Those essays and articles could be rolled into one easily enough, and sometimes it seems as if they have been. The formula is always the same, and can be usefully applied across the political spectrum. Start with talk of the “rising tide of authoritarianism” all over the world, as evidenced by “populism”, Brexit, Giorgia Meloni, Viktor Orbán, Justin Trudeau, Donald Trump, Joe Biden or any other leader you don’t like. Move on to explore how much of this “rising authoritarianism” is reflected in environmentalism, as evidenced by Just Stop Oil, Extinction Rebellion, the Green New Deal, the Great Reset, Bill Gates, Greta Thunberg or [insert name of bête noire here].

After this, list the historical inspirations for these new green authoritarians: Ted Kaczynski, Pentti Linkola and Dave Foreman should do for starters. Dig into the most miserable chans and Reddits of the internet and “expose” a few anonymised avatars promoting race war in the name of the planet. Mention the Christchurch shooter. Use the phrase “dark undercurrent” a lot. Chuck in the names of a couple of nature writers from the Thirties who became fascists. Mutter darkly about how Hitler was a vegetarian. Did you know there was an organic garden at Dachau? Makes you think, doesn’t it?

Having got here, you can move on to the meat of the thing: sombrely intoning about the “new threat to democracy” represented by this frightening movement. Depending on where you’re coming from, you can now explain how these new eco-authoritarians represent either a threat to our God-given right to drive, mine, manufacture, fly, burn oil and freely enjoy the glories that only Western Progress can provide, or a threat to diversity, equality, human rights, LGBTQIA++ people, refugees, “global justice” and a woman’s right to choose. Either way, the conclusion will be much the same: a non-specific but ominous call for more monitoring of “problematic” views, more work to tackle “radicalisation”, more laws to prevent protests and “hate speech”, and probably more internet regulation. For the safety of us all, of course.

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The problem, though, is that actual “eco-fascism” is notable mostly for its absence. Dark corners of the internet aside — you can find any craziness there, after all — it’s hard to find a single “eco-fascist” anywhere out in the real world. No public intellectuals, no writers, no philosophers, no politicians, no popular movements embrace anything of the kind. Plenty of people get the label applied to them of course — without the prefix, the word “fascist” has been a meaningless, all-purpose insult for decades — but they all reject it. I was in and around the green movement for a long time and I never met an eco-fascist, though I did have the pleasure of being called one.

So why all the dire warnings? I can think of two possible explanations.

The first is the simplest: there is something we can’t bear to look at, and we are trying to distract attention from it by screaming at the people who are pointing it out. The thing we are avoiding is the thing that we used to call “nature”, and the reality that we are trying to distract attention from is that we are part of it, we live inside it and that everything we do to it we also do to ourselves. Change the climate out there and it changes in here. Erode the soil, erode your soil. Poison the oceans, poison your culture. This is how it works, and this is what we are now facing.

And we cannot face it, even those of us who think we can. Whatever we think our politics are, we have no idea what to do about the coming end of the brief age of abundance, and the reappearance, armed and dangerous, of what we could get away with denying for a few decades: limits. Those who point these limits out — and who point out, especially, that the very existence of industrial modernity might be the root cause of the problems we currently face — can expect to be smacked down with the worst insults our culture can conjure.

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This is one explanation for the mysterious rise of the ghostly eco-fascists. But I think there might be another. The phrase “eco-fascist” is a label which is increasingly being applied to the wrong kind of environmentalist: those who offer up a vision of humanity and nature that involves roots, traditions, smallness, simplicity, a return to previous lifeways. They are contrasted with the right kind of green: those who are modern, global, progressive and — most important — friendly to the onward march of the technological society.

Nearly a decade ago, I wrote an essay called “Dark Ecology”, about the state of environmentalism. In it, I wrote about the emergence of a tendency in green circles which I called “neo-environmentalism”. The neo-greens — who preferred to call themselves “ecomodernists” — emerged as a reaction to the traditional green movement, which in its infancy had been relatively conservative, low-tech and focused on the human scale. The neo-greens rejected all this as backward, impractical and even dangerous. They believed, as I wrote back then, that: “Civilisation, nature and people can be ‘saved’ only by enthusiastically embracing biotechnology, synthetic biology, nuclear power, geoengineering”. The “new environmentalism”, they declared, in manifestoes like this one, would be, as we might now say, “grown-up”.

