I’m not that young any more – in fact I’m knocking on a bit and I’ve never subscribed to the view that age inevitably brings wisdom, not least because it also brings senility and a certain narrowing of perspectives. I’ve spent most of my sentient life trying to get a better understanding of three things: me, the world I live in (in a planetary rather than a local sense) and what my species is really like. I think, belatedly, I’ve realised something quite important about the latter.
I’ve known for a long time that western man (and woman) has, over a thousand years or so, felt free to exterminate native peoples encountered as we explored and pillaged the globe; we have followed something very unlike the Star Trek Prime Directive that there can be no interference with the internal development of alien civilizations. The work which illuminated this understanding for me was “ Rivers of Blood, Rivers of Gold: Europe’s Conquest of Indigenous Peoples” by Mark Cocker.
Generally, the driving force behind extermination was greed; either ‘they’ were on land we wanted, or they were on land on top of gold, silver, diamonds – you name it – we wanted. Our perception of native peoples shifted from innocents living in an earthly paradise to sub-humans who would be better off Christianised and doing the work we needed doing if we were to prosper. Whether it was offering a bounty for every native ear or scalp (depending on the continent involved), selling wallets made from the breasts of native women or just sending the army in to protect our civilising missionaries, we were good at genocide for profit and saved their souls along the way – a bit like the Auschwitz I, slogan “Arbeit macht frei” (Work Makes Free)’ made by prisoners with metalwork skills and erected by order of the Nazis in June 1940 – a strange kind of freedom and a strange kind of saving.
So, you’ll understand, I haven’t a particularly high opinion of my kind, although some of my best friends are human. Of course we are capable of amazing things, including goodness and self-sacrifice as well as great evil or irresponsibility. I’m less sure now, though, that it is western humanity that carries the guilt, since other cultures seem not to be immune. I’m also not as sure that it’s entirely our fault or that it represents some kind of moral struggle we are destined to run and re-run until the second coming. I think there’s another paradigm which explains what we have done and continue to do; it has to do with ideology if not morality. It’s called free market economics.
My new learning came from another book, not this time about the extermination of native clans and races: this one is about the extermination of any living thing which we encountered. It turns out that when indigeneous Americans, Tasmanians and Africans were killed, it really wasn’t personal.
The book is “The Unnatural History of the Sea: the past and future of humanity and fishing” by Professor Callum Roberts. It makes for desperate reading, not only, or even largely, because he keeps trying to place Grimsby in Yorkshire. It tells the story of our pollution and overfishing of inland waters, of our turning to coastal sea waters, then to distant western waters, then to distant world waters, then to distant deep waters. It speaks of the extermination of colony after colony and species after species of water creatures. As ‘limitless’ fish stock diminished we improved our technology so that we could hoover up (often literally) the few that were left and then moved on to another species until we pretty well ran out of species. If we bumped into otters, dodos, auks, lobsters, shrimps (again you name it) we hunted them to the brink too. Along the way we transformed the sea bed, trawling much of it into flat, near lifeless sludge supporting only bacterial life.
Some species of coral can live for over 4,000 years — longer than any other animal that lives in the ocean. Deep sea and cold water corals were once thought an impossibility – prescient rather than mistaken, since they probably soon will be. As for warm water corals, the Caribbean has around 8% left alive it seems. The book doesn’t mention the role coral plays in carbon capture, only its age, incredible beauty and the part it plays in sustaining an ecosystem, a food and life chain of astonishing complexity.
What do I conclude from all this, apart from having my worst fears about the kind of animal I am confirmed?
Well, what could drive people to systematically destroy the environment and the animal life which are vital to our own survival? Why would we industrially fish out in a few years fish stocks which are, potentially, one of the best forms of renewable energy – life itself? You’ve guessed it haven’t you? It’s greed; it’s a competitive market in a finite resource and the scramble for profit now – whatever the cost later. We keep doing it: it’s the nature of the beast. Collectively we will destroy anything inanimate or living if there is money to be made, whatever the medium and long term consequences; all our history tells us that and we can’t change. Some of the most powerful city-based civilisations died out in part because they destroyed their immediate environment, cutting down all the trees to burn or build with. No trees = no city, but that’s tomorrow’s problem. But to get back to this finite resource thing, it’s not just oil or water or rare earths, or fish, or glaciers or whales – it’s the planet.
Free markets don’t make for responsible stewardship – ever. We can’t be trusted to act responsibly if there’s money to be made. Of course we, in our free democracies, elect governments to be responsible for more than their own survival but that doesn’t work either does it? A politician’s time frame is four or five years and, ideally, civilisations should aim for a bit longer. Democracy is about bribing key parts of the electorate every few years, lying or being ‘economical with the truth’ and recognising that the electorate have a short memory; after all, ‘they’re all the same aren’t they’ is probably truer now than in the pre-Blair years, though the Labour Party seems to have rediscovered its value base. Why do politicians do it? because it works of course. They bribe and we respond. We probably get the politicians we deserve. The EU Common Fisheries Policy quotas were framed by scientists, modified by civil servants to placate politicians and then raised by politicians to placate us, so that we could have cheap and plentiful fish now – well then as of 2012. Arguably, a dictator who didn’t have to court popularity would be as likely (more likely?) to rule in a disinterested way as long as some money could be funnelled into Swiss accounts. I have a feeling though, that a party standing on a principled platform of consuming less now so that our children would have a future might do rather well. That’s why the Green Party are prospering and why the Labour Party membership is soaring now its led by someone brave enough to say New Labour was old Conservatism. After all, even the ‘we’re all in it together’ calls of this benighted government have made most people think sacrifices have to be made to save the banks (and bankers). Surely saving the planet is (almost?) as important.
I grew up in Grimsby (on the Lincolnshire coast). I remember the ‘Cod Wars’ when those pesky Icelanders tried to stop us fishing in what they said were their waters. At the time no-one mentioned overfishing. I live near Newlyn now – a tiny place by comparison but the largest fishing port in the country because Grimsby and ports like it stopped catching much fish a long time ago. If only there were a National Trust for the seas.
In his conclusion to “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism” published way back in the 1930s, Weber lamented the loss of religious underpinning to capitalism’s spirit.
“This order is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which today determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition, with irresistible force. Perhaps it will so determine them until the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt.
In Baxter’s view the care for external goods should only lie on the shoulders of the ‘saint like a light cloak, which can be thrown aside at any moment.’ But fate decreed that the cloak should become an iron cage.”
So what do we need? We need regulation not untrammelled market freedom. We need supra-national decision making at EU and UN levels (I wonder if this is the real reason why the Conservative Party so hates the EU; not the loss of sovereignty but a brake on the stampede for profit and edge of the cliff mayhem). We also need politicians to be kept out of the loop on regulation. And we need probity and a dedication to public service.
As a senior citizen, I look at the policies of our coalition Conservative government and despair: a free market in education, a free market in health, cutting regulation and freeing the entrepreneurs, limiting employment rights and pouring scorn on EU legislation and bureaucracy. The stakes for us are incredibly high. They only stand to lose money, most of which is ours not theirs in any case. We stand to lose everything.
