Popular environmentalism: a manifesto for nature and re-enchantment
Over the course of 2021, the Common Good Foundation has worked with writers, environmentalists, academics and others to develop a politics of nature and the environment that both reflects a richer understanding of human beings as creatures rooted in nature, and that would have wide purchase in the country, reaching the people and places often sceptical about the claims of contemporary environmentalism. This manifesto, written by Tobias Phibbs, is the result. The introduction is reproduced below.
—
During the last 18 months our lives have been bare, digitally mediated and stripped of real presence, encounter or vitality. Alienation and loneliness have increased, with many still too scared to return to living something approaching a normal life. And yet our physical confinement has led to a hungering for something more.
This hungering is found in the waiting lists for allotments, the queues for garden centres, the rediscovery of wild swimming and illicit rambling as British traditions, and the movement of people from the cities to the countryside; and it has been found too in the endless stories – some of them factually dubious – about nature returning during the start of the pandemic: the goats of Llandudno, the dolphins of Venice, the murmurings about the unique clarity of stars we saw in the still Spring of 2020. There is a desire to once again find our place in nature.
At the same time the environment has never been more prominent in our politics. Parties compete over commitments to plant trees, invest in green infrastructure, and achieve net zero. This prominence has been driven by the shift from climate change as distant threat to present reality. Our inability to impose institutional restraints on capitalism’s endless appetite is leading not just to the breakdown of our climate and ecosystems, but also to great movements of people, geopolitical conflict, and challenges to democracy.
The latest IPCC report makes it clear that we are heading towards irreversible tipping points, with a 1.5C rise in temperature likely by 2040. Global temperature is increasing faster than it has for 2,000 years, and extreme weather events are growing in intensity and number. Pollution continues to harm human and animal health, and ecosystems are collapsing due to deforestation, high-intensity agribusiness, and urbanisation. Already, there are limits to what prevention can do; mitigation and adaptation will be part of the solution too. Our lives are already changing, and the pace of these changes will accelerate over the coming decades.
However, at least in Britain, debate around climate change and the environment takes place at a high degree of abstraction, and has no relationship with the hungering for something more than what modern life has to offer. It is either a technocratic debate, with solutions so rarefied as to imply no impact on ordinary people’s lives whatsoever, or else a trivial form of ethical consumerism. Allegra Stratton, for example, spokesperson for the COP26 summit in Glasgow, suggested that individuals might do their bit by stopping rinsing dishes before putting them in the dishwasher.
Worse, where climate change policy does seem to directly affect people – as with the low traffic neighbourhoods in London – it does so largely punitively, and in a way that risks leaning into a culture war. Our culture finds it near-impossible to talk substantively or normatively about the good life or what might constitute it, and we have therefore failed, beyond fringe subcultures, to generate a richer vision of how we might live lives better in tune with our natural surroundings.
The aim of this manifesto is to develop a programme that might bring people not typically attracted to environmentalism into the fold by re-enchanting nature and our everyday lives. Conceptualised not in terms of the abstract or global, but rather the local and national, a popular environmentalism would proceed from mutual interests, broadly conceived, and tie in with a wider strategy of national renewal in our polity and everyday lives. This manifesto begins by detailing the political background and possible fault lines in public opinion, before arguing climate change is symptomatic of our wider disenchantment, and finally outlining our proposals.
This is not a comprehensive document – key issues of carbon capture, nuclear power, international pressure and so on are avoided altogether. That is not because they are unimportant; any serious response to climate change begins with investment in nuclear power, for example. But this manifesto focuses on the environment and nature not as some external force that happens to us, but rather something we live in and through, and suggests changes that would transform our everyday lives as well as carbon emissions.
Underlying our approach are three principles. Firstly, that Britain should be a productive country, and its industry should be good for nature and the climate. Secondly, that nature should be a common treasury for all, with everyone given the opportunity to develop a rich relationship with their natural surroundings. Finally, that local places and environments should be encouraged to develop their distinctiveness and particularity. From these principles flows a politics and a policy that can resonate in the country.