Friday, September 26, 2014
ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE
By David B. Sutton
5/12/14
“One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds… An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business or he must be a doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise.”
— Aldo Leopold, Sand County Almanac
For over forty years I have taken solace in these words of the pioneer ecologist, Aldo Leopold (1). Throughout my entire professional career, I have watched one environmental concern after another silenced by the denial of the status quo. The fundamental dynamic behind all of these concerns is the same. We are apt to forget this fact, caught up as we are in the upward spiral of charge and countercharge about the contamination of food, air and water, global warming, nuclear power …etc. We feel as if are struggling with a whole new set of problems that is unique to our time. Very real moral, economic, political, legal, and social dilemmas surface with the profound implications of each new environmental problem, but they are not new.
With these problems comes a whole set of personalities: the scientist, the environmentalist, the industrialist, the environmental lawyer, the politician, the media and many others. They are wedged in the dilemma that balances economic interests with the ecological consequences both now and in the unseen future. One name-calling voice after another seeks the stage: “ a new breed of criminal,” “hysterical,” ”short-sighted,” “Prophets of Doom,” “irresponsible” – all
positions heard many times before.
The cast of recurring characters was sharply drawn in 1882 by the great playwright Henrik Ibsen in his play, AN ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE (2).
I have used the play as a teaching device in my courses for decades. With proper recognition of individual characteristics we are all there.
The story of AN ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE is straightforward. Thomas Stockmann is a doctor in a small Norwegian town, and medical officer at the public baths whose construction has been overseen by his brother, the mayor. The baths, the mayor boasts, “will become the focus of our municipal life! … Houses and landed property are rising in value every day.”
But Dr Stockmann discovers that the pipes were built in the wrong place, and the water feeding the baths is contaminated. “The source is poisoned …We are making our living by retailing filth and corruption! The whole of our flourishing municipal life derives its sustenance from a lie!” People bathing in the water to improve their health are instead falling ill.
Dr Stockmann expects to be treated as a hero for exposing this deadly threat. After the mayor discovers that re-laying the pipes would cost a fortune and probably sink the whole project, he decides that his brother’s report “has not convinced me that the condition of the water at the baths is as bad as you represent it to be.” He proposes to ignore the problem, make some cosmetic adjustments and carry on as before. After all, “the matter in hand is not simply a scientific one. It is a complicated matter, and has its economic as well as its technical side.” The local paper, the baths committee and the business people side with the mayor against the doctor’s “unreliable and exaggerated accounts”.
Astonished and enraged, Dr Stockmann lashes out madly at everyone. He attacks the town as a nest of imbeciles, and finds himself, in turn, denounced as an enemy of the people. His windows are broken, his clothes are torn, he’s evicted and ruined.
Ibsen drew the plot of AN ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE from an actual incident. A German doctor, after making public the knowledge that a cholera outbreak had occurred at a spa, was held responsible for ruining the season. He was stoned and forced to flee the town by the enraged citizenry. It describes a dynamic that is as alive today as it was to the Norwegians over a century ago.
As Arthur Miller says in the preface of his adaptation of the play:
“The play is the story of a scientist who discovers an evil and innocently believing that he has done a service to humanity, expects that he will at least be thanked. However, the town has a vested interest in the perpetuation of that evil, and his “truth,” when confronted with that interest, must be made to conform. The scientist cannot change the truth for any reason disconnected with the evil. He clings to the truth and suffers the social consequences. At rock bottom, then, the play is concerned with the inviolability of objective truth. Or, put more dynamically, that those who attempt to warp the truth for ulterior purposes must inevitably become warped and corrupted themselves. This theme is valid today, just as it will always be.”
Response to Global Warming: Echoes of Ibsen
The on-going denial of the new assessment by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, follows the action in Ibsen’s play. Media commentary sides with the mayor. First it suggests that the panel cannot be trusted, partly because its accounts are unreliable and exaggerated and partly because it uses “model-driven assumptions” to forecast future trends. (What would the they prefer? Tea leaves? Reading entrails?). Then it suggests that trying to stop manmade climate change would be too expensive. Then it proposes making some cosmetic adjustments and carrying on as before.
While some media accept that the issue at least deserves some consideration, discussions of climate breakdown are scarcely a footnote to the popular issues of the day: “Royal baby is the spitting image of Kate”, “Celebrity X with her new breast agumentation looks more confident than ever as she shows off her toned curves.”
Beneath these indispensable reports are stories celebrating the road towards energy self-sufficency with the new practice of fracking, the construction of the XL pipeline and discovery of vast new deposits of coal. No connection with the release of the new climate report are made. Like royal babies, celebrity curves and Ibsen’s municipal baths, increased fossil fuel consumption is good for business. Global warming, like Dr Stockmann’s contaminants, is merely in the way of the profit to be made.
Everywhere we’re told that it’s easier to adapt to global warming than to stop causing it. This suggests that it’s not only the Stern review (3) on the economics of climate change (showing that it’s much cheaper to avert climate breakdown than to try to live with it) that has been forgotten, but also all the recent extreme weather phenomena. If the richest most well-organised nations cannot protect their people from a winter of extreme temperatures, exceptional rainfall, super storms, …etc. – which might have been caused by less than one degree of global warming – what hope do other nations have, when faced with four degrees or more?
Yet any government official who admits to its existence assures us that climate change is something “we can adapt to over time.” But what adaptations do they envisage? Cities relocated to higher ground? Roads and railways shifted inland? Rivers diverted? Arable land abandoned? Regions depopulated? Have they any clue about what this would cost? Of what the impacts would be for the people breezily being told to live with it?
My guess is that they don’t envisage anything: they have no idea what they mean when they say adaptation. If they’ve thought about it at all, they probably picture a steady rise in temperatures, followed by a steady rise in impacts, to which we steadily adjust. But that, as we should know from our own recent experience, is not how it happens. Climate breakdown proceeds in fits and starts, sudden changes of state against which, as we discovered on a small scale this winter, preparations cannot easily be made.
Insurers working out their liability when a disaster has occurred use a process they call loss adjustment. It could describe what all of us who love this world are going through, as we begin to recognise that governments, the media and most businesses have no intention of seeking to avert the coming tragedies. We are being told to accept the world of wounds; to live with the disappearance, envisaged in the new climate report, of coral reefs and summer sea ice, of most glaciers and perhaps some rainforests, of rivers and wetlands and the species which, like many people, will be unable to adapt.
As the scale of the loss to which we must adjust becomes clearer, grief and anger could become overwhelming. As we learn to live with “the marks of death in a community that believes itself well” the Echoes of Ibsen where truth becomes the enemy of the people continue to reverberate throughout our World.
Notes:
(1) Aldo Leopold, 1949. A Sand County Almanac. Oxford University Press.
(2) Henrik Ibsen, 1882, An Enemy of the People.
(3) Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/+/http:/www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/sternreview_index.htm