Theodore Roosevelt’s leadership had brought nature into American politics, uniting the nascent environmental movement already prone to division. Conservationists, led by Gifford Pinchot, were depletionists following in Jevons’ footsteps and believed in taking a utilitarian approach to the use of natural resources. Preservationists such as John Muir, the first president of the Sierra Club, founded in 1892, rejected the Conservationists’ utilitarianism. For Muir, as for Emerson and Thoreau, nature was a transcendental reality. Nature was needed for men’s souls, not for meeting their material needs. Roosevelt vaulted over Muir’s breach with Pinchot. Pinchot had advocated allowing sheep – hoofed locusts, Muir called them – to graze in forest reserves. Roosevelt spent three days with Muir in Yosemite and, acting at Muir’s prompting, expanded the Yosemite National Park.
The First World War heightened American concerns about energy supplies, a ‘case of national jitters’ after the narrow escape from acute energy scarcity in 1917–18.[24] The 1917 Lever Act put the coal industry under government control, setting prices, allocating supply and requisitioning firms not acting in the public interest, all of which helped trigger America’s first energy crisis – lightless nights, heatless Mondays, shutdowns of factories producing non-essential items, and fuel riots.[25]
Those jitters led to the creation of the United States Coal Commission in 1922. Its three-thousand-page report, assembled by a five-hundred-strong team, sounded the alarm of impending scarcity – the output of natural gas had begun to wane and the production of oil could not long maintain its present rate. As for coal, rather than analyse the impact of government regulation in restricting supply (the geology of the United States hadn’t changed in the fourteen years since the findings of Roosevelt’s National Conservation Commission), it argued that output of coal would struggle to meet demand.[26]
Appointed by President Harding, the commission’s report was received by his successor, Calvin Coolidge. The new president responded to the commission’s report in his first annual message to Congress in December 1923. Acknowledging that the price of coal was ‘unbearably high’, Coolidge gave the barest of nods to its depletionist case and made plain he was not going to intervene in the coal industry. ‘The Federal Government probably has no peacetime authority to regulate wages, prices, or profits in coal at the mines or among dealers, but by ascertaining and publishing facts it can exercise great influence,’ Coolidge declared. The real threat to coal supplies was not from imminent resource depletion. It was the coal industry’s poor labour relations. On this front, Coolidge promised ‘uncompromising action’, urging passage of legislation to settle labour dispute as ‘exceedingly urgent’.[27]
Coolidge’s stand stemmed the depletionist tide for much of the Roaring Twenties. Although Pinchot contemplated running against Coolidge for the Republican nomination in the 1924 election, he decided not to. The Depression in the 1930s reversed the tide. The assumptions underpinning much of Franklin Roosevelt’s Depression-era economic policies ran in the opposite direction. High prices and the dangers of scarcity gave way to low prices and glut, which were blamed for worsening the Depression.
In Europe, calls for a return to nature between the two world wars were a reaction to modernity rather than an articulation of modern man’s need for it – with one major exception. Often they embodied a call to return to the ways of the past; sometimes they were linked to questions of national identity and, on occasion, more than tinged with blood-and-soil nationalism.
The few voices from the political Left tended to be outside the mainstream. The Marxist belief in scientific socialism and the coming dictatorship of the proletariat made communists such as Lenin ideologically hostile to attempts to battle the laws of history. The British Labour party, in the words of Ernest Bevin, emerging out of the bowels of the trade union movement, was hardly in the business of turning the working class into peasants. Elsewhere in Europe, peasant-orientated movements and parties were not about recovering man’s relationship with nature, but pressing claims for land redistribution from landlord to tenant.[28]
In its attitude to nature, National Socialism, together with its British offshoot, was profoundly different from Italian fascism and similar movements elsewhere in Europe, which placed culture and nature as conflicting entities, elevating culture above nature. This led to tension between Italy and Germany when Mussolini embarked on a programme of cutting down trees in the South Tyrol.[29] According to Anna Bramwell in her courageous book, Ecology in the 20th Century,
European fascism, where it had a programme, emphasised forward-looking technological planning and urban development … Germany was the exception, with a tradition, in practice as well as in theory, of looking to nature for philosophical guidance.[30]
That tradition pre-dated Hitler’s rise and was appropriated rather than created by Nazi ideologists. Indeed, the word ecology, Oekologie, was invented in 1866 by Ernst Haeckel as the science of relations between organisms and their environment.[31]
In the 1920s and 1930s, German ideas permeated Britain. They added to an array of ideas championed by prominent literary figures of the age: D.H. Lawrence and the distinctive German brand of serious nature and sun worship and healthy exercise;[32] the Catholic socialism of Hilaire Belloc and G.K. Chesterton (advocates of giving every worker three acres and a cow); T.S. Eliot’s revival of the Christian society and medieval parishes. These disparate voices shared a common loathing of (sub)urban bourgeois culture and hostility to liberal industrial capitalism.
