Does goes on a mission to find out what typifies an Egyptian environmentalist.

A few months ago Egypt was named the greenest country in the Middle-East by a Yale group, even topping neighbouring Israel. It even turned out to be one of the best improving countries in the world. If you ever visited it, this might sound odd, and I in fact haven’t met an Egyptian that took the news seriously. But yet, the ranking seems credible. Maybe Egypt’s people care more about the environment than we think?

Me, I am particularly interested in non-Western ways of looking at the environment. In the West much people reached a level of prosperity, and now they start to care about the environment.  But not everybody who cares about the environment fits in this stereotype. And maybe luckily.

A few months ago I decided that I wanted to search out how a specific Egyptian or Arab environmentalist might look like.  I read too much books, but also interviewed some interesting people, and I thought it might be interesting to share my discoveries with you.  I say share, because I want you to interact with me, by letting me know if you (dis)agree.

West vs. South

First, of all, I don’t assume that the West is more advanced than the South (or the East). Yes, the use of words like ‘sustainable development’, ‘resource management’, ‘greening the economy’ stays limited to those with a Western education.  But that’s just lingo. Turn your focus on other parts of the world, South America for example, and you’ll hear ‘rights of nature’, ‘cosmo-visions’, ‘bien-vivir’ or ‘caring for the seventh generation’.

This is because their analysis differs entirely. The West rarely questions technology and economic growth, and the South seldomly criticises tradition and strong family ties.  Their history differs, the values of the Enlightenment helped the West dominate the world and subsequent crises showed the South local tradition’s ability to offer resilience.

Post-development

But there were also occasions in which the viewpoint of the West and the South met.  Some Western aid workers’ experiences made them question the virtues of progress and Southern intellectuals tried to share their analyse on the failure of development.

In the ‘90s a hotchpotch eventually united under the umbrella of ‘post-development’.  They argue that any attempt to make development more sustainable, balanced or effective is useless, we shouldn’t improve it, but abandon it instead. The concept of development is wrong.

They wrote interesting books, try Ivan Illich’s “Energy and Equity” for example.  Post-development consists for a fair part of people from the global South who use their own cultural roots to analyse society, development and the environment.

Vandana Shiva builds upon Gandhi’s concept of local self-sufficiency.

And Majid Rahnema reflects on his own experiences as an Iranian and UN-official.I thought this might also offer interesting insights about the Arab world, but unfortunately it offers very little examples of Arab thinkers. Also, it gives you plenty of nice insights, but is very ambiguous.  It might be useful as a way to criticise ideas, but gives very few inspiration to make things better.

Looking to Green Islam?

Maybe Islam has something to say about this.  I had heard about Seyyed Hossein Nasr, an American-Iranian professor who had written numerous books on how the loss of spirituality, Islam thus, causes a deterioration of the environment – and society.  His books give you plenty of new angles to look at science, but if you look at it as a whole, his message is quite simple and is merely that the West is to blame. It’s also very academical, difficult to translate to society.

Compared to this, the work of Fazlun Khalid is more interesting. A former officer in the British Army, he uses Islam to create awareness about the environment in theUK, and he  also sets up Islamic initiatives to foster environmental care in Indonesia, Saudi-Arabia and Zanzibar.

Yes, this already linked with the Arab world, but still originated in the West.  A bit in the same way Wester aid agencies promote environmental care in Egypt. There was still nothing really genuine about it.

Maybe I had to look at the local political movements instead. The region’s new rulers, the Muslim Brotherhood claimed to base their politics on ethics, and maybe that also involved the environment.  So I set out and asked them.

“Nature’s not our biggest concern” their think-tank’s Jamal Himdan answered, “but we are anti-nuclear, we believe in large scale renewables and want to fight pollution.”

Pollution was, thus, just part of their social justice approach.

Social Justice

Social justice, here we have it again. Each and every person I interviewed seemed to mention it, and in each article I had to explain that it was one of the main demands of the revolution. But is anybody serious about it? And has it already caused a change?

I’m doubtful, and so is Mohamed Nagi of the Habi Center for Environmental Rights.  He told me that if something changed it was for the worse.

So far outside the street protests, nobody seems to do anything with the message, the SCAF didn’t, and when campaigning most politicians find it more tempting to imagine new big-scale investment opportunities than explain how they will ensure their citizen’s basic rights.

