How far could these environmental policies be described as specifically Nazi rather than reflecting more generalised German values and priorities? Put another way, how central was protecting the environment to Nazi ideology?
The story of organic farming in the Third Reich illustrates the Nazis’ real priorities. Walther Darré, in charge of the agriculture ministry until 1942, was a convinced Nazi; the titles of two of his books give a flavour: The Peasantry as Life Source of the Nordic Race (1928) and A New Nobility of Blood and Soil (1934). He was also a supporter of bio-dynamic (organic) farming that had been advocated by Rudolf Steiner in the 1920s, even though Steiner had been an early opponent of the Nazis before his death in 1925.
Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy, was a follower of Rudolf Steiner’s teachings on the threat to human health posed by artificial fertilisers and Himmler, the head of the SS, encouraged organic farming. Others in the Nazi leadership, such as Goering, were strongly opposed. Following Hess’s flight to Britain in 1941, Darré was marginalised, the Gestapo led a crack down on organic farmers and the technocrats in the regime focused on maximising what farms could produce. The Nazi project was not about saving the planet, but about world conquest, the extermination of the Jews and the enslavement of peoples deemed racially inferior.
To become an international movement and make a global impact in the post-war world, environmentalism needed what its European versions in the pre-war period would have abhorred; mass international travel and communications, multinationals and global consumer brands, a transnational entertainment culture – all the things that go to create a global village. Hitler’s defeat in 1945 and the depth of Nazi barbarism meant that post-war environmentalism wouldn’t speak German as its first language. In Britain, environmentalism’s high Conservative lineage and the stain of its association with National Socialism also meant that the next burst of environmentalism would be led from a different social class and from a different part of the political spectrum.
Environmentalism needed to be Americanised. In the post-war world, environmentalism spoke with an American accent – descended from Thoreau and Emerson, Pinchot and Muir and the environmental politics of Theodore Roosevelt.
* The 1930s drought is now attributed to a cooler Pacific and warmer Atlantic diverting and weakening the jet stream blowing from the Atlantic away from the Midwest (http://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/news/topstory/2004/0319dustbowl.html).
[1] ‘The Changing Arctic,’ Washington Post, 2nd November 1922.
[2] http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/cag3/na.html
[3] http://www.crh.noaa.gov/arx/events/heatwave36.php
[4] http://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/news/topstory/2004/0319dustbowl.html
[5] Gordon Manley, ‘Central England temperatures: monthly means 1659 to 1973’, Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society (1974), 100, pp. 389–405.
[6] O. E. Tveito, E. Førland, R. Heino, I. Hanssen-Bauer, H. Alexandersson, B. Dahlström, A. Drebs, C. Kern-Hansen, T. Jónsson, E. Vaarby Laursen, Y. Westman, Nordic Temperature Maps, NordKlim (2000), Fig 20.
[7] James Rodger Fleming, The Callendar Effect (2007), p. 65.
[8] ibid., p. 68.
[9] ibid., p. 72.
[10] ibid., p. 50.
[11] Theodore Roosevelt, An Autobiography (1913), p. 94.
[12] ibid., p. 47.
[13] Henry David Thoreau, Walden and Civil Disobedience (1986), p. 47.
[14] Roosevelt, An Autobiography (1913), p. 95.
[15] Thoreau, Walden and Civil Disobedience (1986), p. 184.
[16] Paul Brooks, Speaking for Nature (1980), p. 113.
[17] Roosevelt, An Autobiography (1913), p. 435.
[18] ibid., p. 434.
[19] ibid., p. 410.
[20] ibid., p. 423.
[21] Robert Bradley, Capitalism at Work: Business, Government, and Energy (2009), pp. 205–6.
[22] Roosevelt, An Autobiography (1913), p. 424.
[23] ibid., p. 425.
[24] The International Petroleum Cartel, Staff Report to the Federal Trade Commission, released through Subcommittee on Monopoly of Select Committee on Small Business, U.S. Senate, 83rd Cong., 2nd session (Washington, DC, 1952), ‘Development of Joint Control over Foreign Oil,’ pp. 37–46.
[25] Robert Bradley, Capitalism at Work: Business, Government, and Energy (2009), pp. 206–7.
[26] ibid., p. 206.
[27] Annual Message to Congress, December 6, 1923, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=29564
[28] Anna Bramwell, Ecology in the 20th Century (1989), p. 162.
[29] ibid., p. 200.
[30] ibid., p. 173.
[31] ibid., pp. 39–40.
[32] ibid., p. 107.
[33] T.S. Eliot, Christianity and Culture (1988), p. 26.
[34] Stanley Baldwin, On England, and Other Addresses (1938), pp. 6–7.
