The man who stared at goats

Some Greens get my goat.
I don’t mean that dreary bunch whose animating ambition is for a down-table seat in a low-grade government, but the teenage moralists with mid-life crisis who insist on telling you that, personally, they are neither Left nor Right because environmental issues transcend class politics, like.

No, they don’t.
Goats. Marx’s closest collaborator Frederick Engels drew profound conclusions from staring at goats. How come, he wondered, that Greek islands which had been thickly populated in antiquity were now home to roaming herds of bearded beasts very few of whom were human? He sussed that the reason the goat population had soared might be the same reason human numbers had steeply declined.
The islands had once been carpeted in trees which bound the soil to the land. But big city states and burgeoning empires had made it worthwhile to cut down swathes of forest to build ships. As soil became thinner and ploughing more difficult, grazing animals replaced arable farming. Eventually, cattle and even sheep could no longer survive. Only rummaging goats managed to prosper. As people fled a land they could no longer live from, goats inherited the scoured earth.
Engels argued that within the limits of their understanding and of the technology they had available, the people had acted rationally. To refuse to move into timber production was to risk being left behind by adjacent communities which had embraced modernisation.  
In other words, it hadn’t been that there were too many people on the islands consuming too much, but that the way the community interacted with nature had been determined by the economic and political needs of the most powerful elements in surrounding society.
Engels went on to observe the way that modern capitalism, operating on an industrial scale, speeded up and widened the scope of ruination of the earth: “What cared the Spanish planters in Cuba, who burned down forests on the slopes of the mountains and obtained from the ashes sufficient fertiliser for one generation of very profitable coffee trees – what cared they that the heavy tropical rainfall afterwards washed away the unprotected upper stratum of the soil, leaving behind only the bare rock? In relation to nature, as to society, the present mode of production is predominantly concerned only about the immediate, the most tangible result; and then surprise is expressed that the more remote effects of its actions directed to this end turn out to be quite different, are mostly quite the opposite in character.”
It wasn’t interaction with the land to provide a living for the population which ravaged the environment, but a system of production fueled by profit and the competitive drive to accumulate.
Engels identified the connection between the threat to the eco-system and the system of economic organisation. The difference between the coffee planters of Cuba in the 19th century and agribusiness today is that the system has gone global. The threat is no longer to the ecology of this or that country or region, but to the planet and to life itself.
What hasn’t changed is the necessity of understanding this connection and of basing a strategy for survival upon it.
The diversity of the huge protest at the trade talks in Seattle in 1999 which detonated the mass movement for global justice has been widely summed up in the phrase, ‘Teamsters and turtles’ – blue-collar workers threatened by globalisation alongside marchers for the protection of endangered species. It wasn’t a nice coincidence but a necessary alliance.
The problem is not growth but the way growth is planned, or not. The enemy isn’t industry but the pattern of ownership and organisation of industry. The task is not moral persuasion but revolutionary mass action. Greens who affect to disdain the Left-Right divide delude themselves. As well as which, they are very boring. Listening to them is like being guilt-tripped by a goat.
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The inconvenient truth about Al Gore is that he declared himself ‘environmentally conscious’ during the 1992 presidential election – then, with Clinton, broke every major ‘green’ promise they’d made.
Up to a point he admits that now, and says he’s put such errors behind him. And maybe so. His film is effective in presenting the facts and figures of environmental degradation to a public in the US and elsewhere which increasingly knows it’s been lied to. An Inconvenient Truth points out that 100 percent of articles in scientific journals say that climate change is a real and growing danger – but 53 percent of news-stories characterise the phenomenon as ‘a theory.’
The film pulls no punches in alerting its audience to the likely results of doing nothing. But too late for the Kitanemuk.
The Kitanemuk made their home in the Elk Hills of central California for hundreds, maybe thousands of years. But in 2001, the last of their 100 burial grounds and holy places were obliterated by Occidental Petroleum. The company “destroyed forever the evidence that we once existed on this land,” lamented Dee Dominguez, whose great grandfather had been a signatory to the 1851 treaty that surrendered the Elk Hills to federal ownership. In return, the Kitanemuk received a solemn assurance that their lands and their heritage would remain inviolable forever.
In 1995, vice-president Gore dismissed the pleading of the Kitanemuk and drove through the sale of the drilling rights to Occidental, as part of his “Reinventing Government” programme. This was the biggest-ever sale of government-owned rights to private interests in US history.
Gore later admitted that a trust of which he was the beneficiary held $500,000 worth of Occidental stock. Later still, it emerged that Occidental had channeled millions into the Clinton-Gore election war chest.
The Elk Hills scandal was in novelist Gore Vidal’s mind when he commented just after the US release of An Inconvenient Truth that he had always regarded ‘Cousin Albert’ as ‘absolutely pointless as a politician... just another conservative southerner.’
Throughout his career, until his eye strayed towards the White House, Gore was an unrelenting reactionary. He was ‘pro-life’, anti-gun control and called homosexuality ‘abnormal’ and ‘wrong.’ He was, in Vidal’s words, ‘a lover of the Pentagon. There was never anything the Pentagon asked for that Cousin Albert wasn’t down there giving it to them.’ He was one of only 10 Democrats who broke with their party to vote for Bush senior’s 1991 Gulf War.
During Gore’s 2000 presidential campaign, Ralph Nader repeatedly raised his support for Occidental plan to lay waste the sacred grounds of another native people, the Colombian U’wa. In desperation, the 5,000 remnants of this once-mighty nation threatened collective suicide if Occidental went ahead. But when U’wa representative Robert Perez travelled to Washington to press their case, Gore refused him an audience.
In the end, in 2002, facing mass opposition in Colombia and the US, Occidental pulled out. But no thanks at all to Al Gore.
Given this background, it’s hardly a surprise that while An Inconvenient Truth is strong on diagnosing the ailment, the remedies it prescribes are weak to the point of uselessness. Everybody must reduce personal carbon emissions, is the message. But no suggestion of how or by whom the vast forces driving global warming – Occidental Petroleum, for example – might be taken on and defeated.