Sarah Deputy, who’s analyzing Egypt’s Toskha Project, told me last week that she also was amazed at how nothing’s changed.

In the end, Egypt’s newly-elected politicians all seem to propose a new version of Toskha.  The abovementioned interview with the Brotherhood for example, shows you a lot more about big projects then about empowering the Egypt’s citizens.

Last time Saudi Arabia was pushing for Toskha, now the European Union seems to be in for a massive solar energy adventure.

Environmental Justice

But still, it’s not because those in power don’t understand what’s going on, that things cannot change.  People in Egypt have been standing up against big polluters and even resource squander, and have had an impact.

I call this environmental justice. Maybe I am skipping a few steps, but it looks like the same forces are at work as elsewhere in the world. Protests that started fifteen years ago inBoliviaeventually culminated in what is known as the Climate Justice-movement.  Experiences of how native and black Americans were affected by bad policy have led Rob Nixon to coin environmental justice as the environmentalism of the poor.  This may look as a very leftist view, but it is not, as it criticises the governments much more than anything else.

Joan Martinez-Allier and Sunita Narain have described their own experiences in the same manner, and argued that the potential of environmental justice is far bigger than the efforts the West is pushing for.  Their books should in fact be compulsory reading for everybody with an interest in the environment.

The Only Hope

To me, Egypt environmental justice seems to be very promising.  Look at what the most media popular example, the Zabaleen have been able to perform. They combined caring about their livelihood and contributing to the environmental sustainability of the economy at the meantime.

Yes, except for them not many examples are known. But that might be because they don’t get any publicity.  Also all the other environmental initiatives, at least those that gain publicity aren’t very promising.  On a recent conference called “Green Visions for Cairo” the most feasible idea academic experts proposed was to move all the government’s offices from downtown to the desert. That’s not only infeasible, but also runs contrary to what I understand as sustainable.

And the last “Cairo Climate Talks” I attended resulted in a discussion on why gmo-vegetables are still restricted in Egypt. Every time the organisation, or the experts weren’t to blame, they always tried to navigate away from bad proposals, but it just shows how unsuitable easy solutions are in densely populated Cairo/Egypt.

I could go on for a while, showing you initiatives that went wrong, but I think there are more interesting stories to follow. A lot has already been written about failures.  But the stories on environmental justice, or the environmentalism of the poor if you want, haven’t received a lot of attention. Especially not in the Arab region. And that’s what you might expect from me in the future.

Image of Egyptian crowd by Paul Vinten from Shutterstock 

Mat McDermott/CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Over at OnEarth, David Gessner has recently published a piece that hits close to something that I’ve been increasingly thinking.

When it comes to inspiring people to live in awe of nature, with reverence for all life, with a sense of never-ending wonder and desire for open-minded inquiry, environmentalism doesn’t really cut it. Like the word ‘sustainability’ it’s become a hollow word, a word divorced from meaning, a word lacking in soul, separated from its essence.

For me that essence consists of, more than anything, a love of nature, a love of exploration, a love of dirt, leaves, trees, water both rushing and stagnant, small stones and great rocks, a love of animals both human and non-human (a distinction that the English language unfortunately makes more concrete than the reality), a love of play, of recreation.

Which is where Gessner comes in.

After writing about his daughter’s apparent wolf obsession, Gessner references David Sobel about the perils of what’s become traditional environmental messaging (save this! stop this! even, save ourselves!) may backfire with children:

Children who are taught that the natural world is being destroyed, that the rain forests are being mown down, and that a boogeyman called global warming is coming, often tend to withdraw and distance themselves from nature. In fact, there’s no surer way to send them running for the TV or computer screen. “The natural world is being abused and they don’t want to have to deal with it,” Sobel writes, equating this with other types of abuse. As it turns out, a better way to involve young children, at least kids from the age of seven to 11, is exactly the way they used to involve themselves, before play became more structured and the woods off limits. Sobel writes of those formative years: “This is the time to immerse children in the stuff of the physical and natural worlds. Constructing forts, creating small imaginary words, hunting and gathering, searching for treasures, following streams and pathways, making maps, taking care of animals, gardening and shaping the earth are perfect activities during this stage.” Eventually, of course, they will learn about the death of the rain forests, but first comes a more direct, and playful, connection with the so-called environment.