Sucks to be right, as the kids say. Since I wrote that essay, the neo-greens have, as predicted, mounted an effective corporate takeover of most of the environmental movement. Examples of what we might call Machine Environmentalism have been embraced by the corporate sector, big NGOs, global institutions and most of the intellectual class, most obviously in the “Green New Deals” that are popping up like summer daisies in all corners of the globe. Meanwhile, the green movement is splintering into camps, determined by attitudes to the kind of intrusive and novel technologies that the Machine Greens are pushing.

In Britain, this divide has been illustrated recently by attitudes to green pundit George Monbiot’s latest book, which embraces the neo-green vision. In the humbly titled Regenesis, Monbiot, an urban vegan intellectual, makes a case — based, naturally, on the “peer-reviewed science” — for the “end of most farming” and the replacement of much of its output with vat-grown, bacterial “food” manufactured via “industrial biotechnology”. The vast acreages of land which have been stripped of their farmers can then be “rewilded” in various Monbiot-approved ways, which mainly seem to involve growing forests for always-on urbanites to go wolf-spotting at weekends.

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In promoting a high-tech, globalised food system (perhaps overseen by the world government he has previously argued for), and casually calling for the destruction of the basis of post-Neolithic human civilisation, Monbiot offers a perfect example of what a neo-green future will look like: utopian, hyper-urban, technological, rational and most of all, “efficient”. What matters now, as he explains, is mathematics:

“It’s time we became obsessed by numbers. We need to compare yields, compare land uses, compare the diversity and abundance of wildlife, compare emissions, erosion, pollution, costs, inputs, nutrition…”

Welcome to what the greens have become.

A number of actual farmers who are also first-rate thinkers have taken aim at Monbiot’s Machine Green dystopia in recent months (Simon Fairlie, Chris Smaje and John Lewis-Stempel offer some of the best critiques), but while they might win the battle they are, for now at least, losing the war. Only last month, a pioneering Finnish “solar food” company championed by Monbiot was given EU permission to roll out production of their new “sustainable protein” (as part of the “European green deal”). The company says that the laboratory in which it produces this “novel food” — which it calls “Factory 01” — is part of a “food revolution” that will, for the first time in history, detach food production from the land, the farmers who work it and the culture it creates. Excitable admirers are already explaining that this may give us the ability to one day 3D-print our own food. I’m salivating already.

Older, crustier greenies like me, labouring under the yoke of a pre-modern sensibility which makes us reluctant to eat the sludge and live in the pod, might feel that something has gone terribly wrong with the numbers-obsessed rationalism that underlies this new, corporate-friendly green technocracy. But we have no five-point plan of our own, and we can’t peer-review our intuition, so our complaints don’t convince anybody who matters. And now that the localists, the deep ecologists, the peasants, the small farmers — and anyone else whose human-scale vision might interfere with the march of Progress — have been conveniently designated “eco-fascists”, we are able to behold the only legitimate form of environmentalism which remains: a globalised technocratic, “progressive” push for “sustainability”, led by intellectuals, entrepreneurs and professional activists.

The green movement, long ago co-opted by the Left, has now been co-opted too by technocrats. For this reason, the neo-green (or should we say soylent green?) food future can’t be viewed in isolation. It is only one aspect of the unfolding phenomenon which has been dubbed the “Fourth Industrial Revolution” — a revolution in which the Machine Greens, wittingly or otherwise, are playing a key part.

Dreamt up, like so many other catchy corporate catchphrases, by the World Economic Forum in 2015, the Fourth Revolution is a way of describing our historical moment. That same year, Foreign Affairs produced a book by the same name, to accompany the annual Davos gathering of politicians, business leaders and Bono. In it, the inescapable Klaus Schwab explains, in prose that could make a Martian invasion sound boring, the import of the times we are living through:

“The First Industrial Revolution used water and steam power to mechanise production. The Second used electric power to create mass production. The Third used electronics and information technology to automate production. Now a Fourth Industrial Revolution is building on the Third… It is characterised by a fusion of technologies that is blurring the lines between the physical, digital, and biological spheres.”

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The rest of the book, made up of offerings from various scientists, engineers, politicians and philosophers, explores the implications of this “blurring of lines” between created and uncreated, natural and artificial, wild and tamed. Now that we inhabit what the neo-greens like to call the “Anthropocene” — now that we are, in H. G. Wells’s formulation, Men Like Gods — what do we intend to conjure with the thunder and the lightning that pours forth from our just and rational fingers?

