The brutal truth about the environmental movement

Campaigning is a mug’s game at the best of times. Very few campaigns ever achieve what they seek, and measuring success is often difficult anyway. But by any reasonable measure, the efforts of the environmental campaigners of the late 1980s and early 1990s have proved hopelessly ineffective.

At that time, global warming was sufficiently accepted that it was no longer just a fringe hypothesis. There were plenty of doubters (there still are a few), but the scientific consensus was clear that the Earth’s climate was warming – and there was ample reason to suspect it was caused by human activity. Even the conservative US president George HW Bush committed in 1990 to the precautionary principle: that it was better to assume that global warming was happening and be proved wrong, than to assume it wasn’t and be proved wrong.

Now in 2023, with record-breaking temperatures in southern Europe and yet another urgent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change saying that we have just a few years to avoid a calamitous tipping point, progress is still pitifully thin. And there’s only so long you can pretend the elephant in the room isn’t there. Apart from minor successes, the environmental movement has failed, certainly on climate change, and more broadly to instil in citizens an awareness of emissions and resources, and the importance of nature.

There are countless examples of progress in the wrong direction, many of them low level but making up a damning picture. In 1990, most of Britain’s high street shops would have had their doors closed, even when the shops were open – these days few would dare close their doors, even in freezing winter weather. What does that cost in unnecessary emissions? Why are modern-day housing estates built far from railway stations, thereby embedding our dependence on cars? Engine idling is now illegal, yet who observes this, or enforces it? Why aren’t renewable energy capture and “grey water” built as standard with new homes?

So many decisions are still made on the basis that energy and materials are limitless. We can blame big business for lobbying governments into making poor decisions, but the environmental movement has failed to get into citizens’ consciousness in a way that makes those decisions politically unfeasible. A hundred years from now people will look upon us with the same disdain that we reserve for the laggards of the past who obstructed the abolition of slavery and votes for women.

The environmental movement goes back hundreds of years, but as a response to modern-day industrial problems, it started in 1962 when Rachel Carson’s groundbreaking book Silent Spring revealed the damage being done to agriculture by pesticides. In the late 1960s, the Club of Rome suggested that there were limits to how much economic growth was sustainable, and as early as 1971 Switzerland passed a constitutional amendment to protect forests, as there was by then credible evidence that pollution from road transport was killing the trees that protected Alpine villages from avalanches.

In Britain, People, later renamed the Ecology Party (forerunner of the Green Party) was launched in 1973, but it took years before the environmental debate went mainstream. In September 1988, the prime minister Margaret Thatcher, a chemist who understood climate science, made a speech to the Royal Society in which she warned of global warming. “It is possible,” she said, “that we have unwittingly begun a massive experiment with the system of this planet itself,” concluding that “Protecting this balance of nature is therefore one of the great challenges of the late 20th century.”

That unleashed the latent interest in environmental issues that had hitherto been confined to fringe groups. Membership of existing NGOs like Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, WWF, The Countryside Charity and others rocketed, and a host of smaller new environmental campaign groups were set up. I was part of this renaissance of natural concern, launching the Environmental Transport Association in April 1990, and helping to build up the European Federation for Transport and Environment – both still exist.

As such, I share the blame for the failure of the environmental movement to instil a sense of personal environmental responsibility across society. Most of us have some products in our houses that are “green” (or, more accurately, “mildly less environmentally damaging”), but we still get in our fossil-fuelled cars to drive to the gym where we ride an exercise bike when we could have burnt the same calories with a cycle ride.

Of course, it’s not just up to us. We need other countries to embrace environmental awareness, and states like China, India under Narendra Modi, Brazil when under Jair Bolsonaro and others are difficult to work with.

But why should the developing world go slow on material progress before the developed world – which after all created the original mess – takes any remedial action? Even our drive towards electric cars is creating a new imperialism, as many of the precious metals we need for car batteries come from countries in the developing world which we will end up exploiting. Again, we have failed to get the argument through. And now Rishi Sunak is making political capital out of opposing low-emissions zones and granting oil exploration licences.

There is a future for the environmental movement, but the movement has come nowhere near embracing it, let alone framing it. It needs to create a realistic but optimistic picture of the future.

The realism comes in ramming home the message that technology won’t solve the problem. It may help, it may buy us some time, but it won’t do the job by itself. Behavioural change will be needed, the way we live our lives must change – we cannot simply hope some machine or invention will take the problem away. It is our problem that we must own.

This doesn’t have to be bad news, and this is where the optimism comes in.

The environmental movement’s media appearances have often seemed negative: criticising governments or companies for decisions, or warning about impending disaster. It links environmentalism with bleakness.

If the environmental movement can highlight the benefits of a low-carbon society – where walking or cycling short distances is better for health and social interaction, where residential streets not based around cars make for better quality of life, enjoying the satisfaction of goods being consumed much closer to where they were produced, and such like – it can start to get people invested in the need to cut carbon emissions.

It will need to work with science (as well as governments and intergovernmental blocs) to ensure that the efforts being undertaken will actually do what’s required to bring emissions down to the levels we need to ward off catastrophic climate change.

And it will need to impress on all people that, if we want to keep many of the benefits of our highly impressive technological civilisation, we have to reconcile it with nature’s dictates of living in harmony with our environment.

If it can pull off that twin approach, then the environmental movement might yet end up being vastly more successful than it has been over the past 35 years.

Chris Bower was the founder director of the Environmental Transport Association and worked for the European Federation for Transport and Environment