I’m pretty sure that this applies to children of all ages actually.

But maybe part of the problem is that we’re not children of all ages, in the sense that our sense of wonder gets dimmed, either through familiarity or what we perceive as the need to get serious in life, to get real (as if reality is real from only one perspective).

It also applies to those of us who’ve been diligently working away, in our own varied ways, in the environmental movement for years—even those of us who have tried, as we’ve consciously tried to do at TreeHugger to varying degrees of effect and frequency, to as Gessner says not start with shoulds or finger wagging.

“It starts with fun,” Gessner writes. “It starts with building forts in our backyards, it starts with animal explorations. And, it goes without saying, it starts with pretending you are a wolf.”

True enough. Though I think I might be more at ease pretending to be a cat or walking low slung gorilla-like. Try the latter sometime. It’s fun. Lower your butt and spread your legs a bit while walking. It ends up being something like the behind the scenes footage from Lord of the Rings, with extras being taught to walk like orcs. And it really stretches your hip joints. But I digress.

The thing is, when it comes to starting with fun, I tend to think that we mis-equate fun and animal exploration as simply gawking at cute animal photos (as undeniably cute as they are sometimes) or daydreaming about some futuristic building concept that will never be more than a concept, often for very good reason.

It may sound exactly like the type of prescription that Gessner advises against, but I wonder if it’s not, in that there’s a big differences between fun and exploration, and what’s essentially distraction from the darker aspects of all this, the doom and gloom.

When it comes to getting more people to reconnect with the world around them that haven’t done so, and to do so in a present, conscious, aware and clear-sighted way, neither distraction nor doom and gloom are going to do it. Nor will trying to get them to be “environmentalists” (I’m not even sure I personally identify with that term any longer), nor will talking about enlightened self-interest, or the economic benefits of combatting climate change, switching to clean energy, or not chopping down forests because of the valuable ecosystem services those trees provide do it.

But what will work, I’m increasingly certain, is encouraging ourselves, our families, and perfect strangers, in our own way, childlike to more adult, to build those forts, search for treasures, follow streams and pathways, and make our own maps of inspiration and fascination. In cultivating this love of the world around us, this love of nature (which to me includes a love of humanity, necessarily) all these problems of “the environment” will, if not solve themselves, at least become all the easier to resolve.

FP: Dr. Robert Zubrin, welcome to Frontpage Interview.

Let’s begin by you telling us what you mean by “the cult of antihumanism.”

Zubrin: Thanks Jamie.

Antihumanism is a belief system which holds that humans are destroyers, essentially vermin whose activities, aspirations, and numbers must be severely constrained, and that therefore someone must be empowered to do the constraining. Essentially it is an argument for tyranny, oppression, and ultimately genocide.

FP: Why would anyone choose to embrace such beliefs?

Zubrin: Well, you must understand that such arguments have always been gratifying to those seeking to enhance their power or justify their oppression of others. Therefore they use their positions of influence in society to make them fashionable, or “politically correct,” to use an originally Stalinist term that is now all the rage.

FP: It appears that much of modern-day environmentalism is antihumanist, as you’ve defined it, but antihumanism has been around for some time, right?

Zubrin: Yes. In the book I trace it back 200 years, starting with Malthus, the seminal founding father of the theory of limited resources, and then trace it forward through its subsequent development through numerous interrelated forms, including Darwinism, eugenics, German militarism, Nazism, xenophobia, the population control movement, environmentalism, technophobia, and most recently, the incredibly demented climatophobic movement, which seeks to justify mass human sacrifice for the purpose of weather control.

There was a time when humanity looked in the mirror and saw something precious, worth protecting and fighting for—indeed, worth liberating. But now, we are beset on all sides by propaganda promoting a radically different viewpoint. According to this idea, human beings are a cancer upon the Earth, a horde of vermin whose aspirations and appetites are endangering the natural order. This is the core of antihumanism.

FP: Tell us about Al Gore’s antihumanism.