All of the contributors stress that overcoming the old-school distinction between the digital and the natural is the essence of the thing. Neil Gershenfeld, for example, defines the “digital fabrication revolution” — the one which will soon be growing our tank-bred bio-sludge dinners — as “the ability to turn data into things and things into data”. “Intelligent” buildings, wearable sensors, implanted chips: six years ago, when this book was written, these may have seemed radical. Today, it feels as if they have been almost normalised.

Partly this is because of the ubiquity of Amazon Alexas, Smartphone apps and endless, boosterish narratives about the exciting future that AI is building. And partly it is because the Covid pandemic was used as a trial run for precisely the kind of technologies — smartphone-enabled passports, digital population tracking, media-driven narrative control — which are now increasingly sold to us as a means of “saving the planet”. It is no coincidence that some of the loudest proponents of Machine Environmentalism were also fanatical supporters of the Covid biosecurity state. We are being trained to like what is coming — or at least to shrug our shoulders and accept its inevitability.

Perhaps the most important aspect of the Fourth Revolution, though, is what has been called “datafication”. The book’s chapter on “Big Data” explains that the knowledge available to each of us today on the Internet dwarfs that which would have been available in the Great Library of Alexandria, the greatest repository of learning in the ancient world. But size, as they explain, isn’t everything:

“Big data is also characterized by the ability to render into data many aspects of the world that have never been quantified before; call it ‘datafication’. For example, location has been datafied, first with the invention of longitude and latitude, and more recently with GPS satellite systems. Words are treated as data when computers mine centuries’ worth of books. Even friendships and ‘likes’ are datafied, via Facebook.”

Here we see the same “obsession with numbers” that George Monbiot demands of us as we contemplate how to produce our food and live in our landscape, and it reveals the elision between Machine Environmentalism and the elite-driven tech revolution it is part of. What we can see is that both achieve their goals through the process of datafication: the quantification of everything. The pattern of reality will be transformed into bits and bytes, comparisons and yields, numbers and statistics, until even novels and friendships and meadows and family meals on winter nights can be measured and compared and judged for their relative contributions to efficiency and sustainability.

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There is a rift here, and we should gaze deep into it, because there is something down there that we need to make out. It is the ancient rift between those who embrace the mindset of “datafication” — which is, in the form of sums and written language, one of the foundations of civilisation — and those who are repelled by it. I suspect it can never really be healed, because it marks the border between two distinct ways of seeing. The philosopher Jeremy Naydler has referred to them as ratio and the nous, but we could just as well call them left and right brain, mythos and logos, or — perhaps most simply — the sacred and the profane.

The Fourth Revolution and the Machine Environmentalism which it contains offer us a profoundly profane vision of the world. Life in this understanding is not a sacred thing but an engineering challenge. It is something which can be studied, quantified and constantly tweaked until we arrive at the most efficient version. This may be done with the best of intentions (or it may not) but the things which cannot be measured will, of course, be left out of the equation, and the things which cannot be measured happen to be the stuff of life. Love. God. Place. Culture. The profound mystery of beauty. A feeling for land or community or cultural traditions or the unfolding of human history over generations. Song. Art. They’ll “datafy” all of this soon enough, no doubt, or try to. But the kind of people who think that the Great Library of Alexandria contained “exabytes’ worth of information” rather than the collected fruits of hard-won wisdom are lost before they ever sit down to their datasets.

If you have ever wondered why climate change has so utterly dominated the green debate to the exclusion of so many other problems which stem from industrial society — mass extinction, soil erosion, the collapse of human cultures, ocean pollution — then the answer, I think, is here. Climate change is a problem amenable to numerical questions and technocratic answers. It is, furthermore, a problem which, almost by definition, can only be solved by elites. If you can’t read or understand the “peer-reviewed science” then you are open to being intimidated into fearful silence by those who can, or claim they can. And those people — drawn, as all green “thought leaders” are, from the upper strata of society — will bring with them a worldview which treats the mass of humanity like so many cattle to be herded into the sustainable, zero-carbon pen. If you’re wondering where you’ve heard this story before, just dig out your dirty old Covid mask. It will all come flooding back.

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Interestingly, some of the progenitors of the Fourth Revolution are themselves uneasy about where some of it is leading. Even Klaus Schwab, who these days is often lazily presented as a volcano-dwelling Bond villain pulling the global strings, admits to unease at the speed and scale of change. In the book, he expresses his timid concern about how our “quintessential human capacities such as compassion and co-operation” might be eroded by deep shifts like these. “It is already changing our health and leading to a ‘quantified’ self,” he writes, “and sooner than we think it may lead to human augmentation”.

