Our beliefs are like our families. Some we live with every day. Others are distant relations we rarely see but still think of as part of our clan in a warm, vague way.
On the odd occasions they thought about it, leftists and more conservatives than readers of the Spectator may expect have seen the green movement as an eccentric aunt: a bit dotty perhaps, but a good sort and one of the family. I suspect that the majority of the population thinks the same.
Stereotypes reveal popular attitudes, and although many mock the caricature lentil-eating, bicycle-loving vegetarian, their mockery is not malicious. No one would complain if an organic shop were to open in their town — indeed, they would feel their town was coming up in the world. Nor would anyone feel threatened if members of Friends of the Earth moved in next door. In my experience when people vote for the Green Party they do so with pride. They may be wasting their vote, but they believe they have an integrity that voters for the compromised mainstream parties lack.
The green movement is losing the goodwill. It is in danger of becoming a hypocritical, selfish, anti-intellectual movement of rich-world faddists with a closed mind and vicious temper.
The debate about nuclear power gave a taste of what was to come. The best green thinkers, including James Lovelock, Stewart Brand and George Monbiot, argued that if their comrades were serious about combatting global warming they had to accept all alternatives to fossil fuels including nuclear power. Their comrades would do no such thing. Opposition to nuclear power was one of the founding tenets of the green faith, and its zealots would not countenance blasphemous revisions of the gospel.
The double standards over combatting global warming are as nothing, however, compared to the attitudes on display at the Rothamstead Research Institute today. Demonstrators are descending on the laboratory because it has an experimental planting of genetically modified wheat. Independent scientists, not the lackeys of some evil corporation, are running tests to see if they can create a strain with a natural resistance to pests. The activists in the absurdly named Take the Flour Back campaign do not care that scientists are not seeking private profit. They have broken the GM taboo and must be punished.
Professor John Pickett, who heads the research, has published a refutation of the protestors’ claims which is well worth reading. Non-scientists may not be qualified to test the validity of his arguments but we can recognise a quasi-religious movement when we see it. The language of the Rothamstead protests contains an almost pagan delusion that nature is pure and must be saved from ‘contamination’. So confident are the faithful they will not only threaten to destroy an experiment rather than wait until they can debate its results, but they will also refuse to debate with Professor Pickett and his colleagues on a public platform.
Instead of arguing, Jenny Jones of the Greens asserts that ‘we need a new green revolution… but not one based on a science and technology riddled with patents and corporate control’. We certainly need a new green revolution. The world’s population is increasing by 160,000 a day. Without new ways of increasing yields, environmental degradation, starvation and war will follow. The idea that an agricultural revolution cannot be based on science and technology is mystical dreaming. Every advance in agriculture since the 18th century has been based on science and technology. It is impossible to imagine an advance based on anything else. Patents and corporations are not necessarily evil, it depends on who owns them and what they do with them, and what controls public authorities place on their exploitation. Indeed I find it hard to know what an agriculture that didn’t incorporate the profit principle would look like. When the communists tried collective farms in the 20th century they created mass starvation.
Only a very privileged and spoilt westerner, who lives in a country that has not known famine for centuries, could afford to dismiss science and technology without a qualm. Only a know-nothing could reject an experiment in advance. And only a dilettante wills the ends of combatting global warming and food insecurity but screams with rage when anyone proposes means. The warm, vague feelings I had about the greens are cooling by the day.
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