Zubrin: Al Gore is trying to turn antihumanism into a global cult. Just have a look at this quote from his book An Inconvenient Truth:

“The climate crisis also offers us the chance to experience what very few generations in history have had the privilege of knowing: a generational mission; the exhilaration of a compelling moral purpose; a shared and unifying cause; the thrill of being forced by circumstances to put aside the pettiness and conflict that so often stifle the restless human need for transcendence; the opportunity to rise…When we rise, we will experience an epiphany as we discover that this crisis is not really about politics at all. It is a moral and spiritual challenge.”

In short, the purpose of the global warming crusade is not to change the weather, it’s to organize a mob in support of totalitarian policies.

It is revealing that Gore chose the words “An Inconvenient Truth” as the title of his book. That phrase could be the virtual chorus line for all the antihuman movements for the past 200 years who used pseudoscientific arguments to demand that people harden their hearts to the human misery the purported to be necessary. I.e.

Thomas Malthus: It is an inconvenient truth that “the Irish must be swept from the land.”

Charles Darwin: It is an inconvenient truth that “the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace the savage races throughout the world.”

General Friedrich von Bernhardi (German General Staff, author, Germany and the Next War, 1912): It is an inconvenient truth that “war is necessary because it eliminates the weak.”

Madison Grant (Author, The Passing of the Great Race, 1916): It is an inconvenient truth that “indiscriminate efforts to preserve babies among the lower classes often results in serious injury to the race…It is an inconvenient truth that “the laws of nature require the obliteration of the unfit and human life is valuable only when it is of use to the community or race.”

Henry Fairfield Osborn (1932): It is an inconvenient truth that “overpopulation and underemployment mat be regarded as twin sisters…the United States [with 112 million people in 1932] is overpopulated at the present time.”

Rudolf Hess (1933): It is an inconvenient truth that “National Socialism is simply applied biology.”

Adolf Hitler (1941): It is an inconvenient truth that “the law of existence prescribes uninterrupted killing, so that the better may live.”

Fairfield Osborn (author, Our Plundered Planet, 1948): It is an inconvenient truth that “the problem of the pressure of increasing populations…cannot be solved in a way that is consistent with the ideals of humanity.”

Paul Ehrlich, (author, The Population Bomb, 1968): It is an inconvenient truth that “the population explosion is an uncontrolled multiplication of people…We must shift our efforts from the treatment to the cutting out of the cancer.”

John Holdren and Paul Ehrlich, (authors Global Ecology, 1971): It is an inconvenient truth that “when a population of organisms grows in a finite environment, sooner or later it will encounter a resource limit. This phenomenon, described by ecologists as reaching the ‘carrying capacity’ of the environment, applies to bacteria on a culture dish, to fruit flies in a jar of agar, and to buffalo on a prairie. It must also apply to man on this finite planet.”

The Club of Rome (authors Mankind at a Turning Point, 1974): It is an inconvenient truth that “the world has cancer, and the cancer is Man.”

Alexander King, (founder, The Club of Rome, 1990): It is an inconvenient truth that “DDT…has greatly added to the population problem.”

All: “It is an inconvenient truth that humanity must be crushed. Science requires it. So harden your heart and join with all enlightened people in support of those doing the crushing.”

FP: Share with us some of the worst crimes perpetrated by the antihumanist movement.

Zubrin: I discuss many of them at length in the book. They include denial of food aid and imposing crushing taxes and rents on Ireland and India during the great famines of the 1800s, promoting the ideologies that led to World War I, World War II, and the Nazi genocide programs, the forced sterilization of tens of millions of people by the prewar eugenics movement and the post war population control movement, the killing of hundreds of millions of people through denial of vital life-saving technologies including pesticides and vitamin-enriched crop strains to the third world, and assisting in the impoverishment of billions by blocking the development of new energy resources.

FP: Most people don’t know how the first Green Party was actually founded. Please enlighten us.

Zubrin: The German Green Party was founded by August Haussleiter. A former SS officer and member of the Nazi Party since 1923, when he stood by Hitler during the Beer Hall Putsch. It was based on such previous works as Ludwig Klages’ 1913 proto-Nazi German “Volkisch” youth movement tract Man and Earth (republished by the Green Party, without comment, as one of its founding documents in 1980) and future Nazi Agriculture Minister Richard Darre’s 1931 book A New Nobility Out of Blood and Soil.

