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Opinion

>> Home >> Opinion

Jeanette Fitzsimons: History
shows that environmentalists haven't cried
wolf

Jeanette Fitzsimons

02.06.05

Colin James' Perspectives page diagnosis of the
environmental movement betrays a doctor who has not been listening
attentively enough to, or examining closely enough, the patient he seeks
to treat.

His criticisms of the environmental movement - and by
extension the Green Party - boil down to two claims: first, that we are
overly alarmist and negative; and secondly that we instinctively favour
regulation over market mechanisms in solving the problems we perceive.

He portrays the Greens as out of step with the times - modern
society being unerringly positive and market-focused and we being negative
and regulation-focused.

To call us alarmist is to suggest that
environmentalists keep crying wolf about problems that never materialise.
The problem with this argument is that even a cursory glance at history
illustrates how baseless it is.

The Club of Rome's 1971 report
Limits to Growth was the first to use computer models which showed that
continued growth in population, along with demand for food, energy,
minerals and associated pollution, would overshoot and collapse sometime
in the 21st century.

While many of the details turned out
differently, the overall message of the model is still accurate. Oil will
most certainly peak and then decline within that time. Despite huge growth
in average incomes, more people are hungry now than then. World fisheries
are certainly in worse decline than 30 years ago, and fresh water is both
more scarce and more polluted.

This warning was echoed in March in
the report of the 1300 scientists who worked for several years on the
Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. They said it was likely that the services
we depend on for life - such as fresh water, fisheries and climate - would
not be there for the next generation.

So what is the Greens'
record in this story?

Take climate change. I began campaigning on
it publicly in 1988. Many people scoffed. The major political parties
didn't want to listen. The media was, by and large, uninterested. Since
then, evidence of polar ice melting and extreme storms, floods and
heatwaves has led to widespread agreement that human-caused climate change
is real.

Take ozone depletion. When the reaction between CFCs and
ozone was first demonstrated in the laboratory, industry argued with
scientists and environmentalists that there was no evidence it was
happening in the atmosphere. A decade later, when the greatly enlarged
ozone hole appeared above Antarctica, CFCs were greatly restricted, but we
had committed to decades of skin cancer before ozone levels rebuild to
normal.

Take dioxins. We started talking in the 1970s about the
fact that dioxins from the manufacture of 245-T and other chemicals could
be accumulating in the food chain and people. We pointed out links with
birth defects and cancer in laboratory tests. Stories have kept emerging
of sickness among people who worked in the Dow plant in New Plymouth. Now
we have tests that show they have up to four times the normal level of
dioxin in their bodies.

None of these issues would have come to
popular consciousness had it not been for someone sounding the alarm in
the first place. It is not alarmist to raise issues on the horizon so that
New Zealand can best prepare for them - it is prudent.

It has been
common throughout history to shoot the messenger. Alarmist really means "I
feel alarmed when you say that, so please don't". But James is right that
if your message is singularly negative, it can turn people off.

If
all you say is, "we have these problems", people will stop listening. That
is why we won't join the prophets of doom who say there is no hope, and
predict nothing but chaos and destruction. The human spirit can always
rise above disaster and make a better way of life and we are determined to
offer hope as well as honest analysis.

James' second point, that
the Greens instinctively favour regulation over market mechanisms, sets up
a false dichotomy. Regulation and the market are not polar opposites.
Market mechanisms are only possible if they have overarching rules of
engagement.

The Green approach is for the Government to set the
standards, and then allow business the freedom to work out how best to
meet them.

Our energy policy proposes that the Government call a
competitive tender for the production and installation of 500,000 solar
water-heating panels over five years.

We desperately need to raise
the fuel efficiency of motor vehicles entering the country so that each
litre of petrol goes further. To do that we propose setting a fleet-wide
standard and then leaving importers to work out for themselves the mix of
models that will meet that standard.

There is nothing wrong with
the market as a way of allocating resources, so long as you set the
framework within which it must operate, and ensure all costs are reflected
in prices. For a long time markets have been skewed by allowing business
and consumers to offload the real costs of their activity on the
environment and future generations. Ecological economics provides the
methods to stop that free-loading.

* Jeanette Fitzsimons is
responding to the view of columnist Colin James that voters may have
become immune to predictions of environmental doom.

Related
Links
• Colin James: Maybe it's not so easy being a Green MP any
more

• National
News
• Conservation
& Environment
• Government
• Politics
• Legislation
• NZ Green
party
• New
Zealand

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