No-good do-gooder
* Pretend to be greener than thou
* The world hanging on your every word
* Sabotage the green movement
Single-handedly, you are going to hijack environmentalism. Yep, you’re going to join the tofu-eating tree-huggers brigade. You will become a bitter, twisted sandal-ista whose doom-mongering and unrelenting preachery will marginalize the environmental movement. Your mission is to make the greenies irrelevant.
Already the writing is on the wall. Heed the words of the government’s former chief scientist Sir David King, who described global warming as a greater risk than terrorism and warns that green activists are putting the fight against climate change at risk by wanting to take society back to the seventeenth century. There’s also the founding father of the British environmental movement and chairman of the government’s green watchdog, the Sustainable Development Commission, Sir Jonathon Porritt, who has lambasted fellow environmentalists for being too ‘narrow…too depressing, too dowdy’. You must take it from here. Set up your own lobbying group to sabotage the sandal-wearers from within. You, my friend, are going to put the mental into environmentalism.
Already, your do-gooderism has received sponsorship from local firms. You are wacky, a bit out there, and you pretend you have what it takes to save the planet, so long as everyone works together. Your global organization operates from a one-man office in Watford. You have no business plan – being an environmentalist means you have no economic understanding and the financial acumen of a bedbug – but you do know you need a trustee. So, you write to James Lovelock, whose laboratory is in an old Cornish mill. This is the man who devised the Gaia hypothesis, a revolutionary theory that the earth is a self-regulating super-organism. The 88-year-old is considered a hero by the greens. More importantly, he unequivocally supports your hidden agenda, namely that lifestyle adjustments will do nothing to save the planet but might make some pathetic specimens feel better about themselves. ‘Enjoy life while you can. Because if you’re lucky it’s going to be twenty years before it hits the fan,’ he recently said.
While waiting for Lovelock to reply, you compile your first press release. It is titled ‘Lighten up’ and explains in needless detail that, by painting walls in a pale colour, homes require less artificial light, use less electricity and ergo save the world. Your second release explains how cleaning the back of your fridge can rescue us all from planetary apocalypse. ‘Dusty coils increase energy consumption by 30 per cent.’ Each release is stained with tears to symbolize the suffering that fat, rich Westerners are causing to the planet. Walk more. Eat by candlelight. Grow your own berries. Live in a long house. Stop breathing. Your stock-in-trade soon becomes the dissemination of tiny solutions to save the planet; nondescript yet ostentatious gestures that you, like your potential trustee, Lovelock, know will have absolutely no impact.
At the end of each press release is a box of statistics showing how the earth is falling apart at the seams. You are extra careful to promote only flawed figures documenting the collapsing ecology. Deforestation. Mass species extinction. Pollution. Over-use of chemicals. Over-consumption. Soil erosion. Global warming. All are indeed taking place, but your overblown figures are completely wrong. Already, you have garnered some media reaction for your ‘Lilac lifeline: pale paint will save us all’ exposé in the Watford Observer. You suspect that sales of lilac will dip sharply. Another check of press cuttings refers to your coil release with the desultory headline ‘Earth in a strangling coil’. Its introductory paragraph reads: ‘A Watford-based pressure group says that we will all die if we don’t act now – starting with our fridges.’ You write to ask for a correction, explaining that you are an international pressure group.
With feedback distinctly underwhelming, you decide that sitting around in a flower-power shirt is getting you nowhere. Time to spice things up a bit. You hire five gorilla costumes and several inflatable bananas and, with four like-minded dowdies, stand outside the headquarters of a well-known multinational company that has interests in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Dressed as ‘eco-chimpions’, you chant and wave placards.
As security guards attempt to usher you from the steps, a scuffle erupts. You turn around to see a gorilla punching a middle-aged security guard on the chin. At that moment, a freelance photographer arrives, takes a picture of the scuffle and sells it to the Sun. Britain’s most popular newspaper publishes it the next day with the headline: ‘You couldn’t ape it up.’ Three weeks later, your group, minus the one on remand for GBH, climb on to the roof of parliament wearing matching hats made by an indigenous tribe at risk from tree-logging in Ecuador. You unfurl a banner declaring that your (now planetary) liberation movement intends to f**k the system. Again, there is an unseemly grapple as police officers attempt to wrestle you before the gaze of the world’s media. Eventually, you are arrested for trying to enforce existing government policy against the wishes of the government.
