43
Steering by Numbers
he modern Western environmental movement differed from the other new social movements that emerged in the second half of the twentieth century in the closeness of its involvement with science. Rachel Carson, whose book
Silent Spring
is widely acknowledged as the catalyst to the grassroots environmentalism of the 1960s, was a marine biologist by training and her professional background helped her to piece together the story of the impact of pesticides on ecosys-tems and humans. Te figure of the concerned scientist continued to play a strong role in the movement’s development, as did the findings of research into the impact of human activities on the living world. Yet this was also a movement that questioned worldviews: the background maps and stories that shape our perception of the world and our sense of what is possible, while mostly passing for just how things are.As it traced the consequences of industrial production, environ-mentalism started to reopen political questions that had been largely closed off since the mid-nineteenth century, when parties of the left and right converged on a framing of the space of politics as the organisation and distribution of the outputs of industrial society. By drawing attention to its disowned outputs – the scale of its ‘negative externalities’ – the environmental movement called the core assump-tions of industrial society into question. Following the trail upstream from the parts of the story that science could piece together, it entered the terrain of culture, the groundwork of habits and stories that make
44up a way of life, and it opened a conversation about what other ways of living together might be possible. Tis kind of environmentalism had its heyday in the 1970s, or so I’m told by those who are old enough to remember it. My own early political memories coincide with the green wave of the late 1980s. I was eight years old the spring the reactor at Chernobyl caught fire, sending a plume of radioactive smoke across northern Europe. We followed it night by night on the
Six O’Clock News
. I remember the fear, but also the spreading sense of awareness in those next few years.By the time I was eleven, it felt as though the winds of history were blowing in a hopeful direction. Te Green Party came from nowhere to take 15 percent of the votes across the UK in the European elections of 1989. Elsewhere, its German sister party had already established itself as a parliamentary force. Te fall of the Iron Curtain felt like part of the same story: change was not just possible, it was happening at a speed that no one had predicted.In 1987, the Brundtland Report had established ‘sustainable devel-opment’ as the frame within which the international community would talk about the planetary situation: a framing which yoked the pursuit of ecological sustainability to the trajectory of economic and technologi-cal development, without any proof that this pairing could pull in the same direction. In hindsight, the five years between its publication and the Rio Earth Summit of 1992 appear as a high tide of international concern and intergovernmental action around the environment that remains unsurpassed to this day. Tis was also the moment at which the environmental movement drew back from the terrain of culture and established a new relationship with science. No longer was the scientific evidence a starting point for a larger questioning of society or making political arguments; now the evidence itself was to make the case for change, to carry the weight and do the work of politics. Tis turn is not hard to understand: in countries where Green politicians had entered parliament, the demands of working within existing institutions drove a certain kind of ‘realism’. Meanwhile, the journey of David Icke from BBC sports presenter to Green Party principal speaker to promoter of lizard-related conspiracy theories
45offered a cautionary example of how the attempt to call your whole culture into question could unravel. Te logic was clear enough, too: the scientific evidence for the consequences of industrial activity was growing, so why get tangled up in arguments over worldviews and values? Surely the way forward was to bypass that kind of politics, to lay out the facts and figures that would prove the necessity of massive societal change? It helps that this is the kind of language our society says you’re meant to speak if you want to get invited to the grown-up policy discussions. Yet as an attempt to bypass the frailty, fallibility and slowness of human judgement, with the potential for conflict that it brings, this belonged to a repeating pattern in the history of modern societies. ime and again, the power and cleanness of calculative reason has seemed to hold out the possibility of leaving behind the clash of conflicting stories, but whatever the intentions behind it, this move never quite works out.—For the New Atheists of our time, the scientific revolution that began in Europe in the seventeenth century might seem to have heralded the dethronement of God. At the time, however, the implications for religion looked rather different. Newton had revealed the invisible force of gravity and shown that its operation could be described with the tools of mathematics. Among the European scholars absorbing this news, the thought arose: what if we could trace the other hidden forces at work in the world and follow the chains of cause and effect back to the beginning? Te possibility they had glimpsed was not to eliminate God but to offer the definitive account of His works.In its radical form, this project gave rise to deism: the belief in God as the Prime Mover, the first cause setting in motion a clockwork universe. As religions go, deism was never going to pack churches or stir revival movements. It offers a cold, mechanical vision, stripped of love, sacrifice or the possibility of forgiveness. Yet its appeal within intellectual circles was powerful, for after two centuries in which religious disputes had provided the fault lines along which the princes of Europe had fought a series of exceptionally bloody wars, it seemed to offer a foundation for peace.