These writers popularized a cult ideology celebrating the natural “authentic” qualities of the good old-fashioned German country people, or Volk (literally “folk,” but also carrying the meaning of “tribe”). According to these and allied writers, the Volk derived their deep and “genuine” souls from their “rootedness” in the land, shared ancestral kinship, and connection to nature. In contrast, Jews, representing corrupt urban modernity and lacking in landed rootedness, were soulless and thus could never be part of the German Volk. Christianity, science, technology, industry, progress, “mechanical and materialistic civilization,” and all else that proposed to raise man above nature, were also to be abhorred. Popularized widely in prose works, fiction, and drama, these ideas formed the basis of the huge back-to-nature Volkisch and related Youth movements that arose in Germany during the late 19^th Century.

When, in the 1920s, the new Nazi party raised the pagan swastika flag celebrating the power of irrational animal nature over civilization and reason, the Volkisch Greens flocked to the cause. In the 1970s, as environmentalism became fashionable again, Haussleiter seized the time to organize a political renaissance of this constituency. The result was the Green Party, which true to its origins in “pure race on pure soil” ideology, has taken the lead in the campaign to stop modern agriculture worldwide.

As a result of their activity, the European Union has banned farm imports from third world countries using genetically modified crops. Since the third worlders cannot afford to give up the European market, this has blocked them from implementing vitamin-enriched cereals like golden rice, which could prevent the blinding or deaths of millions of poor children every year.

FP: Crystallize please the major flaws of Darwinism.

Zubrin: Evolution is a fact. However natural selection is a radically false theory of human social development because unlike animals, humans can inherit acquired traits, such as new technological abilities. Not only that, can inherit such valuable acquired traits from people they are not related to. Furthermore, such beneficial acquired traits, which become available to all, are created by human effort during life. Therefore human existence is not a struggle of all against all. Humans benefit from the existence of other people, nations, and races, exactly the opposite of what a Darwinian view would maintain. Darwin says that it is “from this war of nature, from famine and death,” that progress in nature occurs. But this is simply untrue for humans. Human progress is driven by creative activity during life, not by elimination through death.

FP: What is really behind the climate change/global warming movement?

Zubrin: In the 1970s there was a global cooling trend going on. So the antihumanists said “look, there is global cooling, which is being driven by industry, which is being driven by out of control economic growth and population growth. They have to be put under control. Put us in control.” Then in the 1980s the climate began to warm, so they said “look, there is global warming, which is being driven by industry, which is being driven by out of control economic growth and population growth. They have to be put under control. Put us in control.” The problem is always different, the solution is always the same – put them in control. Its not about weather, it’s about power.

Actually, they made a lot more sense when they were against global cooling. Had it continued, global cooling would actually have been bad. Global warming is good. It lengthens the growing season and increases net rainfall worldwide. Increasing the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere is even better, as it accelerates the rate of plant growth – and this in fact is happening. We have photographs taken from orbit since 1958, and they show that the rate of wild plant growth has increased 14%, at the same time that the atmospheric CO2 level has increased 19%. And there is no doubt that it is the CO2 augmentation that is helping the plants, because you can repeat the same experiment in the lab and get the same result. Plants need CO2, and by raising its atmospheric concentration above its impoverished preindustrial levels, humans have made the Earth a more fertile planet. But to the antihumanists, this does not matter. Despite their rhetoric, they are not friends of the biosphere, they are enemies of humanity – prosecutors seeking any grounds, no matter how unfounded, for a conviction that will allow them to put the human race in chains.

FP: Why were Jewish refugees on their way to America aboard the St. Louis in 1939 turned back? Who and what was really responsible for that crime? What ended up happening to those refugees?

Zubrin: During the 1920s and 1930s the American eugenics movement, which, as I show in detail in the book, was intimately linked to the Nazis, sought to restrict immigration to prevent non-Nordic people from entering the United States, and with their advice, immigration restriction laws with strict racial quotas were passed for that purpose. Jews were a particular target, and became more so after the Nazi takeover of Germany in 1933 made emigration an increasingly urgent necessity. For their part, the pre-war Nazis were willing to let Jews leave, albeit without their property. The problem was, that in every country the eugenicists campaigned to stop their admission. Thus, when in 1939, Senator Robert Wagner (D-NY) put forward a bill that would have allowed 20,000 German Jewish children, who had already been accepted for adoption by American families, to enter the USA above the quota, the eugenicists, led by Population Reference Bureau director Guy Irving Burch, Eugenics Records Office Superintendant H.H. Laughlin, and American Eugenics Society director John Trevor, organized a successful campaign to defeat the bill. According to Burch, writing in the Washington Post in May 1939, 20,000 Jewish children might not seem like much, but they would multiply to 500,000 in only 5 generations.