Even as he proselytises for the Fourth Revolution, Schwab can see what is coming. Google maps and smartphone apps were always just the beginning. We are headed into a Brave New World of all-knowing Smart homes and vat-grown sludge for breakfast, and every step along that road will make perfect rational sense. A Panopticon world, remade at the nano level by the allegedly well-meaning, lies just around the corner. C. S. Lewis understood the trap well: “Of all tyrannies,” he wrote, “a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive… those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”

What the Fourth Revolutionaries never seem to grasp is that the question you ask will frame the philosophy you develop. If your question is “how can we remove all this atmospheric carbon to avoid what these computer models say is coming?” then the answer can only lead you to a globalised technocracy. If, on the other hand, the question you ask is “how can we build lives which offer us meaning, in alliance with the rest of nature?” then you may be led in a very different direction.

It is the first kind of question that a Machine society will always ask, and there will always be endless, multiplying justifications for asking it. Ecology, equality, feminism, democracy, public health, growth, security, the war on terror or crime or drugs or whatever: there is always a reason for Big Data. The control is always necessary to prevent a greater evil. Even a movement which once challenged this grim way of seeing has today been bought and sold by it.

For at least 200 years we have been thoroughly undermining the foundations of all of our assumptions. Now, new cracks in the masonry are appearing daily. Can we caulk them up with vat-grown eco-sludge and hope they don’t spread? Can Big Data come to our rescue? What can we measure, manage, monitor, to help us escape from this? This is what I think, though I often wish I didn’t: we are living now through what may be the final triumph of Rational Man. The tower he has made has nearly touched the very roof of the world. Every old story can tell us what will happen next.

The Devil has finally found the ultimate weapon of mass destruction. It is not, as you might suspect, a hurtling asteroid or Putin pushing the thermo-nuclear button; it is, apparently, farming. It is, according to the environmentalist and journalist George Monbiot, “the most destructive force ever to have been unleashed by humans”. This ancient activity takes up vast tracts of the planet and the gases emitted by its cows and sheep take up its atmosphere.

Credit where it is due, Monbiot presents in his latest book Regenesis:“Feeding the World Without Devouring the Planet” a damning case for farming being the Devil’s work. What the public understands as farming — carefully husbanded crops and moo moos attended to by a rosy-faced family — is increasingly absent from the landscape and confined to the board books the middle classes read to their toddlers. About 70% of global farmland is owned by 1% of “farmers”. Agri-business now rules the roost.

Four companies — Cargill, Archer Daniel Midland, Bunge and Louis Dreyfus — control 90% of the global grain trade. Similarly, four companies — ChemChina, Corteva, Bayer and BASF — control 66% of the world’s agricultural chemicals. These businesses are hardly renowned for their care of the environment. Likewise, politicians. The post-Second World War intensification of agriculture, promoted in the West by national governments and the nascent EU as a path to food security, has starved the soil and exhausted crops.

The litany of the woes caused by agriculture continues. Pesticide use on farmland has resulted in what Monbiot calls “Insectageddon”: even an eco-minded country such as Denmark has witnessed a drop of 70-80% of insects in the last 20 years. No fewer than 75% of antibiotics sold in Europe are used for treating farm animals, and perhaps 58% of those antibiotics are excreted, with some reaching water courses. I learned to swim in the River Wye, in the self-same stretch near Hay where Monbiot today fears to tread water, due to pollutant run-off from 590 chicken units. Soya fed to housed cattle requires the cutting down of the Amazon rainforest. Then there is wasted water from the tap left running. And those methane belches.

We in the West live in a careless and consumerist Sodom and Gomorroh, and the remainder of the planet is following in a handcart. By what is known as “Bennett’s Law”, consumption of fat and protein (read: “meat”) rises with income. As hitherto starving parts of the globe gain more currency in the pocket so they will, like us decadent Westerners, tuck into burgers, spare-ribs, entrecote, all of which come from the same pesky, methane-producing, land-hogging livestock who are already the principal cause agents of The End Times. “The biggest population crisis is not the growth in human numbers, but the growth in livestock numbers”, Monbiot declares.

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It might come as a surprise to Saint George of The Guardian, but many of us in agriculture would concur with his jeremiad against Big Farmer. Indeed, my book The Running Hare, an account of sustainably retro-farming an arable field, anticipates many of his sallies against the agri-industrial dragon. Conventional, chemically-dependent agriculture is a bonfire of the sanities, ecological and economic, being dependent on big (but barely scrutinised) public subsidy.