[35] Peter Hall, Harry Gracey, Roy Drewett & Ray Thomas, The Containment of Urban England (1973), p. 102.
[36] ibid., p. 628.
[37] George Orwell, The Lion and Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius (1941), included in Essays (2002), p. 292.
[38] Cecil Palmer, ‘Do We Agree? A Debate Between G. K. Chesterton And Bernard Shaw with Hilaire Belloc in the Chair’ (1928) http://www.cse.dmu.ac.uk/~mward/gkc/books/debate.txt
[39] George Orwell, The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, from In Front of Your Nose, Vol. 4 (1968), pp. 162–3.
[40] Orwell, The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, p. 189.
[41] http://www.kibbokift.org/jhbio.html
[42] John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1973), p. 371.
[43] Rolf Gardiner & Heinz Rocholl (ed.), Britain and Germany: A Frank Discussion Instigated by Members of the Younger Generation (1928), p. 19.
[44] ibid., p.124.
[45] Bramwell, Ecology in the 20th Century (1989), p. 165.
[46] ibid., p. 118.
[47] Quoted from Henry Williamson, Phoenix Generation, cited in Anna Bramwell, Ecology in the 20th Century (1989), p. 142.
[48] ibid., p. 164.
[49] ibid., p. 110.
[50] ibid., p. 110.
[51] ibid., p. 217.
[52] http://www.soilassociation.org/Aboutus/Ourhistory/tabid/70/Default.aspx
[53] Gardiner & Rocholl (ed.), Britain and Germany: A Frank Discussion Instigated by Members of the Younger Generation (1928), p. 123.
[54] ibid., p. 129.
[55] Bramwell, Ecology in the 20th Century (1989), pp. 198–200.
5
Turning Point
Human beings are now carrying out a large scale geophysical experiment of a kind that could not have happened in the past nor be reproduced in the future … This experiment, if adequately documented, may yield a far-reaching insight into the processes determining weather and climate.
Hans Suess and Roger Revelle, 1957[1]
In 1962, when Silent Spring was first published, ‘environment’ was not even an entry in the vocabulary of public policy.
Al Gore[2]
After the Second World War, Callendar exchanged ideas with the younger generation of climate scientists such as Gilbert Plass and Charles Keeling. In 1956, Keeling obtained funding for an observatory at Mauna Loa in Hawaii to record atmos
pheric concentrations of carbon dioxide. Over time, results from Mauna Loa would show rising levels of carbon dioxide, the Keeling Curve as it became known.
Five years later, Callendar finished the last of his essays. In his 1938 paper, he wrote that ‘the course of world temperatures during the next twenty years should afford valuable evidence as to the accuracy of the calculated effect of atmospheric carbon dioxide’.[3] His 1961 paper concluded that the trend toward higher temperatures was significant. Yet Callendar’s confidence was undermined by the downturn in global temperatures in the 1950s and 1960s. England’s three skating Christmases of 1961, 1962 and 1963 – the coldest since 1740 – shook Callendar’s belief in the Callendar Effect.[4]
The post-war era began by subscribing to Francis Bacon’s belief that the progress of science and technology aid mankind’s mastery of nature and improve his material wellbeing. That belief was to be challenged and then recede over the course the second half of the twentieth century. During it, the prime source of ideological hostility to the Baconian view of man’s relationship with nature shifted from the Right to the Left of the political spectrum; the conservationism of the century’s first half would be supplanted by environmentalism and the public role of scientists would change from illuminating and enabling mankind’s progress along the path of greater material wellbeing to issuing warnings about economic growth and telling governments how they should mitigate the effects of such progress. For a development of such enormity, it all happened with surprising speed.
The end of the Second World War and the start of the Cold War saw the return of fears that the US might run out of raw materials, exacerbated by the Korean War. In January 1951, President Truman appointed William Paley, president of the CBS network, to head a Materials Policy Commission. ‘We cannot allow shortages of materials to jeopardize our national security nor to become a bottleneck to our economic expansion,’ Truman wrote to Paley.[5]
When its eight-hundred-and-nineteen-page report, Resources for Freedom, appeared the following year, it was unmistakably a product of its time.