A few weeks later, the St. Louis arrived, bearing 930 Jewish refugees, seeking permission to land. As they sailed up and down the east coast begging entry, Laughlin issued a special report on immigration which demanded that “international sentimentality” not cause America to lower its “eugenical and racial standards,” that immigration quotas be cut a further 60 percent, and that “loopholes” which allowed Jewish immigration to America by excusing the “moral turpitude” of fleeing Jews who had smuggled (their own) money out of Nazi Germany be closed.

As a result of this agitation, the St. Louis was turned around, and the 620 of its passengers who could not receive permission to get off in Britain were returned to Europe, where 254 of them were eventually gassed.

In 1942, Burch and Trevor’s anti-immigrant “Coalition of Patriotic Societies” was indicted for pro-Nazi subversive activities. This, however, did not stop Burch from going on to have a great career as a leader of the post-war population control movement.

FP: The Left is at the center of antihumanism. Tell us why and what your findings tell us that the Left really is.

Zubrin: Once upon a time there were many leftists who saw themselves as champions of the oppressed, and who therefore opposed Malthusianism on that basis. I quote a number of them in the book, as in their own way, they are particularly strong in underscoring the utter immorality of antihumanism. But since about 1970, when the mass-promotion of environmentalism made it the new super-fashionable cause wherein recruits could be gathered, such voices have fallen silent.

So now, instead of socialism being set forth as the means for enabling the progress that capitalism can’t, it now stands openly as a way of stopping the progress that capitalism can. There is a legitimate role for a left in society, and that is to represent the plebian interest. Such a left would be strongly supportive of economic growth and technological innovation. But that is not the left we have. Instead of representing the working class, they represent the bureaucratic class, which seeks to expand its power by dreaming up ever more requirements for restraining human activities. Antihumanism is the perfect creed for justifying this totalitarian crusade, as it provides the arguments the prosecution needs to put humanity in shackles.

However, even in the days when the left still supported hydroelectric dams and nuclear power plants, they were nearly all collectivist in outlook. This made them ready candidates for recruitment into the antihuman camp, which constantly poses the metaphor as human individuals as mere cells within some greater organic entity, such as the Volk, the human race, the biosphere, the world, or Gaia. Of course, in such systems, the body is what counts, whereas the individual is entirely expendable. We have seen where that leads.

FP: What does your book do that no other book has done before?

Zubrin: I have taken these numerous movements, which span 200 years of history and every political coloration imaginable, and shown that they are all one. Furthermore, I have refuted the pseudo-scientific pretentions of every one of them, and hopefully done so in a way that shows that they are all false for the fundamentally the same reason, which is that they deny the true creative nature of man.

FP: What do you hope your book will help achieve?

Zubrin: I hope to refute antihumanism, expose its crimes, and make apparent its mode of operation, so that it can be recognized and repulsed in whatever form it may choose to appear. I hope to make people understand that we are not in danger from lack of resources, we are in danger from people who seek to stop us from using our resources; we are not in danger from there being too many people, we are in danger from people who say that there are too many people; that we are not in danger from human liberty wrecking the Earth’s weather, we are in danger from people who wish to use weather as an excuse to wreck liberty.

I hope to make people understand that, contrary to the antihumanists, every new person born into the world is not a minus to the rest of us, that every nation or race is not the enemy of every other nation or race, and that we do not need have a future of enforced stagnation, poverty, tyranny, war, hate, despair, and genocide. I hope to make it clear that, provided we categorically reject antihumanism and embrace instead an ethic based on faith in the human capacity for creativity and invention, that we can have a future of peace, progress, abundance, love, hope, unlimited possibilities, and the freedom to pursue them.

FP: Dr. Robert Zubrin, thank you for joining Frontpage Interview.

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