Monbiot’s solution is a ‘‘farmfree” future, in which our farmland has been re-wilded with exotic megafauna — think lions, elephants, giraffes. What will we eat? Bacterial soup, grown in vats. Such gloop can, apparently, be modelled into tasty dishes. In an aural irony a comedian would blush to construct, Monbiot’s damascene conversion to this ascetic diet came in Helsinki.

But any discussion of global food policy needs to begin with one plain fact: there is, as Monbiot concedes, no actual food shortage. Already, the planet’s farmers produce enough food to cater for the projected 10 billion humans of 2050. The problem is waste, and distribution. The West goes to fat, while Ethiopia hungers; worldwide, more than 10% of people are hungry, roughly 25% are overweight or obese. The United Nations’ figures for global food waste are somewhat fluid, but 33% is in the ballpark. The rich West throws away food, while the Third World lacks the storage to keep food preserved. I’d be more amenable to laments about farming by every George, Dick and Henrietta if the public stopped binning food, and government did its job of equitable distribution.

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Not that my views as a farmer will interest Monbiot. He has seen the light, and I am to be made extinct. Or I will be turned into a tourist guide for his wildlife park — which, after all, is what the British countryside will become under “farmfree”. Lions are apex predators, and quite capable of eating a human for lunch, so they will need to be fenced in when the Serengeti comes to Surrey. What used to be working countryside becomes an extended zoo where Nature is exterior to humans. A visitor attraction for city folk.

To justify his “farmfree” future Monbiot, after reasonably critiquing conventional, intensive agriculture, then traduces alternative, nature-friendly, climate-aiding farming methods. No-till, regenerative, and organic are all set up as Aunt Sallies, to be “demolished” in the proof that no farming model is sustainable. Not one.

But take organic farming (and I declare an interest). According to Monbiot, organic farming only allows “a slightly wider range of wildlife to persist” than conventional farming, and can inflict more damage on the overall environment because of its “lower yields”: it uses more land to produce the same amount of food. But as the same George Monbiot noted, in 2000, in a Guardian article called “Organic farming will feed the world“, organic farming of maize produces yields “identical to yields of maize grown with fertilisers and pesticides, while soil quality in the organic fields dramatically improves”. He goes on to explain the research of Professor Jules Pretty of Essex University, which demonstrated “how farmers in India, Kenya, Brazil, Guatemala and Honduras have doubled or tripled their yields by switching to organic or semi-organic techniques”.

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And does organic land really possess only a “slightly wider range of wildlife”? According to an Oxford University study, organic farms support 34% more plant, insect and animal species than conventional farms. I’d say 34% was more than “slight”, wouldn’t you?

As the high priest of British veganism, Monbiot really has it in the neck for farm animals, who do not feature in his eerily Orwellian “farmfree” dystopia. Curious, is it not, how some eco activists claim to love animals, but are happy to see farm breeds — some of which, like White Park cattle, have been around since Druid times — made extinct? Is there some sort of hierarchy, where wild animals are good, farm animals bad? I aver that our Ouessant sheep, a Viking-era breed from Brittany, are no less fascinating than their wild Mouflon ancestors. And I have observed both.

Sheep — usually Monbiot’s bete noire, for their supposed “sheepwrecking” of the uplands of Wales — get off lightly in Regenesis, in which the pasture-fed, organic cow becomes the “most damaging farm product” on Earth. Why? Because they are slow to grow to maturity, thus taking up more space, and emitting more methane.

But the organic cow will produce, from its back end, enough manure to feed over 2 million insects a year, the start of a wild food chain going all the way up to the fox and swallow. More organic cows might, then, end “Insectageddon”. Moreover, traditional hay meadows — the precise origin and purpose of which is the feeding of livestock like Ermintrude — are one of the most florally diverse habitats in the world, and can contain over 140 plant species.

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Arguments like this will fall on stony ground with Monbiot and his largely urban following of rewilders, whose experience of agriculture is that of the voyeur, the observer. Monbiot has no appreciation of farmland ecology, and for him Nature and Farming are absolutely discrete (as they are, ironically, for Big Farmer). He complains that 40% of global land use is given over to farming, whereas “Only 15 per cent of the world’s land, by contrast, is protected for nature.”

