Majorityrights Central > Category: Environmentalism & Climate Change

This post is a very ad hoc affair written, really, to raise a subject - one that is under-served here -  for discussion.

The reason I don’t spend a lot of time writing about the environment is because I’m not 100% sold on the notion that membership of a healthy and self-conscious organic society necessarily implies care for the land.  It never did, down all the years when the crises of our people and of our environment were nightmares of the imagination, and nothing more.

Of course, nobody has ever argued that pollution is good.  But 99.9% of us - our forefathers included - have been very keen indeed on material progress and deliverance from want.  In the words of John Gummer when he was John Major’s Environment Secretary, “We are rich because we pollute.”

It would, I suppose, be logical for environmentally negative tendencies to increase with hyper-individualism.  But received wisdom states that care for the environment strongly corresponds with times of economic growth, and capitalism, with all its individualist dynamics, is the great deliverer of growth.

So this picture is perhaps more mixed than it might at first glance appear to the romantic nationalist.  I think one has to be careful to avoid undue romanticism in thinking it through.  Irrespective of politics, everyone can agree that dirty old factories and power stations belching greenhouse gasses into the air and pumping filth into our rivers are undesirable.

That said, there is such a thing as a uniquely nationalist discussion on the environment.  It should chiefly consider issues of population size and carrying capacity ... and immigrant repatriation, I imagine.  Incidentally, in his definition of exceeded carrying capacity Frank Salter includes the lost values of privacy, access to open space,  and sustenance.  Maximising our genetic interests may, for a time, mean a focus on maximising proximate environmental interests rather than ultimate reproductive interests.

Another area for nationalist discussion should be sociobiological in character.  Which peoples can genuinely contribute to tackling global pollution?  Europeans are the most intellectually gifted and, therefore, creative of all great peoples, and these qualities are what are really needed.  We are also the most altruistic of peoples, and the most individualistic - meaning we do not live as in thrall as non-Westerners do to, in this context, regressive thought patterns such as tradition, social conformity, fatalism, and spirituality.

Alright, I’ll leave it there.  Comment is, as they say elsewhere without actually meaning it, free.

The emotional subject of white American resettlement out of the south-west has been featuring here pretty regularly of late.  James has posted some related material.  But most of the energy for this discussion is on the threads where the chief proponent of resettlement is GT, who you will recall also guest-blogged for us on black serial killers three weeks ago.

Now, the 5th April issue of Nature is carrying a feature that will greatly interest GT.  The headline, “Return of the dustbowl”, is alarmist and doesn’t really do credit to the seriousness of the research.  But here’s the straight from the shoulder payoff:-

The drought that spawned the great American Dust Bowl of the 1930s may become the new climatic norm for much of the southwestern United States and other subtropical regions of the world. In a report published today, researchers in the United States and Israel project an imminent increase in aridity in subtropical regions over the next century, which will affect several important agricultural regions.

The results indicate that growing drought in the southwest is a problem that is likely to affect agriculture. “This is something that is already under way. It’s not an end of the twenty-first century thing where we have the luxury to sit around and wait,” says Richard Seager, a climatologist with the Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory in New York, who led the 13-member research team ...

“This is a robust prediction that’s been backed by observation,” says Dennis Hartmann, a climatologist in the Department of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Washington, Seattle. “It seems like a reasonable scenario for the future.”

The implications for such a drying are far-reaching. California, for instance, accounts for approximately 16% of all US agricultural exports. Seager suggests that North American farmers need to rethink certain agricultural practices, including adopting more water-efficient irrigation systems such as those being used in Israel.

And, where there are water shortages, there is also the potential for political conflict. “As Mark Twain wrote, ‘Whiskey is for drinking. Water is for fighting over’,” says Seager. Mexico depends on water originating from the Colorado River, he notes, whereas Iraq and Syria depend on the waters of the Euphrates, which originate in Turkey. Cross-border conflicts are likely to arise as these streams of water dry up.

It is not, therefore, at all unreasonable to posit, as GT does, that ethnic competition in the south-west will centre on water - and thus food - availability.  Watch for the early signs that others, who may not intend white Americans much good, understand both this and the need to secure the situation for themselves first.

Forced by the suspension of the blog to find some other source of intellectual diversion, and having re-thumbed my entire stock of Chronicles back copies, I hit the TV remote before Sunday lunch and, for my pains, saw (turn away NOW, if you of a squeamish nature) the big, bland face of David Bloody Cameron.

He was being interviewed by John Sopel for the BBC’s Politics Show.  They were fencing with one another about the political flavour of the moment, the Stern Report on climate change.

Now, I readily acknowledge that climate change is the only issue bigger than the survival of Western Man, and I don’t seek to belittle it in any way.  But it wasn’t Cameron’s fine intentions and general planetary high-mindedness that piqued my interest.  It was his repeated refusal to identify holiday air travel as a frivolity that - “if ‘the polluter pays’ is to mean anything” - must shoulder its share of the CO2 burden.  He wouldn’t, he informed Sopel, be the one who told the common man that he can’t have his sun ‘n sangria.

In so doing Cameron revealed himself to be too much of a politician ever to be much of an environmentalist.  He also demonstrated that his abiding concerns are specifically voter-related rather than UK industry-related (ie flightwise, outbound rather than inbound).  In the Opposition’s perfectly understandable struggle to get elected frivolity, it seems, is more important than profits and jobs.  That’s probably a correct strategy.  These days, the economy is not a strong electoral card for the Conservatives and the generality of employment in UK tourism is, anyway, very poorly paid and far too frequently filled by Poles and Filipinos.

So it’s beer and skittles all across the cloudscape to sunny Espagne, and CO2 be damned.  And if the on-line tabloids are a good judge of their own audience, young master Cameron and his pet tarantula are right.

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