My interest in environmental conservation was inspired early on by an acquaintance with a pair of old-school activists. I was young and impressionable, and their infectious reverence for the ocean’s natural beauty awakened in me sensibilities I hadn’t appreciated before. Later encounters deepened these convictions and I arrived at university armed with idealism. Disturbingly, however, I found myself unable to fully commit to the cause. Instead I drifted from campus group to campus group, showing up sporadically and half-heartedly to meetings. Something was irking me, not only at these small gatherings, but in the streams of emails I still received from various grassroots organisations across Australia.
I realised only a little while ago why it was I had become so disenfranchised with environmental politics. Over the course of their emergence into mainstream debate, it seems that a growing proportion of the conservation movement has undergone what can only be described as a corporate transformation. This transformation is observed in the calls that we protect the reef from dredging in the name of tourism or fishing, prevent extinction for the purposes of pharmaceutical research, or support renewable energy in the interests of ‘job creation’. It is a worrying trend that has crept into sections of the divestment movement.
Despite being motivated to curb climate change primarily out of respect for nature’s intrinsic value, some activists are choosing to promote the cause by way of cost-benefit analysis. Falling oil prices and increasing regulation in the energy market have exposed investors to the prospect that fossil fuel assets will become ‘stranded’ and worthless. Market Forces, a prominent divestment pressure group, has tapped into these financial concerns with a recent report into superannuation. The report promotes divestment exclusively on the basis of a finding that many superannuation-fund holders have already lost significant sums to fossil fuel investment. GetUp! has run a similar campaign against investing in the controversial Adani mine by appealing primarily to its untrustworthy economic credentials. Working as a volunteer on the campaign, I began to feel as though I were regurgitating scripted lines that reflected little of what I and my fellow activists were truly passionate about. Consequently, it became more and more difficult to engage with the movement.
Such alienation is an inevitable result of deep insincerity inherent in the use of neoliberal arguments to promote environmental causes. What has become of the founding conviction that life and wilderness are simply intrinsically valuable? That nature need not answer to modern demands that it be ‘useful’ or ‘valuable’ for human purposes? These fundamental convictions appear to have fallen somewhat by the wayside, at least publically, in the clamour to be heard and taken seriously. No longer deemed sufficient grounds of persuasion in of themselves, they are held to require more substantial and ‘legitimate’ justification couched in economic terms. The result has been the degradation of public conversation into mere disagreement as to how best to realise future economic prosperity.
When was it that the capitalist elite managed to convince its opposition that the only basis upon which to have a genuine discussion was on its terms? Since when did grassroots society have to begin cloaking its true convictions in economic and anthropocentric language? Faced with the urgent need to enter public discourse, it can be difficult to resist the pressure to do so on neoliberal terms. This difficulty is compounded by the fact that admission often appears to offer the fastest route to tangible success. The environmental crisis we are now confronted with requires an immediate and heavy-handed response. Concurrently tapping into existing prevalent values and offering reassurance that they are not incompatible with environmentalism allows grassroots organisations to gain broader support and avoid being labelled as extremist. With the time constraints posed by the environmental crisis, there is certainly an argument to be made in favour of a more pragmatic approach, albeit one that is rather corporate and manipulative. Despite these potentially alluring benefits, however, I firmly believe that by perpetuating the causative destructive mindset, corporate strategies can yield no more than fleeting short term gains. They will ultimately only lead the movement into a corner from which it will be impossible to further the cause without rousing crippling contradiction or hypocrisy.
Although the passions of my early mentors lay in the ocean depths, the conversations they encouraged were largely abstract and values-based. In doing so they set me up for a life-long commitment to a broad range of both environmental and social justice causes which, when viewed at a values level, are inextricably connected. In order to affect deep and lasting change, conservationists must challenge the hegemony of economic rationalism in the public debate, rather than simply work within the parameters of the status quo. Daniel Hunter captures this need in his powerful metaphor of politicians as balloons tied to a rock. Swatting at the balloons can only sway them so far. Real reform demands that we take up the more difficult task of shifting the rock itself – through education and a rekindling of humankind’s innate affinity for the natural world. This is the approach that Bill McKibben has pursued as a leader of the divestment movement. An avid writer, his numerous publications engage wide audiences in deeper intellectual reflection. Most importantly, he continues to appeal to the immorality of profiting from irresponsible economic ventures. The messaging that “if it’s wrong to wreck the planet, then it’s wrong to profit from that wreckage,” inspires true passion, and is all the more persuasive for it.
Common goals need not require a common motivation, but this is not to say that parties must at least pretend to be commonly driven. There is nothing embarrassing about promoting environmental conservation on deep ecological grounds, even if any wider political support is primarily economically informed. To present a façade of agreement with pure economic rationalism is disingenuous, alienating to potential supporters and does the movement a disservice. It may be that the present urgency requires a compromise between pragmatism and idealism, but conservationists must never lose sight of their driving principles. Real change in Australia requires a radical shift in values. This cannot possibly happen if environmental activism denies its true roots.