Is not a traditional, chemical-free hay meadow, with its meadow brown butterflies and meadow pipits, “protected for nature”? For The Running Hare, I took a chemically-lashed arable field and turned it into a Victorian-type cornfield, which as well as giving “yield” ran anew with poppies and hares, cornflowers and red-leg partridge.

The British countryside has been farmed for 3,000 years, and in those millennia developed distinct farmland habitats, with allied, dependent species. The clue is in the names of the flowers: Cornflower, Meadowsweet, Corn Marigold. Today, in Britain, it is these flora and fauna of traditional farmland that is most under threat. Since the industrialisation of agriculture in the Fifties, some 97% of traditional hay meadows have disappeared, and arable flowers, grown in fields since the Stone Age, have become extinct. As for the farmland birds, here’s the report of theDepartment of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, Wild Bird Populations in the UK, 1970 to 2014:

“The long term decline of farmland birds in the UK has been driven mainly by the decline of those species that are restricted to, or highly dependent on, farmland habitats (the ‘specialists’). Between 1970 and 2014, populations of farmland specialists declined by 69 per cent … Four farmland specialists (grey partridge, turtle dove, tree sparrow and corn bunting) have declined by 90 per cent or more relative to 1970 levels.”

In Britain’s fields, courtesy of Big Farmer, specialist birds, bugs and flowers totter on the edge of extinction. They are wild, but they live in a human-created habitat, farmland. Some arable flowers actually require the disturbance of ploughing to live. For the sin of impurity, farmland’s wild things are of no account to Monbiot. There is no place for them in his farmfree future. He therefore threatens to finish the work begun by Big Farmer.

All year, we’ve had striking school children and Extinction Rebels tell us that time is running out and that we must take radical action now. They’ve made themselves heard and the politicians are pretending to listen: “OK, Zoomers — we’ll stick up a few more windmills — now, run along back to class.”

But according to environmentalists like George Monbiot, that’s not nearly enough. Clean tech alone won’t save the planet — we have to drastically reduce our consumption too. That way we can kick our fossil fuel habit much sooner, plus all the other ways in which we mess up our world. In short, our lifestyles are unsustainable, no matter how we power them. It’s an argument he sets out in his compelling Confessions interview with Giles Fraser (he also makes his case here).

What would 'living with less' actually look like?

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OK, let’s assume that things are every bit as bad as Monbiot says they are. Let’s also assume that people would vote for the radical reduction in consumption that would be required to achieve net zero emissions by 2030. You may think that deadline unrealistic, but it does allow us to ask an interesting question: what would living with less actually mean?

Extinction Rebellion swerves the question by referring it to the ‘citizen assemblies’ they want established. Other campaigners, including Monbiot, focus on the extravagantly wasteful appetites of the wealthy — whose private jets and grotesquely oversized yachts have got to go. Then there are the full-on Savonarolas, who look beyond the lives of the rich and famous, to humbler folk. They want us to give up our cars and stop eating meat, pronto. As for all of our stuff — the gadgets, trinkets and fast fashion — that too can fuel a modern bonfire of the vanities. (Though not literally, considering the emissions.)

In short, living with less means minimalism, veganism and bicycle-friendly cities — plus a hefty dose of egalitarian politics. From a youthful, Left-leaning, metropolitan point-of-view that doesn’t seem too bad. Rather agreeable, in fact.

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Except that actual de-consumerism would be a lot harder. We know this because we’ve done it before. Go back 50 years and we were living with less; and a hundred years ago, even less than that. So, let’s use the past as a rough guide to the future.

The first thing worth noting is that a lower level of overall consumption does not require economic equality. Quite the opposite in fact. Rich people tend to spend a lower proportion of their money than the rest of us. Indeed, that’s one of the problems with the current age of inequality: because they tend to sit on their cash piles, millionaires and billionaires act as a drag on consumption and therefore economic growth. The conventional Left argues for more redistribution on the grounds that it would boost consumption. However, that goes against the logic of radical environmentalism. A seriously green agenda wouldn’t just need to re-invent capitalism, but socialism too.

In any case, it’s not the Gulfstreams and Daimlers that are making all the difference. It’s the era of mass mobility that’s put such a burden on the planet — all those millions of cars and billions of air miles. Lifting that weight from the world means rolling back freedom of movement for the many, not just the few. Access to affordable air travel and the private car would have to be heavily restricted.