In their criticisms of capitalism and its exploitation of nature, there was little to distinguish Left from Right. Just six months before the outbreak of the Second World War, T.S. Eliot wrote about ‘the evil in particular institutions at particular times’. These included ‘problems such as the hypertrophy of the motive of Profit into a social ideal, the distinction between the use of natural resources and their exploitation, the use of labour and its exploitation, the advantages unfairly accruing to the trader in contrast to the primary producer, the misdirection of the financial machine, the iniquity of usury, and other features of a commercialised society’.[33]
These ideas were seeded in the fertile political soil of nostalgic patriotism that located the essence of England in the English countryside, a country where the desire of people to have their own garden is visible to anyone flying over London into Heathrow airport. ‘The sounds of England, the tinkle of hammer on anvil in the country smithy, the corncrake on a dewy morning, the sound of the scythe against the whetstone, and the sight of a plough team coming over the brow of a hill, the sight that has been in England since England was a land,’ words spoken by Stanley Baldwin in a nostalgia-laden St George’s Day address in 1924.[34]
British politicians began to respond to the consequences of the rapid expansion of England’s cities. Electric trains had extended the reach of the suburbs and, in the inter-war years, the motorcar was further extending it. In 1935, Baldwin’s government passed the Restriction of Ribbon Development Act, designed to limit unplanned suburban spread. Protecting the countryside from expanding cities was an outgrowth of nineteenth-century agitation for social reform of curing urban problems through town planning. Ebenezer Howard proposed the garden city as a peaceful path to reforming industrial society. ‘The key to the problem,’ Howard wrote in 1898, ‘is how to restore the people to the land, that beautiful land of ours, with its canopy of sky, the air that blows upon it, the sun that warms it, the rain and dew that moisten it, the very embodiment of Divine love for man.’[35]
In 1926, Sir Patrick Abercrombie, one of the leading town planners of the age, founded the Council for the Protection of Rural England. Was this an English version of Muir’s communion with nature in Yosemite and the foundation of the Sierra Club in California? Peter Hall, the leading authority on the English planning system, detects a different motive. Rural England was a place of segregation and social stratification.
&nbs
p; The more prosperous members of the old county society, joined by selected newcomers from the cities, have sought to defend a way of life which they regarded traditionally as their right. The weapon they have used, and it has been a powerful one, is conservationist planning. The result has been to segregate the less affluent newcomers as firmly as ever the medieval cottagers were.[36]
By contrast, George Orwell’s England embraced the urban England where Labour drew its support, ‘the clatter of clogs in the Lancashire mill towns, the to-and-fro of the lorries on the Great North Road, the rattle of pin-tables in the Soho pubs’.[37] There was a lively debate within the Left’s intelligentsia between urban socialists and rural distributists, the former pushing for the nationalisation of the means of production, the latter for the expropriation of landowners and the redistribution of land to the rest of society.
In 1928, Hilaire Belloc chaired a debate between George Bernard Shaw, speaking for socialism, and G.K. Chesterton championing distributism. Belloc, himself a distributist, summed up. Industrial civilisation, he prophesied, ‘will break down and therefore end from its monstrous wickedness, folly, ineptitude’ or it will lead ‘the mass of men to become contented slaves’.[38] Before the First World War, Chesterton had written of the need for a Peasant Proprietorship in What’s Wrong with the World. ‘If we are to save property, we must distribute property, almost as sternly and sweepingly as did the French Revolution,’ a sentiment closer in spirit to Robespierre than Edmund Burke.
