ABC screens anti-environmental fantasy

July 29, 1998
Issue 

By Allen Myers

Anybody inclined to believe the federal government's complaints about the ABC being "left wing" would have been quickly brought back to reality by tuning in to the first part of the Against Nature series, screened on July 21.

The film was an attack on environmentalism that would have sent corporate polluters' hearts everywhere a-patter with enthusiasm. It must also have set some sort of record for dishonest and shameless distortions of both reality and the views of those it pretended to combat.

When Against Nature was first shown on Britain's Channel 4 last year, complaints to the Independent Television Commission led to a ruling that the program's makers had misled environmentalists whom they interviewed about "the content and purpose" of the film they were making, and had then distorted their views by "selective editing".

These distortions were used to provide seeming support for the film's repeated sweeping generalisations about what "environmentalists say" or "greens claim", most of which were followed by exaggerations or misrepresentations.

The ABC included a very brief reference to the ITC ruling at the end of its broadcast — the theory seems to be that it's okay to broadcast things you know to be lies, if you gently allude to the dishonesty during the final credits.

However, the dishonesty went far beyond anything the ITC was asked to rule on. For a start, many of the film's on-camera "experts" were anything but.

Lying about science

Then there was repeated misrepresentation of scientific opinion, or of plain fact. For example, right-wing think-tanker Steven Hayward, in everything-is-getting-better mode, declared, "Lake Erie 30 years ago was virtually dead. Today you can fish in it, you can swim in it."

But as environmental writer Peter Montague has pointed out, in Lake Erie and Lake Michigan, "sport fishing is able to thrive only because governments stock the lakes with hatchery-bred fish each year ... each year state and provincial governments in the US and Canada issue book-length catalogues listing coves and bays throughout the Great Lakes where it is not safe to eat the fish."

Repeatedly, the film-makers claimed that "many" scientists doubt the evidence that gases such as carbon dioxide released by human industrial activity are changing the climate. At one point, the authoritative-sounding voice-over declared, "Many scientists have concluded that carbon dioxide doesn't even affect climate".

Unsurprisingly, none of these "many" scientists were named. Nor was there any mention of the reasoned opinion of the 2500 scientists of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, that measurable global warming is not merely a threat, but has already begun.

Embroidering their fiction, the film-makers went on to declare, "Many environmentalists have been forced to accept much of the scientific evidence against global warming"!

On the rare occasions that the film-makers stumbled upon a real scientific fact, they still managed to get things wrong. For instance, much was made of the fact that nature produces many pollutants — as if anyone had ever doubted it.

When Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines erupted, the voice-over declaimed, it put into the atmosphere "30 million tonnes of sulphur dioxide — almost twice as much as all the factories, power plants and cars in the United States do in a whole year".

The difference between Pinatubo and factories is that society has the power to decide what comes out of one, but not the other. The fact that nature produces something dangerous is no reason to be blasé about producing more of it. The sun produces more heat in a second than all human activity in history, but that's no reason to set your house on fire.

It is also the (fortunate) case that Pinatubo doesn't erupt annually. In fact, before the 1991 eruption, the most recent eruption occurred in the year 1356. So the film's comparison could just as well have been: "The factories, power plants and cars in the United States each year produce as much sulphur dioxide as Pinatubo does, on average, in three centuries".

Covering for imperialism

Sometimes the distortions became so grotesque that it was possible to imagine that perhaps the film was a parody gone wrong. In this category were the description of German Nazis as "the most notorious environmentalists in history", and the further attempt to identify greens with fascism on the basis that Hitler was a vegetarian.

However, the main misrepresentation of Against Nature is that poverty in the Third World is being preserved by greens' opposition to "progress":

"In the name of preserving nature, environmentalists have challenged the old ideas of progress and economic development. But in doing so, they have been accused of needlessly consigning millions of people in the Third World to poverty and early death."

(If you're wondering who has so accused environmentalists, it's the reactionaries who made the film.)

The film carefully tiptoes around a rather fundamental question. Even if one accepted the absurd claim that environmentalists want to and have the power to preserve poverty in the Third World, it would still be necessary to ask: where does Third World poverty come from?

Third World poverty is considerably older than First World environmentalism. Why is it that the First World is rich and the Third World is poor?

Those who suggest that the answer has something to do with imperialism will be dismissed by the film-makers as followers of Adolf Hitler. The word "imperialism" occurs only once in the film, when one Dr Frank Furedi asserts that environmentalism in the Third World is "as intrusive today as imperialism was in the 19th century".

What about imperialism in the 20th century? Does Furedi believe it has ceased to exist, or has it merely become non-intrusive?

Against Nature totally falsifies both history and present-day reality, denying that past and present imperialist exploitation is the ongoing cause of Third World poverty.

(One can understand such a view being put by right-wing think-tanks and Republican senators, but, in one more twist that smacks of deliberate spoof, Friends of the Earth have discovered that the makers of Against Nature are mainly members and supporters of a British sect that claims to be "Marxist", the Revolutionary Communist Party, of which Furedi himself is a leading light.)

It is this cover-up for exploitation that explains the film's popularity with television programmers. (The ABC, while screening this garbage, has demonstrated its pro-capitalist political correctness by refusing to show David Bradbury's excellent anti-uranium documentary Jabiluka.)

This suggests the main lesson that environmentalists should draw from the experience. A green movement that doesn't clearly identify imperialism as the enemy will end up being made a scapegoat by imperialism and its friends.

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