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As well curbing emissions, this would change society. The history of liberalism goes hand-in-hand with the history of transport — specifically the individual’s ability to physically escape the ties of family, community and place. We wouldn’t have to sacrifice all our gains, of course. There’d still be room in the new dispensation for bicycles and buses (indeed a great deal more room, with cars off the streets). Nevertheless, by limiting our options for getting around, we’d be shrinking our horizons.

“Think global, act local” is an old environmental motto. But in a less mobile society, would we continue to think globally? After all, it’s hard to be a citizen of the world if you can’t get there. We’d have to forget foreign holidays, wave goodbye to the gap year: luxuries that our ancestors couldn’t imagine would become unimaginable again. Moreover, what applies to tourism and travel would also apply to migration. A globalised economy that depends on millions of workers moving back and forth across continents doesn’t fit with a living-with-less regime.

There might, however, be a new source of labour. Or, rather, a return to an old one as colleges and universities were emptied of their students. That so many young adults today can study for so many years is a sure sign of our great wealth, but would it survive the economics of ‘de-growth’? I doubt it.

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Another relevant pattern from the past concerns family structure. One of the reasons why people were able to live with so much less is that social bonds were stronger and a whole lot more restrictive. The only welfare state was the household and, perhaps, the immediate community — which is why our forebears couldn’t afford to be as socially liberal as we are.

Some environmentalists see fit to lecture people on the number of children they have. And, fair enough, each extra mouth places an additional burden on the environment; but then so does living in ever-smaller households so that the same population requires a greater number of resource-consuming homes. Learning to live with less would mean learning to live together — at the expense of personal autonomy.

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How WEIRD are you?

By Peter Franklin

It’s hard to think of a single stable society that lives with much less than we do that isn’t much more conservative than we are. Take attitudes to crime and punishment, for instance. These are typically harsher in places and times where the impact of theft and vandalism is more deeply felt. A simpler, less consumerist society may appeal in theory to the green Left; in practice it may prove more pleasing to the reactionary Right.

But, hang-on, a de-consumerised future wouldn’t have to mimic the pre-consumerist past, would it? Though we’d need to make difficult choices, we could prioritise the things that mattered most to us. Indeed, part of the attraction of this whole agenda to radicals is that the process of priority-setting would allow society to be reordered in keeping with their values.

Perhaps, but if the climate emergency does compel us to change our ways, democracy won’t allow one side of the cultural divide to load most of the pain on the other side. We saw what happened in France when President Macron tried to introduce a fuel tax that hurt the left-behinds more than the well-connected. So if we do need to radically cut our consumption, those in the forefront of the cause are going to have to accept that the sacrifices will be as painful to them as to anyone else.

Until now that is. Monbiot believes that he has the outline of just such a story. Here, from the Guardian, is his elevator pitch:

“Through restoring community, renewing civic life and claiming our place in the world, we build a society in which our extraordinary nature – our altruism, empathy and deep connection – is released. A kinder world stimulates and normalises our kinder values. I propose a name for this story: the Politics of Belonging.”

To get the full gist, you’ll need to read the whole thing, but what might immediately strike the casual reader is the story’s utopianism. Its author, however, makes an appeal to scientific plausibility:

“Over the past few years, there has been a convergence of findings in different sciences: psychology, anthropology, neuroscience and evolutionary biology. Research in all these fields points to the same conclusion: that human beings are, in the words of an article in the journal Frontiers in Psychology, ‘spectacularly unusual when compared to other animals’. This refers to our astonishing degree of altruism. We possess an unparalleled sensitivity to the needs of others, a unique level of concern about their welfare, and a peerless ability to create moral norms that generalise and enforce these tendencies.

“We are also, among mammals, the supreme cooperators…”

Actually, that would be the Naked Mole Rat, which (along with the Damaraland Mole Rat) is the only eusocial mammal. Zoological pedantry aside, one has to observe that, while uniquely compassionate, humans are also uniquely cruel. And though uniquely altruistic, we’re also uniquely avaricious. Indeed, in terms of morality and immorality, we’re peerless in every way. That’s because, in all but the least important sense, we’re not animals. If I were constructing a narrative of hope, that’s what I would begin with – we are not animals.

To be fair, Monbiot believes that we can and should put aside our competitive instincts and make the most of  our cooperative potential. Furthermore, he has every confidence that we can do this in a politically transformative way – because it’s already happening:

“…[it] might sound like an improbable hope – until you begin to explore some of the remarkable things that have been happening in the United States.