Orwell was dismissive of the distributists, writing that a return to small-scale peasant ownership was impossible.[39] In The Road to Wigan Pier, Orwell wrote of what he called the Chesterton-type of writer, who wanted ‘to see a free peasant or other small-owner living in his privately-owned and probably insanitary cottage; not a wage-slave living in an excellently appointed Corporation flat and tied down by restrictions as to sanitation’.[40]
After the First World War, the younger generation espousing return-to-the-soil ideas broke off in an entirely new direction. In 1920, a leading member of Baden-Powell’s Boy Scout movement, the twenty-six-year-old John Hargrave founded the Kindred of the Kibbo Kift, the name purportedly an ancient Kentish dialect meaning proof of great strength. Hargrave’s movement had a programme of open-air education, camping and naturecraft and the Brotherhood of Man. A Quaker and a pacifist, Hargrave – White Fox to his followers – believed society could only be regenerated by training a cohort of the strongest few. Inspired by North American Red Indians (the movement adopted totem poles), the Kibbo Kift combined Nordic sagas and Saxon dress.
How could anyone have taken Hargrave and his movement seriously?
An idea seizing the imagination of the leading minds of one age can appear bizarre or absurd to a later one. Within three years of its founding, Hargrave had signed up some of the luminaries of the 1920s to his Kibbo Kift advisory council: Norman Angell, author of the celebrated pre-war book, The Grand Illusion, a future Labour Member of Parliament and winner of the 1933 Nobel Peace prize; the evolutionary biologist Julian Huxley; the Belgian playwright Maurice Maeterlinck and winner of the 1911 Nobel Prize in literature; the Indian poet Rabindrath Tagore and H.G. Wells. D.H. Lawrence was put off by Hargrave’s impractical ambition, but, for all that: ‘He’s right and I respect him for it … If it weren’t for his ambition and lack of warmth, I’d go and Kibbo Kift with him.’[41]
In 1923, Hargrave first met Major C.H. Douglas, the theoretician of the Social Credit movement. Social credit, a now forgotten monetary explanation of the economic difficulties of the inter-war years, was based on Major Douglas’s cranky A+B theorem. It earned Douglas a mention in Keynes’ 1936 General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money – ‘a private, perhaps but not a major in the brave army of heretics’.[42] Eight years later, the Kibbo Kift became the Green Shirt Movement for Social Credit. Now the Green Shirts had a comprehensive solution to society’s problems, an economic prong and an environmentalist prong together providing a critique of capitalism and urban industrial society. Accompanied by a corps of drummers, Green Shirts marched through English towns and cities, singing the Anthem of the Green Shirt movement:
Dead Men arise
From the catacombs of Death!
went the refrain, the anthem ending with the stirring cry,
Wake, now, the Dead!
By numbers held in thrall;
On this fruitful Earth
There is Earth-wealth for all!
While Hargrave and the Green Shirts looked to the past and to Red Indians and Saxons, for inspiration, others looked across the English Channel. ‘England is dying, capitulating to the forces which she herself has set in motion,’ reads the preface to a book published in 1928.
Germany is the sole country where there is a positive challenge to the mechanism and commercialism which we associate with America, but which we in England take lying down, without real protest or power to discover an alternative. If contact with Germany cannot stir the faint-heart hopes to a new quickness which will attune us with the forgotten genius of our own Britain, some of us might realise that Germany is fertile soil in which we may plant the seeds of our experience with the surety of their having increase.[43]
Britain and Germany: A Frank Discussion Instigated by Members of the Younger Generation, was co-edited by Rolf Gardiner, who had briefly been a member of the Kibbo Kift and had originally introduced Hargrave to Major Douglas and social credit.
