"GreenBashing." The Collapse of Environmentalism

As Machiavelli never said, "The Art of Politics Consists in Finding Someone to Blame."

Isn’t it obvious to you that forest fires are started by the Greens to promote their environmental policies? And isn’t it evident to everyone that the recent floods are due to Greens opposing the cleaning of canals to protect a rare species of frogs? Everywhere in the world, Greenbashing is the new trend. It is a major cultural and societal shift that will probably see the demonization and the rejection of everything that goes under the name of “environmentalism.” It will be classed together with ideas considered to be obviously bad, such as propitiatory human sacrifices. (This post is a little pessimistic, I admit. But it seems to be describing how things really stand)

In the 1990s, I remember driving home one evening after some heavy rains and finding that the road continued underwater. I stopped, and I saw the buildings of the small town where I lived emerging out of a newly formed lake. Fortunately, the water rapidly receded, and the flood caused only moderate damage and no victims. It also caused an interesting debate in town: who was the culprit? Most local people blamed the Greens because “they had opposed cutting the trees that grew in the bed of the local river.”

Remarkably, the accusation was based on nothing more than the observation that the flood had left a large amount of wood debris around. Nobody could provide evidence that trees were growing right in the middle of the riverbed before the flood, nor that the local Greens had been active in preventing the authorities from cutting them.

But those who were most certain about the nefarious role of the Greens were those who seemed to be the least knowledgeable about the local river. Some of them didn’t even seem to know that a river existed before seeing their basement flooded. Some were surprised that the river hadn’t been culverted long before, turning it into a much needed parking lot. It was another fault of those nefarious Greens who wanted to save the frogs. The idea that the main cause of the flood was having constructed buildings, parking lots, and roads along the banks of the river, forcing it into a narrow bed, seemed completely alien and incomprehensible to them.

As I think Machiavelli never said, "The Art of Politics Consists in Finding Someone to Blame." The human mind is wired in this way: in moments of stress, it looks for a culprit. It is a plot that already unfolded when the Club of Rome sponsored the study “The Limits to Growth” in 1972. The attempt to avoid a global catastrophe resulted in the Club being accused of working to create that catastrophe, an accusation that still lingers in social media.

Today, this phenomenon takes the aspect of “greenbashing,” accusing Environmentalists of the disasters they had tried to avoid. A recent post by Gaspard d'Allens on “Reporterre” discusses the wave of greenbashing engulfing the world and reports several examples. Here are some excerpts (translated from the original French).

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From Reporterre.net
by Gaspard d'Allens

<Greenbashing is> a phenomenon that's spreading to the four corners of the planet. It's a sign of the powerful backlash against our Western societies, which are plagued by right-wing extremism and misinformation. Everywhere, ecologists are being blamed for the climate catastrophes they have been predicting for decades. Their messengers are targeted, attacked and turned into scapegoats. Public debate is caricatured and instrumentalized, caught up in sterile and absurd polemics. ...

One would have thought that these catastrophes would be a moment of revelation and truth that would go in the direction of ecologists,” historian Laure Teulière tells Reporterre. But the opposite is true. In the light of the storm, the confusion is even worse. In her view, "technocapitalism is radicalizing its forms of domination. The environmentalist cause allows those who have a vested interest in the status quo - the industrialists who profit from the economic system - and the politicians who thrive on public resentment to unite against it."

In Canada, the Conservatives are lying in ambush. With megafires ravaging 18 million hectares of forest by 2023, former Foreign Affairs Minister Maxime Bernier asserted that "a good part of the forest fires were started by green terrorists to boost their climate change campaign ”. …

The same scene was repeated with the floods in the north of France. Michel Onfray's magazine accused the ecologists of not wanting to clean up the canals to protect the frogs.

D’Allens and the people he interviewed seem to believe that greenbashing is the result of right-wing groups spreading disinformation in the media. It may well be true, at least in part. But I think it is a deeper and more general problem that has to do with how the human mind works. Ideas that do not bring immediate, tangible benefits are demonized and rejected. And we should admit that environmentalism has not been effective in creating a green paradise on Earth; no more than Communism was able to create a proletarian paradise. Capitalism, instead, provides an immediate, short-term benefit. For instance, cutting down a forest will not only provide an immediate monetary return but will also solve the problem of wildfires once and for all. No wonder people vote for candidates who propose these “solutions.”

So, we are probably going toward a major shift in the global cultural sphere where Environmentalism will join propitiatory human sacrifices, phlebotomy, and Communism as obviously bad ideas that can be rejected without the need for a discussion or a debate.

If it is happening, it means that it has to happen. The universe does not plan ahead; it tests in real time. What doesn’t work is ruthlessly destroyed and replaced by something that works. Humankind is not exempted from that rule, and if people believe that the way to avoid wildfires is to cut down the forests, they will have to pay for the consequences. Creating a human society compatible with a healthy ecosystem may be impossible, or maybe there are more effective ways than preaching about what should be done (e.g. COP29 in Baku). In any case, the universe just keeps going on.