“The Big Organising model developed by the campaign to elect Bernie Sanders as the Democratic nominee is potentially transformative. Rather than relying on big spending, big data and a big staff, it uses proliferating networks of volunteers, who train and supervise more volunteers, to carry out the tasks usually reserved for staff. While Hillary Clinton’s campaign was organising money, the Sanders campaign was organising people.”

Back in May of this year, Monbiot argued that “this method could be used to transform the prospects of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party”. He was “widely mocked” for doing so, but he was proved right by subsequent events.

However, in noting – and, in some cases, celebrating – the rise of grassroots political movements, he has, I believe, misunderstood their essence. What’s really going on isn’t some kind of shared spiritual awakening, but a potentially darker phenomenon.

The other week I wrote about the anthropological philosophy of René Girard – who knew a thing or two about human storytelling – and who concluded that “imitation is at the root of all human behaviour.” We are, he said, driven by “mimetic desire”.

Thus when people come together in pursuit of a common goal we should suspect that copying, not community, is the motivating force. Indeed, what the new political movements have in common – from the populist left through to the alt-right – is their profoundly mimetic nature. Their most powerful form of communication is the internet ‘meme’ (a word meaning ‘that which is imitated’).

From ‘oh, Jeremy Corbyn!’ to ‘Pepe the Frog’, memes create a sense of belonging, but only for those who copy.

An example of an unwisely-chosen target is George Monbiot – a man of the green left, but interesting with it. To the annoyance of his detractors, he doesn’t just criticise capitalism, but also the underlying culture of consumerism. To an extent now quite rare on the left (and indeed the centre and right), Monbiot has opinions on how we ought to live, not just on the wickedness and privilege of a distant elite.

This is why he attracts such flak from the right, especially the libertarian right: How dare he tell us what to do with our lives! What his detractors don’t get is just how many people do want to be told. There is a unfulfilled appetite here, not for a personal challenge to one’s own conduct, but for a broader vision of a justly ordered society and the valued place that each of us would have within it.

In an essay for the Guardian, Monbiot argues that the most powerful way of communicating such a vision is through that fundamental building block of culture – the story:

“When we encounter a complex issue and try to understand it, what we look for is not consistent and reliable facts but a consistent and comprehensible story. When we ask ourselves whether something ‘makes sense’, the ‘sense’ we seek is not rationality, as scientists and philosophers perceive it, but narrative fidelity. Does what we are hearing reflect the way we expect humans and the world to behave? Does it hang together? Does it progress as stories should progress?”

Neoliberalism is a story. So was social democracy before it. And laissez faire capitalism before that. Obviously these dominant and once-dominant ideologies are also expressed as economic theories, political manifestos and government programmes; but the source of their power lies in the stories told about them.

Even when a story is overshadowed by real events – as neoliberalism has been by the financial crisis and other manifest failures – it can persist if no one tells a better story:

“You cannot take away someone’s story without giving them a new one. It is not enough to challenge an old narrative, however outdated and discredited it may be. Change happens only when you replace one story with another. When we develop the right story, and learn how to tell it, it will infect the minds of people across the political spectrum.”

This is spot-on and explains the political developments and non-developments of the last decade. In the immediate wake of the financial crash, a surge of support for the parties of the centre-left was expected. But, for the most part, it didn’t happen. Indeed, the trend across the West has been in the other direction. That’s because they failed to tell a different story. The centre-right parties weren’t telling a different story either, but at least their version of it made more sense (batten-down the hatches as opposed to carry on spending).

But if, in the longer-term, people yearn for change, telling an old story – even the best version – leaves you vulnerable to a new one.

Not just any new story, though; George Monbiot has some editorial guidelines:

“Without a new story that is positive and propositional, rather than reactive and oppositional, nothing changes. With such a story, everything changes…

…there is nothing to be gained from spreading falsehoods, it must be firmly grounded in reality.”

Unfortunately, negative storytelling can make a difference. As for spreading falsehoods, those who spread them have plenty to gain. Monbiot had it right the first time when he emphasised the power of “narrative fidelity” over “rationality” and “facts”.

A consistent story doesn’t have to be true. Indeed, consistency is easier to achieve in fiction; which is why populist politicians with little regard for the truth can run rings around their more scrupulous opponents.

Responsible leaders face the challenge of finding a fresh and compelling counter-narrative, but one nonetheless based in reality – a true test of the storyteller’s art.

George Monbiot believes that he has just such a story. But to get my take on it, you’ll have to wait until the next exciting episode of UnPacked…