In a chapter, ‘Have the Northern Peoples a Common Destiny?’, Gardiner repudiated sterile internationalism and rejected Hargrave’s pacifism. ‘Should some polity arise which calls forth a genuine star-like quality in the blood of men we should be prepared to fight and die for that quality,’ Gardiner wrote.[44] Europe’s artificial states should be dissolved to reveal the real frontiers of ‘race and culture, and they are made manifest in the form and effluence of landscapes, of regions inhabited by past generations.’
Gardiner disdained the British Union of Fascists for being too lower middle class and urban for his taste. Instead, national regeneration would come about through an alliance of aristocracy and yeomanry.[45] Together with the Earl of Portsmouth, Gardiner was the leading advocate of organic farming, the pair paying a visit to Walther Darré, the Nazi agriculture minister. Their journal, The New Pioneer, was edited by an ex-member of the National Socialist League, an organisation that criticised Moseley’s fascists for being insufficiently anti-Semitic, and devoted much of its space to Gardiner’s back-to-the-land programme and organic farming.[46]
The complexity of the various cross currents of the non-traditional Right can be seen with Henry Williamson, author of Tarka the Otter, published in 1927, and one of the greatest nature writers of the twentieth century. Having fought in the First World War, Williamson ended it strongly sympathetic to Germany and a Bolshevik. On returning from the 1935 Nuremburg Rally, Williamson expressed his revulsion of the rootless civilisation he saw in London, ‘hoardings, brittle houses, flashiness posing as beauty, mongrel living and cosmopolitan modernism.’[47] Two years later, he joined Moseley’s British Union of Fascists. Agricultural reform was central to Moseley’s plan to recreate British society. Under the Fascists, land use throughout Britain was to be centrally planned and organised, with programmes of re-afforestation, sewage disposal and building motorways to create jobs and re-cycle materials.[48]
Brown Shirts and Green Shirts clashed on the streets of Britain’s cities. According to Bramwell, ‘the Green Shirts had an element of Quaker niceness, of world unity pacificism’ completely at variance with the violence and anti-semitism of Oswald Moseley’s fascists.[49] In 1937, the Public Order Act swept the Brown Shirts and Green Shirts off the streets. The Second World War rendered environmentalism irrelevant, putting some of its more vocal pro-German supporters behind bars. In 1944, the Green Shirts were being written off by Labour MP Tom Driberg as a ‘small, fantastic cult of natur
e worshippers’.[50] Hargrave dissolved the organisation in 1951.
Gardiner and his circle found a more successful route into the post-war era. In June 1945, he co-founded the Soil Association and for many years sat on its council.[51] Until the early 1960s, its journal, Mother Earth, was edited by the former British Union of Fascists’ agricultural secretary, who had spent part of the war in prison. Sixty years after it was founded, eighty per cent of the organic food sold in Britain’s supermarkets was being certified by the Soil Association.[52]
Thus British environmentalism emerged from an alien gene pool from the Progressive policies of Theodore Roosevelt a decade or two earlier, with a strong anti-democratic virus and narrative of national decay. To British environmentalists, American culture exemplified all that was wrong with the modern world. ‘The English have now reached a point in their history where they must seek a new focus,’ Gardiner wrote in 1928; ‘the saga of our nationhood and Empire is finished.’[53] Britain had to reject materialism and accept where its true destiny lay: ‘Germany is once again a young and puissant nation, pulsating with life and hope, and, like Faust, striving for possession of her own soul.’[54]
In German culture, nature – especially trees and forests – is part of national identity as in no other European country. The Nazi seizure of power in 1933 means that this aspect of German culture became entwined with National Socialist ideology. And here one comes to an awkward truth for the post-1945 environmental movement. Were it not for its crimes, the Nazi record on the environment would have been praised for being far in advance of its time. Nazi Germany introduced anti-vivisection laws. It was the first country in Europe to create nature reserves. In 1934, the Nazis required that new tree plantations should include deciduous trees as well as conifers. In 1940, the Nazis passed hedgerow and copse protection ordinances to protect wildlife as its armies were laying waste to Europe. Following the annexation of part of Poland, one sixth of the new territory’s arable land was reserved for new forests and woodland. At the height of the war, Hitler vetoed Ministry of Agriculture schemes to drain and reclaim moorland.[55]
The Age of Global Warming: A History Page 6