Sustaining the Earth: The past, present and future of
the green revolution.
By John Young
New South Wales University Press, 1991. $19.95
Reviewed by Craig Brittain
John Young has moved from the History Department at the University of Adelaide, to being director of the Mawson Graduate Centre of Environmental Studies, to running a wooden boat-building school in partnership with his wife in Tasmania. From 1980 to '85, he was chair of the association which built the sail training ship One and All to coincide with South Australia's 150th anniversary. Now he is putting his energy behind the alternative culture which he believes is crucial for the future of humanity.
The book examines the ideological underpinnings of both the environmental crisis and the environmental movement: the one the result of western civilisation and mainstream Christianity's belief that Nature is to be subdued and is there solely for our benefit; the other contained in the notion of stewardship (also a part of the Christian tradition), that we are responsible for the environment and for each other.
Young sees the industrialised world as suffering from acute alienation: not so much from the means of production as from the meaning of production — we've forgotten what the economy is for.
Like R.H. Tawney in the '20s and Fritz Schumacher in the '70s, he believes that western civilisation is spiritually bankrupt. It dominated and destroyed the planet to the extent that it dispensed with social values — and it is these values which have to be regained. What is needed, and is emerging in the green movement, is the development of a global morality.
For examples of what such a morality might include, Young looks to models from the Pacific islands and other indigenous peoples, and certain experiments in bio-regionalism and communalism, where emphasis is placed on responsibility, kinship, obligations and the awareness of interdependence and interrelatedness of the living and non-living world.
While Labor politicians and Social Democrats see no way out of the present economic crisis apart from a push for "economic growth" and the abandonment of previous concessions to the environment, Young regards this whole outlook as a dead end. He sees no solution for the unemployed in job creation schemes that are temporary at best, teach no real skills and in any case only fit people for an industrial system that's had its day.
Speaking from first-hand experience, he proposes an alternative strategy: "to work through community organisations and local governments to divert funds solely into projects which enable people to sustain and employ themselves. The aim should be to provide ... practical experience of a consciously creative and therefore subversive nature ... The object would be to remove as many people as possible from as much as possible of the consumer economy. The paradoxical effect would be to gain them as members of society."
Young is an optimist; he has faith in our ability to change. He believes that "practical steps towards environmental reform achieve something directly, however small, while helping by example to undermine the ideology of industrial dominance".
Some readers of a less optimistic disposition might find it hard to see how a change of heart (no matter how widespread) will have any significant effect on the modern economic system, or the need for most people to struggle for employment within it. When one considers the incredible lengths to which the Western world went to destroy communism because it "threatened our way of life", it doesn't seem likely that capitalism will just recognise the error of its ways and disappear. But perhaps he's right, and this is how real revolutions begin.