a short period. Those on both sides of the climate change debate, the 'believers' and the 'skeptics', contain many who go with some of the arguments and not others. There's a lot of heat (excuse the pun), and hysteria, for both sides believe the consequences are highly likely to be dire. Which they very likely are.
In philosophy one talks of what is, and then of what one ought to do as a consequence. Fisheries the world over are collapsing. Humans are very much contributing to this fact. Acidification of the oceans seems to be occurring and that is serious. We are running out of fresh, potable water, and so on and on.
Increasingly, and quickly - as I see it - we are going to have to alter the way we live, how we live. Much is finite. The Sumerians, the Easter Islanders, the Mayans, and so on, shat in their own nests. We are shitting in ours, big time.
This Wall Street Journal author of 'Climategate: Science is Dying' writes that because of flawed 'science' we're being asked to 'undertake a vast reordering of human behaviour at almost unimaginable financial cost'. Well, we all bear costs of which the financial is but one whenever major change occurs; such change is happening now whether we like it or not. What is noticeable in New Zealand today is the extent to which a large percentage of those of my generation are angrily resistant to change. I live among a whole generation of 'affronteds' (if I may coin a term) who resent having their beliefs challenged, who don't want to accept that we have made mistakes, and who often still say, or imply, that 'we have no alternative' but to continue with policies and lifestyles we embraced - some did - in the 1980s, and that anyone who questions this is a scaremonger and 'backward-looking'. I tend to think the opposite is the case.
There are costs no matter what courses we take. The climate change believer side would agree with Margaret Attwood's view that 'nature is calling in her debt'. I incline to agree with her, on the basis of what I've gleaned from my wide reading and personal experiences and observations of the past 40 years. I tend to think that James Kunstler's view of what is occurring in the US and elsewhere, as presented in his website essays, and in his book The Long Emergency, is more likely the one that is beginning to play out. So I see much more that is plausible and likely in Dimitry Orlov's work and views, and in Richard Heinberg's essays, and so on and on (Jared Diamond's too), than I do in the positions taken, and arguments presented by those, say, of a strong neo-liberal and/or Christian fundamentalist persuasion.
That said, I hope the Kunstler view is wrong, but boy, if he's only half right the time to start changing how we behave and live, how we see and interact with nature and each other, is now.
I've long been disturbed and saddened by our refusal to accept that we ought to adopt what Kathleen Dean Moore, a philosopher at Oregon State University, calls an 'ecological ethic of care'. That would mean acknowledging that our survival depends on practising an ethic founded on an awareness of a need to care for both people and places, the biodiversity found there. We do live in 'a community of interdependent parts', ought to 'Sing our love for and obligation to' the land, as the great American conservationist and forester Aldo Leopold put it.
I see as disastrous the extent to which we've come to see ourselves as - Moore puts it succinctly - 'apart from and superior to plants and animals.'
I try to avoid getting too involved in arguing about whether global warming is anthropogenic or not, but it sure looks like there is a problem, and a big one. On a world scale New Zealand's Co2 emissions are very high per capita but overall they are so small relative to other countries that what we do about it - or don't do about it - here, is not going to significantly effect the outcome worldwide. But it's how others see us, and how they decide to treat us as a result of what we do, or don't do, about our per capita emissions, that's the crucial issue. We have yet to find out what other nations decide in that respect.
Now let me segue into a far from unrelated subject, because it relates to New Zealand's interest in producing energy from 'renewables', and the extravagant claims made for windpower.
On 8 December 2009, John and Susan Elliot of Lammermoor Station, put their names to a column in the Otago Daily Times. It was exceptionally self-serving, full of half-truths and untruths, like their claim that the Environment Court's decision to decline Meridian energy's application to build a giant windfarm on the Lammermoor Range means that 'the local [community's] continued existence now hangs in the balance.' As a result, said the Elliots, (or their corporate scriptwriter?) 'Young people... are all now resigned to the idea of having to leave our communities to look for work elsewhere.' The Elliots, seeking sympathy, write of the threat to the small Paerau school, but fail to mention that a large part of the reason for that is because other farming families in the valley have left, or are leaving, as a result of the friction caused by the actions of Meridian and the prospect of a massive windfarm across the valley. The Elliots, condescendingly, if not insultingly, refer to former neighbours as 'Even the few locals who opposed the project have almost all left the area.' No prize for guessing why. Mr and Mrs Elliot also conveniently declined to mention that they stood to receive several hundred thousand dollars a year in rental from Meridian for the right to plonk huge turbines on their land, in some cases right alongside the Old Dunstan Road, perhaps the most historic, hence culturally priceless, and certainly most grand and dramatic of routes into Central Otago.
