Kathleen Jannaway
This is a review of various works by Kathleen Jannaway. This article was first published january 19th 1991. It has been published in mm15. The original textual style of the article, which now seems rather quaint, has been preserved.
The Politics of the Tree.
Many years ago I lost interest in green politics because of global warming. Despite its long scientific heritage, global warming emerged into the scientific domain only in the early 1970s. As yet another far distant, somewhat exotic, doomwatch scenario it was of interest only to a tiny minority of people. By the mid 1970s, however, a number of scientists began speculating about the possibility of global cooling and it became clear that scientists’ understanding of the Earth's climate was rudimentary. I decided it was time to move on to more substantial issues.
A decade or so later, after quiet investigative work by many scientists all over the world, there has been a proliferation of theories about global warming and the ways in which it could affect the planet. Instead of a flimsy article, there is now a hefty bookful of hypotheses about global warming each waiting their turn for the evidence that will give them validity. The publication, in May 1990, of the report by the United Nation's Inter governmental Panel on Climate Change revealed that global warming had become the mainstream view of the global scientific community. Although the planet is rotating towards the next ice age, humans are dumping so much pollution into the atmosphere it is overwhelming this contrary trend and is threatening to plunge the Earth into a tropical nightmare.
After I joined the Green party, my main political priority became the preservation of Wildlife. I believe the extermination of Wildlife would be a greater moral depravity than the attempted extermination of various races during the second world war when the nazis, for the first time in human history, erected extermination camps. The political and philosophic implications of animal rights are far more profound than workers' rights, women's rights, black rights, gay rights, and even civil rights. I'd go even further and state that without Wildlife humans won't be human. And, it should go without saying, the planet would be on the verge of an ecological collapse once Wildlife have been massacred. As I began catching up on the global warming debate, it dawned on me that the ecological solution to excess carbon emissions opened up one last hope for saving what is left of the Earth's fantastic treasure of Wildlife.
This 'window of opportunity' for animals can also be found in recent pamphlets by Kathleen Jannaway, a long time vegan and founder of 'The Movement for Compassionate Living'. Kathleen's moral position that humans should not kill, abuse, or even use, animals has been reinforced by an ecological justification; livestock farming is not merely morally wrong but ecologically damaging since ruminants are one of the main sources of methane, potentially the most frightening greenhouse gas.
Correspondingly, her view that humans should obtain resources from trees and crops rather than animals is no longer just a moral stance but an ecological imperative since trees are vital for extracting surplus carbon from the atmosphere. Global warming is an ecological phenomenon which can be countered only by an ecological remedy, mass reforestation. Thus, instead of continuing to clear forests to make way for more pasture, livestock farming should be phased out and forests allowed to grow on the redundant pastureland. Abandoning pastureland could provide huge areas of land for mass reforestation.
Such a transformation would also allow land to be set aside for wildlife. (After all, western governments have no right to insist that Third World countries save the elephant and the tiger etc., if they do not make a similar proportion of land available in their own country for the exclusive use of Wildlife). This solution to global warming seems like a fortuitous coincidence of interests for all life forms on Earth as if a Gaian invisible hand was guiding human destiny towards a wholesome, morally, and ecologically, fruitful existence.
In the mid 1970s, I rejected veganism not because I was a glutton for meat (I used processed meat to avoid thinking about what I was eating) but because i believed that if clothes weren’t provided by animals then they’d be provided by rapacious multinational companies using scarce fossil fuels that polluted the planet. I thought the former option was better than the latter. What changed my view was the discovery, originating from Egon Glesinger but publicized by Jannaway, that trees could provide the raw materials to produce exactly the same range of clothes that were being produced by the Animal exploitation industry - not merely fig leaves. This would mean a continued reliance on the chemical industry but there should be less pollution. Most importantly, however, the need for non renewable fossil fuel resources and animal exploitation would disappear. It seems like the best deal going.
This is where my views begin to diverge from Jannaway's. Firstly, she believes the prospects for a popular shift to veganism are good. She believes a fundamental change in human nature would not be necessary because humans are not predators by nature (whether hunters or farmers) but herbivores and the only obstacles that would have to be overcome would be the bad habits acquired through possession of slave animals, "With animal husbandry there crept in a spiritually debilitating treachery." I suspect, however, that many would switch to poaching and that drastic action would be needed to stop this from happening.
Secondly, and most importantly, if livestock pharming was abandoned, instead of planting massive new forests, politicians might be tempted to build a "rash" (Michael Heseltine) of new towns across the countryside. In the debate between those, like Jannaway and Jonathon Porritt, who want to urbanise the countryside and those, like Leopold Kohr and James Lovelock, who believe people want to remain in towns, I support the latter.
Through the Movement for Compassionate Living, Jannaway has advocated Gandhian principles such as living simply and locally. These ideals have helped to shape the basic beliefs of the Green movement. But, one of the flaws in this ideology is population growth. The colossal damage that humans are inflicting on the planet can be reduced by reversing economic growth, abolishing factory pharming, and living more simply, etc., but, ultimately, no matter what else it does, the human race will still face extinction if it allows its population to go on increasing. The most important long term green issue is not global warming but overpopulation.
One possible solution is economically self sufficient, regional, wood economies. Everyone in a region would decide how much of their wood resources should be converted into food, energy, clothing, commodities, or support for new humans (whether babies or immigrants). This would present them with a clear democratic choice; they could either be rich (more food, more clothes, more energy, more goods) but have few kids or, poor but have more kids. Its up to them. However, if they acted irresponsibly and consumed their resources they would have to face up to the consequences of their profligacy. Humans have got to learn to live within the planet's ecological means or they'll perish.
By confining themselves to deriving all their needs from trees, humans could avoid the pitfalls of green growth. William Catton has talked about the way that, over the last couple of centuries, humans have adopted 'take-over' and 'draw-down' methods to obtain huge quantities of extra raw materials which have resulted in a population explosion (currently running at ONE BILLION PER DECADE). But, in the future, there is also the threat of 'up-reach' in which humans tap the vastly larger sources of energy such as solar (either directly or through its derivatives such as wind/wave/hydroelectric) and lunar (tidal) power. These forms of energy are part of the green growth platform advocated by many light greens and the additional powers they would bestow upon humans threaten to destroy the planet just as much as the extravagant consumption of fossil fuels. The most important political characteristic of trees is their finite nature; there are only so many trees that can be grown on the planet.
What is more, solar and lunar sources of energy are alternative, not renewable, forms of energy. There is only one major source of renewable energy and that is trees. Greens continually reiterate that the human race must adopt ecologically sustainable lifestyles by drawing an income from the planet's renewable resources and yet they fail to accept the corollary; banning the use of non renewable resources and alternative energies except in emergencies such as fending off an impending ice age.
There is no escaping moral responsibility for population control. At one extreme, we can ignore it and end up causing mass starvation; or, at the other, we can forcibly prevent people from having babies. Alternatively, we can use the finite nature of trees to make everyone visibly and concretely aware of the limited regional resources at their disposal so that they have to act with greater ecological responsibility. In other words, trees are a form of contraception. They are the most benign form of population control.
