Please note: This is written in a
personal capacity.
If you swim with sharks then at
some point you're going to get bitten, but one of the many wonderful things
about the internet is it allows you to bite back.
And
so, to today's appearance on Julia Hartley-Brewer's show on talkRADIO, which
you can catch at about 08:30 here: https://talkradio.co.uk/radio/listen-again/1565760600#
Let
me be very clear. I have a fair amount of experience of mental health issues,
personally (I have OCD and an anxiety disorder), through my own family, and
through our work on supporting vulnerable householders, and this understanding
and empathy means I take great offence at the use of anyone's mental health
conditions to deliberately stigmatise them and undermine their contributions to
society. Sadly, this was exactly the tack taken by Ms Hartley-Brewer over Greta
Thunberg's plan to sail to the next climate change summit in New York, and
whilst she may not quite have plumbed the depths reached by Andrew Bolt's
column in the Herald Sun, her
argument, language and tone was depressingly similar.
Had
I realised that Mrs Hartley-Brewer's opinions have previously resulted in the
Royal College of General Practitioners withdrawing an invitation for her to
speak at an 'NHS Question Time' panel debate in 2019, after over 700
GPs signed a petition complaining that her views were not conducive to
the work they were doing to promote inclusivity within the profession and
amongst patients, or had I been aware of her thoughts on the Omagh
bombing, I might've thought better of agreeing to appear. However, the call
came at very short notice so I didn't get time to do my homework and, to date,
all my experiences on talkRADIO have been very positive and professional.
For
example, James Whale and I may disagree a bit over climate change but I have a
huge amount of respect for the campaigning he's done on dyslexia and literacy,
and I think we probably agree more than he'd admit because we're both fully
paid-up members of the awkward squad. James is delightfully provocative but, as
you can hear for yourselves in the links posted elsewhere on these pages, this
comes from a keen interest in the evidence. He may be a wind-up merchant, but
you have to respect the brains and empathy behind the persona.
Yet Ms Hartley-Brewer's only
interest in Greta's mental health and family was not, as it could've been, to
attempt to understand someone from a very different background and with a very
different way of thinking, but to use what relatively little about her private
life that is in the public domain to attempt to dismiss her contributions
trying to solve the biggest crisis that has ever faced humanity. This is an
example of 'othering',
which is based on the conscious or unconscious assumption that a certain
identified individual or group poses a threat to the favoured group. Donald
Trump, Boris Johnson and Stephen Yaxley-Lennon are just three of the modern-day
masters of othering, and we can all name at least one historical figure whose
popularity was built on it.
People
like Greta are indeed threats to this favoured group because, unlike them,
their arguments come from hard scientific evidence, understanding, empathy, and
a powerful desire to leave a better world in a better shape than the one it was
in when they were born. Which brings us to the other thorny topic of the
morning, my mentioning of population. For the record, I listed flying, driving
and having too many children as the great 'evils' of climate change (I
should've also listed over-consumption of resources, but then flying is one of
the most egregious examples of this). This was a big mistake only in that I
then had to struggle to get the subject back to the impact of the aviation
industry (which if counted as a country would be one of the world's top ten
emitters of greenhouse gases). Ms Hartley-Brewer's response, jumping on my use
of the word 'evil', is a classic example of how desperate those who wish to
somehow preserve the status quo can resort to othering when confronted with
someone who dares to call the evidence out for what it is.
For
the record, I have wavered over the population debate since discovering deep
ecology as an idealistic undergraduate, when people like Paul and Anne Ehrlich,
Herman Daly, and Garrett Hardin were my intellectual heroes (and still are). I
don't support coercive measures to reduce our population (and let's not forget
it was the Tories that capped child benefit), and I would distance myself
completely from those supporters of population control who use this to justify
support for curbing immigration and limiting freedom of movement. However, I
strongly support the views of experts
such as Robert Engelman of the Worldwatch Institute (hat tip to Abi
for the link), who argue that the impacts of population growth must be
mitigated through consuming less, wasting less, and educating and empowering
women. The latter is the one and only consistently proven method of reducing
birth rates, and one which must be right at the heart of our efforts to tackle
climate change and bring about a more equitable and sustainable global
society.
Deciding
what we want our future planet and society to look like will involve some hard
choices, and deciding what level of population we should allow ourselves to
sustain, and where we should house that population, means also deciding the
quality of life we wish to be able sustain for ourselves and future
generations. It's a zero-sum game. Most importantly, this means tackling the
extreme over-consumption of the super-rich - not just the 1%, but the 10%, and
more - but with just 12 years to save the planet all options must now be on the
table. Managing our population is one of them and, as I mentioned in the
interview, this is not a simple as reducing the global birth rate because some
parts of the world (such as Scotland) are facing ageing and declining
populations that mean, at least for now, that they need to grow. Perhaps, given
an ideal world and enough time, universal education and unlimited freedom of
movement would allow human populations to naturally settle into more
sustainable communities, but we're very far from that world and we don't have
anything like the time left.
That
leaves us with some very hard choices, and if you need an idea of how hard
those choices may be, pick up a copy of the Ehrlich's famous book The
Population Bomb, and remember that the measures they discuss were not their recommendations (although
they openly support educating and empowering women), they are simply options. If
they shock then they merely highlight the gulf of understanding between
those who understand the hard evidence and those who simply cannot accept it
because the implications are too threatening. (Their work led to the
development of the Kaya Identity, one of the most important equations in
climate science). As someone with an understanding of the science I am,
personally, far from convinced that the planet can reasonably sustain north of
10 billion people all living what we currently think of as a comfortable
standard of living by the standards of the most 'developed' nations. I don't
know what my own preferred limit would be because there are so many variables
and so much uncertainty involved, but excuse me if I fail to be optimistic
about the likelihood of overturning the growth of consumer capitalism or
achieving a near-complete elimination of the fossil fuel industry in little
over a decade either.
I'm
not having children for a number of reasons, not all of which relate to what we
understand about the implications of climate change. I also don't drive and do
various other things to try to limit my carbon footprint but, as I admitted on
the show, none of us are perfect - I have two dogs and, having not flown in
years aside from one trip for work, I'm jetting off for holidays twice this
year. I'm not Greta, and very few of us could get a place on a yacht sailing
across the Atlantic even if we wanted to, but the very fact that we have a 16
year old girl doing it in the name of climate change, let alone becoming a
figurehead of a global movement, is hugely significant. It’s the sort of change
even a younger and more idealistic me would've dismissed as being too radical
too ever happen. And that only goes to show why those who fear the sorts of
radical changes we will need to tackle climate change have every reason to fear
those who speak truth to power.
Sadly,
Mrs Hartley-Brewer seems to be so fearful of those of us that recognise the
urgency and implications of climate change that she is unable to enter into any
reasonable discussion of the evidence and possible courses of action, and so
people like Greta become personal demons who must be othered out of public
consciousness pour encourager les autres.
So maybe we shouldn't engage with
them, but they have a right to freedom of speech and whilst they have public
platforms they will find guests to talk to, so we must also hold them to
account. Therefore, I am strongly of the view that in the interview today Mrs
Hartley-Brewer, whilst claiming to care about the welfare of an autistic child,
used her autism and other personal details about her to other her (and I am
unclear as to what exactly the 'dangers' were that she referred to as regards
being on the yacht so I will leave readers to make up their own minds about
that part of the conversation). I am also strongly of the view that she did
this deliberately to undermine Greta, and all of us who recognise the severity
of the climate crisis and, in our own imperfect ways, are taking some personal
responsibility for the planet and future generations.
It's time to make a stand.
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