The fillip is that you are now official hero of the environmental movement, a cause célèbre among the eco-warriors. This time, your press release is pretty damn edgy and calls for the overthrow of capitalism through ‘whatever means possible’. Its banality is enough to make the national press. Thom Yorke of Radiohead calls up to venture his support. You accept and smile approvingly, knowing that there is nothing better than a middle-class pop star telling the rest of us how to live. REM joins the bandwagon, saying it’s the end of the world as we know it. Jeremy Clarkson refers to you in his Sun column as a ‘mealy-mouthed environmental weird bear fool’. You have arrived, even if Lovelock has yet to reply.
During a subsequent guest-speaker appearance you reveal details of your next strategy to an audience of unreconstructed Sixties activists and upper-class Oxford undergraduates. You offer them £20 – a week’s worth of lentils, tofu and organic wine straight from New South Wales – and they promise obediently to execute your plan. In early January 2009 London awakens to find that the statue of Winston Churchill has been defiled. Headgear from the Ecuadorian rainforest sits skewiff on his marble forehead. Graffiti sprayed on the base of the nearby Cenotaph reads: ‘Eco-nazis, don’t knock ‘em’. Images of the man who rescued Britain from the black hole of true Nazism appear in every world newspaper. You are the new Banksy; the media has dubbed you the face of the entire green movement.
Overnight, you have been recast as the leader of a cult. Emails flock in from believers, messages of support from across the world. You take advantage and order all followers to wear flip-flops made from African elephant hide. You preach constant self-flagellation, particularly for those caught carrying plastic bags, bottled water, or buying individually wrapped (gasp!) Quality Street chocolates. Your members are told they shouldn’t date unless they are living together, thereby sharing lighting and heating. You even have temples – the wind turbines deep in the country from where you deliver sermons on dusty coils and the importance of lilac paint.
Mainstream groups like Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace issue statements to distance themselves from you, but no one listens. You are the green movement. You squarely blame big business and rich Westerners for all the planet’s current troubles. And then you play your ace of spades. You publish your manifesto, which demands a slew of eco-taxes. You demand 20 pence per litre of petrol, tax on cheap flights, restrictions on 4x4s, a plastic-bag tax, fines if families flush their toilet more than once a day. ‘The economic rape of the planet must be stopped if we are to let our children inherit a working earth,’ you say, smiling smugly into the Sky News cameras.
The paparazzi cannot get enough of you. They have already tracked down your mother, who says you were a lovely child who only ever seemed interested in killing worms and putting wingless flies under a magnifying glass when the weather was hot. But all good things come to an end. You call the tabloids to say that you will be outside McDonald’s just after 3 p.m. At the allotted time you leave the restaurant clutching a Big Mac, a two-litre bottle of New Zealand spring water, and a genuine ivory carving. You wear a cotton shirt which came from the modern slave trade and was manufactured with an over-use of chemicals. The photographers snap you getting into an idling SUV you then drive aggressively towards Heathrow airport. You are heading to New York for a weekend designer-shopping spree. Inside the terminal, you make an impromptu press statement in which you explain that trying to save the planet is total bollocks, a massive waste of time and resources and that you didn’t mean a word of it. ‘Sorry, everyone.’ You smile. You declare that it is far too late to cut greenhouse gases and that ethical shopping is a scam. And, finally, in the hall of Heathrow’s new Terminal 5, besieged by the world’s media, you borrow verbatim the words from the man for whose reply you are still waiting, ‘Green is the colour of mould and corruption.’ The whole concept is utterly jaded.
* The environmental movement becomes increasingly marginalized as people get bored of being told what to do. Probable.
* People realize that tiny sacrifices are making no difference whatsoever and environmentalism becomes seen as little more than faddism. Likely.
* An authoritative report says that the planet has passed its tipping point. In a pioneering statement it concludes that people might as well enjoy life while they can. Predictable.
* A series of riots erupt across Western capitals targeting affluent homeowners and businesses as a new activist movement decides to overthrow the state to try to save the earth. Maybe.
* Environmental issues move increasingly into mainstream politics. Government policies are amended accordingly but the world goes about its business like it always has. Certain.
Likelihood of environmental movement being seen as preachy by majority of public by 2015:67%