The Elliots also stated that they believed 'they have a right to decide how to use their land in order to get the best out of it', and so on and on. We all know the extent to which people fiercely advance and protect what they see as their 'property rights'. Property rights are dear to many of us. But it is not true to say that property ownership confers rights to do what suits us individually. Civilized societies are underpinned by a believe that rights and responsibilities - call them duties or obligations too - are indivisible: one has to have regard for other than one's own preferences and predelictions. That is why we have regulations and laws.
But I won't go further and continue to unpick the Elliot's piece which is a stunningly ignorant whinge masquerading as concern for the future of the area.
This is not to say that the Elliots are without their supporters, far from it. Cringing acquiescence in the face of spin from energy companies is widespread throughout the country, and not just the Maniototo and Central Otago. Comments from some locals as published in a local giveaway paper The Mirror, showed that some in the Maniototo truly believed that Hayes would bring many more people to the area, that a significant number of new jobs would result, that the area would benefit long-term, that the power was badly needed, that lights would likely go out without it, and so on. All of that is, if not mostly untrue, certainly highly debatable. And it shows the power of corporate spin and the pervasive belief that many so-called communities have in Cargo Cults.
Maniototo Community Board chairman Richard Smith made some telling remarks. For instance, 'Meridian endeavoured to tear at the fabric of our community by doing deals with groups of interest and then approaching the board for without prejudice meetings, all the while pretending that we were the one and only group they were having discussions with.'
Smith was also reported as saying that the board 'soon became aware of the void between its values and what Meridian believed should compensate for the stress the project would put on the key services of the Maniototo. ... I believe, from the experiences we had as a board, that we could not have trusted Meridian to deliver what was promised and, to a greater extent, what was needed.'
There is a maddening degree of dumcluckery about, dumbcluckery which finds its expression in attacks on people who challenge the views of those who assert that There Is No Alternative (TINA) to further big industrial scale energy projects. To oppose the movement that thinks it's okay - no, that it's actually right and proper and necessary - to dam our remaining rivers and open the way for an infestation of windfarms all over the landscapes, is to be accused of being 'against progress', a 'nimby', a 'naysayer', a 'nature lover', and other pejoratives. Folks, exploring different ways of doing things and providing for 'genuine needs' is not heretical.
Consider this: it's been estimated that Otago and Southland at present, with around 7 per cent of New Zealand's population, produces about 20 per cent of this little country's energy. In Otago we produce more than twice the energy we use. Tidal, solar, photo-voltaics, possibly more thermal, and small-ish scale wind close to where energy is needed, are the way of the future. The time to ramp up the research and development in, and switch to them, is now.
But to return to Kathleen Moore's reference to our need to embrace an 'ecological ethic of care', and to examine and reconsider our perceptions of ourselves in and as a part of nature, we need to suppress greed and curb the excesses of western triumphalism exacerbated by the discovery of once-abundant fossil fuels, and downplay our inclination to trumpet the primacy of human beings over all other creatures. We can't, as a species, keep consuming and abusing nature the way we have been. Quantity of consumption and quality of life are not synonymous. Much is finite. To provide for all the earth's people in a manner to which we in the west are accustomed would require a planet several times the size of earth.
I'll finish, for now, by returning to Moore where she writes,
How suspiciously convenient it is to believe that humans have the monopoly of the universe on the mind. If people are going to imprison dolphins and transmogrify the gall bladders of bears into fortifying elixirs, if they are going to scrape the bottom of the ocean bare and grind the hindquarters of black-tailed deer into patties, if they are going to reduce owl nesting sites to toilet paper and convince themselves that this is not a problem, then they will need to believe that human beings have minds but other animals do not. But this is a matter of convenience, not truth.
To those who declaim that we 'must go forward' I say, yes, all right, but first stop going backwards by continuing to degrade, desecrate and defile this world we live in, and, especially, our region.
Brian Turner
14 December 2009 |