The United States, once criticised as the creator of a crassly materialistic order of things, is today throwing its might into the task of keeping alive the spirit of Man and helping beat back from the frontiers of the free world everywhere the threats of force and of a new Dark Age which rise from the Communist nations. In defeating this barbarian violence moral values will count most, but they must be supported by an ample materials base. Indeed, the interdependence of moral and material values has never been so completely demonstrated as today, when all the world has seen the narrowness of its escape from the now dead Nazi tyranny and has yet to know the breadth by which it will escape the live Communist one.[6]
Soaring demand, shrinking resources, upward pressure on costs, the risk of wartime shortages all threatened to stop or reverse Americans’ rising standard of living. It sounded as if Resources for Freedom would be the latest product of the Jevons cookie cutter. Instead, Resources for Freedom turned out to be the most comprehensive official statement of the ameliorist position made by any government or intergovernmental body before or since. It was a popular fallacy, the report concluded, ‘to regard our resource base as a fixed inventory which, when used up, will leave society with no means of survival’. American history showed why. ‘In developing America,’ the commission asserted, ‘our forebears consumed resources extravagantly, but we are certainly better off in materials than they were. It would be unreasonable for us, their posterity, to suggest that they should have consumed less so that we might consume more.’[7]
Using resources today is an essential part of making our economy grow … Hoarding resources in the expectation of more important uses later involves a sacrifice that may never be recouped; technological changes and new resource discoveries may alter a situation completely.[8]
To act in this way, the report suggested, would be rather like the early settlers of New England conserving bayberries to provide light for a generation that lives by kilowatts.
At times, the report reads like a point-by-point refutation of Jevons. On recycling, it sided with Keynes, who, as we saw in Chapter Three, had criticised Jevons for hoarding scraps of paper. It was another popular fallacy, the commission said, to equate physical waste with economic waste, an attitude which can lead to ‘devoting a dollar’s worth of work to “saving” a few cents’ worth of waste paper and old string.’[9] The waste paper bin does have an economic function after all.
The commission had three fundamental convictions. Growth is good (‘it seems preferable to any opposite, which to us implies stagnation and decay,’ was the common sense justification); belief in private enterprise, the profit motive and the price system; and internationalism.[10] Trade was good for America and America was stronger when its allies were stronger. If the US did not work to raise living standards in the rest of the free world, it would ‘hamper and impede further rise of our own, and equally lessen the changes of democracy to prosper and peace to reign the world over.’[11]
Resources for Freedom made two fundamental recommendations – a do and a don’t to maximise economic efficiency. ‘There is no magic formula which will yield the right answers … Yet there is one basic economic principle which, if applied to the limit of available facts and injected consciously into each judgment, can provide a basic thread of consistency. THE LEAST COST PRINCIPLE.’[12] The commission recognised the risk of interest groups exploiting political concern about the availability of resource supplies to cut legal privileges and special deals for themselves.
The second recommendation was a plea to avoid protectionism and autarky. ‘The United States must reject self-sufficiency as a policy and instead adopt the policy of the lowest cost acquisition of materials wherever secure supplies may be found.’ The idea of self-sufficiency, the commission observed, ‘amounts to a self-imposed blockade and nothing more.’[13] It urged that tariff and other barriers to trade be removed, as these were adding to the free world’s material problems. ‘By interfering with market pressures of supply and demand, they prevent normal development of the tendency to move toward the lowest cost sources of materials – a movement which, as the commission has pointed out, is essential in promoting the most rapid economic growth of both the United States and the less developed countries.’[14]
The US should unilaterally eliminate import duties on any commodity if the US was likely to become dependent on it. In the case of petroleum – ‘the great enigma of future energy supplies’ – the commission envisaged with equanimity that by 1975 the US would have increasingly turned to foreign supplies, although it suggested stockpiling in case of war.[15] It went on to urge repeal of the Buy American Act 1933 and similar protectionist legislation, ‘a relic of depression years and depression psychology’.
In the history of concern about industrialised societies running out of resources, which started in 1865 and continues to the present, Resources for Freedom stands apart. Based on its examination of history, the commission rejected the depletionists’ assumption that there was a fixed lump of resource which, when used up, was gone forever. Compared to the drumbeat of depletionist reports that punctuated the 1970s prophesying resource-induced and environmental catastrophes before the end of the twentieth century, the view of the world set out in Resources for Freedom turned out to be right. The world reached 1975 (the time horizon adopted in the report) and the beginning of the twenty-first century closer to the state envisaged in Resources for Freedom than the predictions made by the depletionists. For that reason alone, Resources for Freedom demands attention and a respectful hearing.
It would have been easy for the Paley Commission to have lapsed in to paranoia. The international situation in 1952 was much riskier than fifty years later. The Soviet Union had acquired the Bomb, the Iron Curtain divided Europe, and the US and its allies were fighting a war in Korea in which the American commander had requested the use of at
omic weapons against China.
The policy optimism of Resources for Freedom reflected the outlook of a governing elite that a few years earlier had led America to victory in the Second World War and had just put in place the architecture that would win the Cold War. It was confident about America’s future and the capacity of its economy to keep growing. It had the self-confidence to be internationalist. Far from falling for the illusion of ‘energy independence’, Resources for Freedom recognised that American prosperity and security were enhanced by an open trading system.
The Age of Global Warming: A History Page 7