Humbug and the Greens

Daily Express in November, 2000

Prince Charles is in that awkward season of the year. The tan from his Aegean holiday will have faded, and he hasn't yet packed to jet off for his ski-ing holiday. He may even be feeling a little neglected. Why, he hasn't been big in the papers since he gave one of this year's BBC Reith Lectures. Do you remember? He exhorted his future subjects to attend to our "inner heartfelt wisdom". He had been doing a bit of that on the lovely Mount Athos, home to monks and no women. An innermost voice still insists that Charles is abusing his position to spout the kind of guff that takes in too many people. And now, he has been insisting that global warming is the result of human arrogance. He ought to know: he has, over the years, written the manual on that subject.

What we might call the Highgrove Tendency, after Charles' Gloucestshire estate, is riddled with arrogance and humbug. The Prince has for years been egged on in many of his sillier views by Jonathon Porritt, Bart.. This old-Etonian lives in a gorgeous 4-storey 1860s terraced house in Cheltenham, from where he opined in his last book that real progress depended on, "scientists getting down off their high horses and mixing with us ordinary folk". It’s almost certain he didn’t spot the irony.

The Highgrove Tendency isn't a conspiracy: these people do not all hang out together. But it's a mindset we need to fight. Charles and Porritt are typical of a kind of lofty, stiff-necked Englishman who likes to lecture the rest of us on green issues. Think of Zac Goldsmith, old-Etonian and editor of the Ecologist, spouting tripe about cancer (no, Zac, it isn't mostly caused by industrial chemicals). He hates corporations, but is himself reported to be sitting nicely on a huge fortune which was inherited from his father James, and which certainly wasn't created in some Gandhian cottage industry.

And there is the old-Etonian Lord Melchett, who has just left Greenpeace to work part-time for Iceland, the supermarket, and to convert to organic production the land he inherited from his industrialist father. Years ago, he transferred the ownership of these hundreds of Norfolk acres to a charitable trust, to do good works, and some became organic. But for sound economic reasons, most were not, which did not stop His Lordship leading the anti-pesticide brigade. But Charles leads the way, with his predilection for large boats, Bentleys, and Aston Martins. He must have done more global warming in his life than a good few hundred of his subjects-to-be (presuming, of course, that emissions from fossil fuel burning are doing the harm he says they are). One can forgive him big use of helicopters: security considerations alone may justify that. Still, people who fly high mileages at public expense might recall their own culpability before droning on about ours.

The Highgrove Tendency matters for much bigger reasons than this. Prince Charles is at one with a great tribe of therapists, foodies, muck and magic pseudo-peasants, Greens, and Christian and socialist "development" specialists who are systematically trashing the traditions of a civilisation which for hundreds of years has been developing a way of discussing and organising a better way for man to live on his planet.

He says BSE proves we were arrogant, but forgets it seems to have resulted from a recycling practice dating from the mid 1920's and carried out without noticeable harm for sixty years. Not arrogance, but cock-up. Charles adores complementary medicine, much of which fails every objective test that it is any use at all medically (though it may make the credulous and vulnerable feel a bit better "in themselves", which may be a good thing but is hardly a ringing endorsement). He endorses organic farming, which the Food Standards Agency has had the courage to point out confers no important benefit in food quality or safety (and which would be an expensive way of getting more butterflies into the countryside). He loathes genetically modified crops to the point of insisting (like Lord Melchett) that we should not even do the trials which would find out their benefits and failings. Amongst the toffs, indeed, only Jonathon Porritt has a word in favour of GMOs, and even that comes hedged about with politically-correct nonsense.

This tendency's philosophy – if it deserves the word – is to deny almost every proposition of a way of thinking which could fairly claim to be the finest product of the human mind. The Highgrovians despise the British Enlightenment of Newton, Locke, and Hume. They loathe its rationalism without noticing that it was brilliant at considering Charles' beloved balance of reason and intuition.

The essential dilemma for thinking people is to balance their desire for safety, which is falsely equated with tradition, with their appetite for progress, which is falsely equated with risk. The Highgrovians throw away any sense of these necessary tensions. They worship intuition, myth and emotion. The rest of us should quake when we hear the eco-reactionaries witter on about this or that "contamination", and their love of "purity", granted the totalitarian drift of such yearnings.

We have inherited a world of wealth derived from the exploitation of Nature. Charles says we should work "with the grain of Nature". But that is what our entire intellectual tradition is about. It is also stating the obvious: nothing big can be achieved for long which seriously flouts Nature. Nothing, however small, can be achieved without taking chances with her.

It is no use to say that we can learn any moral or practical rules from Nature. Charles' "sacred" Nature is a blind, thoughtless and tough old bag. She is given to cannibalism, to violence, and to flesh-tearing indifference to the finer feeling of us, her brainiest, nicest, kindest and most interesting offspring. Her insect and microbial hordes wage deadly battle with man every day of their lives and ours.

It is Western civilisation which has deployed science to discover what her laws are. It is the West which has harnessed trade, industry and government to soften Nature's harshness to the poor, hungry and the sick. And it is Western civilisation which, self-consciously, deliberately and energetically, explored and codified the means by which rich societies should conserve and restore damaged landscapes, and harvest and conserve threatened plant gene stocks. It is humans who love Nature's species, not any other of her species.

It is modern, rational, passionate, technological people who will work out what to do if global warming is real, whether it is really our fault or not. Humbug won't help.