The Enemies of Progress: The dangers of sustainability
by Austin Williams
(Sociatas, 2008, 156 pages)
Occasionally one is genuinely surprised by programs on the ABC. Recently, a regular radio favourite on Saturday morning, On Design with Alan Saunders, included an interview with the British architect Austin Williams.
Normally Saunders interviews all sorts of people about design and lifestyle, the radio equivalent of a trendy weekend newspaper supplement. But Williams, straight off the starting block, started attacking the "moralistic, parochial, misanthropic and risk-adverse" Green mantra of sustainability.
In short order, Williams claimed that sustainability was small minded -- in pretending to change the world, it only got us to change our light bulbs. He described George Monbiot as sanctimonious and extremist -- Monbiot, after all, once said about his own book Heat: How to stop the planet burning that if it frightened his readers to stay in bed all day, then that would be worthwhile, as they would thereby have reduced their consumption of fossil fuels.
If listeners were in any doubt about what they were hearing on "their ABC", Williams continued by comparing sustainability to a woman who had only two weeks to live and was told by her doctor to give up smoking, drinking and sex. "But will it make me live longer?" she asked. "No", the doctor replied, "but it will seem like it".
Predictably, the ABC website was flooded with complaints from listeners. "How does a reactionary like this with nothing creative to say get on the radio?" "Did I really hear this twaddle!!!!!" "Is this an example of the ABC's effort to find 'journalistic balance'?"
Well, just maybe, but how refreshing it was.
Austin Williams, the author of The Enemies of Progress: The dangers of sustainability, is Director of the Future Cities Project and an architect and project manager by profession. Previously Technical Editor of the Architects' Journal, he now writes for a wide range of publications on urban and transport issues. The Enemies of Progress is a very polemical -- and very satisfying -- rant against the pervasive indoctrination of sustainability that has paralysed political will and cultivated a fear of the future in our society. With echoes of Virginia Postrel's The Future and its Enemies, the book systematically documents the effects of sustainability on energy production, architecture and the city, our neo-colonialist attitudes towards the developing world's "sustainable underdevelopment", and the role of the United Nations and Al Gore and our educational institutions in the systematic spread of green propaganda.
Williams spends precious little time on the inaccuracies and falsehoods that underpin green claims -- it is as if he doesn't have time -- but he amasses some wonderful statistics on their consequences and brings home just how pervasively this new zeitgeist has permeated our thinking. Take transport and the importance of mobility for human progress. Quoting Dr Thomas Arnold on seeing a Victorian steam train, "I rejoice to see it, and think that feudality is gone forever", the author clearly links the notion of human progress to the ability of people to move from the dead end of village life to a future in the city. Immigration has throughout history been a yearning by people to improve their lives. Increased mobility is the key and is being demonstrated every day before our eyes in the flight from rural China and India to the big cities. But this impulse has been turned on its head by the dead hand of sustainability. Now, "local is good, slow is best". Western environmentalists hate the city, and wish these masses would remain in their low impact, ecological wonderland, in poverty. May I urgently suggest to anyone who thinks along these lines to read the 2008 Man Booker Prize winner, The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga on the grim reality of rural life and the servant class in India.
In this new "sustainable" world view, congestion and grid lock of our cities becomes an anti-city, anti-progress propaganda obsession. But how many people would know that London had the same number of cars in 1963 as it did in 2003, before its congestion charge was introduced. Williams illustrates the measly approach to infrastructure development in Britain by contrasting it with the dynamism of China and India. China plans to build over 8000 kilometres of roads in the next five years, in addition to the 30,000 kilometres of highways it has already built over the past 20. India is upgrading and resurfacing 65,000 kilometres of road network in the next 15 years. But contrast this sort of activity to the developed world -- the British Transport Minister boasted recently that in the last two years they will have "delivered approximately 10 kilometres of road improvements to the network".
The new feudal arbiters of our travel plans turn out to be politicians like Tony Blair, who famously argued that "a new approach to transport may mean sometimes not travelling at all". In this way the United Kingdom's transport policy becomes a value judgement, not a "state provision". It is hard to believe that there is no irony in Cool Britannia's driving test that will soon include questions like: "could my journey be better made by bike?" Williams deftly contrasts this new constipated approach to Mrs Thatcher's claim that anyone catching a bus after the age of 30 "has failed in life". Contradictory attitudes to travel are given by illustration. The Bishop of London claims that "flying is a sin against the planet", whilst at the same time the Queen gives a knighthood to Easyjet boss Stelio Haji-Ioannou, praising him as the person who had "made it possible for millions to fly". In the meantime, Prince Charles swears to reduce flights for the monarchy, whilst the Pope gets into trouble for opening Mistral Air for Catholic pilgrims from Rome to Lourdes.
Williams signals that the dangerous corollary to reducing energy consumption is that governments then weaken in their will to provide needed increases in energy generation like, for instance, nuclear. The pattern is clear here in Australia. With the current Prime Minister's obsession with his emissions trading scheme, we see scant consideration for the realistic need for expansion of coal generated electricity or effective investment in increasing our energy output in any form. But, as we all know, the chattering classes and doctors' wives believe that "doing without can be fun". They have it completely wrong when they recommend that India, for instance, should look for labour-intensive solutions rather than capital intensive ones. As Williams explains, "It is minimisation of human effort, not external energy, that is the key to progress."
Williams sees the environmentalist ideals of self sufficiency or living off the grid as simply a retreat -- a metaphor for social and political disengagement: "Instead of pissing into the tent, or out of it, everyone's simply pissing off." Williams sees this as political nihilism. It is a lack of desire to engage in meaningful, transformative change through society.
In the penultimate chapter Williams looks at the inherent misanthropy of environmentalism and links it directly to a threat to democracy and prosperity. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon is one of many who have claimed that climate change poses "as much of a danger to the world as war". So who is the enemy? With an apparent lack of irony, Osama Bin Laden, from his eco-hideaway agrees, and chastises the White House for not observing the Kyoto accord. Williams thus sees, from a Western democratic perspective, that there are parallels between the anti-humanism of environmentalism and the nihilism of radical Islamists.
Environmentalist's misanthropy is feeding the growing demoralisation with rational modernity, preferring instead to wallow in the metaphysics of "Gaia". And Islam taps into the perceived cultural vacuum in Western modernity.
The worry for the author is that our Western values, our developed, progressive, democratic values have no purchase in a sustainable universe.
Overall, the book is a dispiriting read, but certainly it is a rallying call to counter the current unsustainable sustainability madness.
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