Greens bite back at Burchill

3:34pm Friday 15th August 2008

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In her latest book, Julie Burchill claims all greens are unsexy, massively wealthy and hypocrites. Environmental reporter Sarah Lewis fights back

All environmentalists are hypocrites. If you want to engage in society there really isn’t very much choice but to be. You know, stuff like travelling, using electricity, eating food, it can all be pretty hard to do in the most responsible fashion. Of course there are greener options, but the world is not set up to make it easy – at least not yet.

But because you sometimes need a car, or just really want a bacon sandwich, doesn’t mean you can’t still be educated, or even concerned, about the state of the planet.

Not according to Julie Burchill. She claims in her book Not In My Name: A Compendium Of Modern Hypocrisy that anyone who worries about environmental issues while simultaneously wondering how to get to work and back is not only a hypocrite, but “supremely unsexy” and akin to the Nazis who, she says, were the first greens because they hated supermarkets.

As I understand it, their fondness for incinerators precludes them from such a rubric.

She goes on to say that she finds “something particularly weird about the idea of Jewish Greens”.

When I interviewed her she told me: “I know Hitler was a big green, so it seems odd that a people as clever as the Jews would ever go for such mumbo-jumbo. Nature worship and fascism have a strong historical link.”

So too does nature worship and Paganism, nature worship and Hinduism, and – shock, horror – nature worship and Judaism. In fact, historically, there is really very little to link what we would consider modern environmentalism with any particular political party.

Sure, the Nazis were into a bit of ecology, but only as part of the whole cleansing of the human race thing. It isn’t really the same as modern environmentalists trying to protect trees because they give us food and oxygen.

In reality, the call of eco-fascism at the hint of a tree-hugger is wildly reductive and smacks of a world view gained by only peering at it through a keyhole.

But then as someone who is both Jewish and green – and sexy, natch – it’s unlikely I’m ever going to agree with her.

While Burchill’s essay on environmentalism in her new book is an ad hominem attack on Greens, in person she reduces people’s concerns about climate change to simple self-importance.

“Some people love to worry,” she says. “It fills up their joyless lives and makes them feel important.”

Disagreeing with the science of climate change is a choice we are all allowed, but to deny that man is having a negative effect on nature is blind in the extreme.

We only have to look to the millions of tonnes of plastic floating in the oceans, to the mountains which have had their tops removed in the desperate scrabble for coal, and to the carcinogenic toxins found in human breast milk to see that something is not quite as it should be.

Burchill also claims environmentalists are against cheap food, clothes and travel because the chattering classes simply want to put the paupers in their place and prevent them from having any of the privileges of modern society.

Yet the reality is cheap food and cheap clothes are produced by people even poorer than Burchill’s beloved British working class, by people who are kept in their place of poverty and destitution by the constant demand for £3 jeans and cavernous warehouses filled with the cheapest and most readily available food the world has ever seen.

Similarly, cheap flights are not primarily taken by people on lower incomes. They are taken by middle class business trippers flying to Manchester or Edinburgh, or middle class couples nipping off to Barcelona for a romantic weekend away. The victims are all those who stand to lose out as climate change takes hold.

Indeed, Burchill herself says: “The rich West cannot tell the Third World not to want all the things we have. It’s definitely hypocritical and very likely racist”. But by insisting our poor has access to these cheap things – through unfair trade, exploitation of the poor of other countries and resource plundering in developing nations – she is herself complicit in the hypocrisy and racism of which she speaks.

Environmentalism is not some Illuminati-fuelled conspiracy to keep the poor in their place. It is not driven by the rich. I know this, because there are vastly more environmentalists than there are rich people.

With more than 2,000,000 known groups worldwide working towards environmental and social justice it is, in fact, the largest social movement in human history.

Author and environmentalist Paul Hawken describes this seemingly arbitrary network of distinct groups as humanity’s immune response to the ecological crisis. A swelling of aid and support from every walk of life – independent of one another but all working towards the same goal.

A movement where not everyone agrees, because there is no history, no system and no ideology, and certainly no definitive solution, but one where concern for the environment and the rights of every living thing on the planet come together and take the place of concern for business, profit and class.

It isn’t about poor Julie not being able to buy a T-shirt for a couple of quid on the high street, it’s about the rights of humans in Asia to not have to work in a sweatshop to produce that T-shirt, the rights of humans in India not to have to drink water poisoned by pesticides and insecticides from a cotton plantation, the rights of humans in Bangladesh to live on their land without it being gradually taken from them by the rising seas of an imbalanced planet.

Julie Burchill cries for one little girl in Delhi using a foot pump rather than a diesel power-driven irrigation system, hailing environmentalists as evil for making her do this, but fails to mention the estimated ten million people displaced through environmental deterioration every single year that environmentalists are trying to help.

Looking after the planet is not about haves and have-nots. Flying, hot baths, road trips and iPods: all those things can still happen, but just with a little thought for the other 6.6 billion people who live here too.

It comes down to this very simple idea: we are all in this together. Us, the air, the soil, the water, the animals and plants, we are all dependent on each other. If one goes, we all go.

So niggle that someone asked you to walk half a mile to work, or complain that you have to take your empty cab-sav to the bottle bank, but also take some time to appreciate that we are all part of a much, much bigger picture.