The Age of StupidIt’s like looking through binoculars, observing people on a far off beach, running around in circles, fixated on the small area of sand under their feet, as a tsunami races towards the shore.
- Pete Postlethwaite in the movie The Age of Stupid
NEXT month The Age of Stupid begins its run in New Zealand cinemas. Produced by New Zealander, Lizzie Gillett, directed by Franny Armstrong of McLibel fame, and starring the veteran English actor and Oscar nominee, Pete Postlethwaite, this powerful docudrama about climate change is set in 2055 and features a doomed archivist searching and re-searching the record of the early 21st Century for something which might explain his species’ imminent extinction.
"We wouldn’t be the first life form to wipe itself out," muses Postlethwaite’s character, "but what would be unique about us is that we did it knowingly. I mean, what does that say about us? The question I’ve been asking, is why didn’t we save ourselves when we had the chance? Is the answer because, on some level, we weren’t sure if we were worth saving?"
Armstrong’s movie is but one aspect of a much wider campaign of global consciousness-raising leading up to the United Nations’ Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in December. Screenings of the film in the UK are being used to generate a heightened sense of urgency on the climate change issue, and to enrol a much broader cross-section of the public in the sort of protest and advocacy activities usually restricted to the more marginal (and marginalised) activist groups of the ecological vanguard.
In the vanguard of the vanguard, so to speak, is the "Climate Camp UK" movement, a sort of alternative-camping-trip-encounters-anarchist-teach-in-turns-into-non-violent-protest-outfit which began with a "gathering" outside Britain’s largest coal-fired power station at Drax in West Yorkshire in 2006. A year later in was making world headlines by erecting a protest camp only metres away from Heathrow Airport. And, just last month, during the G-20 summit, Britain’s Climate-Campers were again in the news for attempting to set up their pup-tents in the heart of London.
Clearly inspired by Britain’s hippy-campers, a small group of local eco-anarchists calling themselves "Climate Camp Aotearoa" (CCA) chose Anzac Day weekend to organise their own "gathering" at the historic Taranaki Maori settlement of Parihaka.
In the search for "climate justice", CCA insists that: "change comes from the grassroots". Citing the "Save Happy Valley" anti-coal campaigners as "a wonderful example of a campaign targeting the root causes of the problem by by-passing the political circus of climate politics and aiming at keeping fossil fuels in the ground where they belong", the organisers of the gathering identified nine potential targets for "non-violent direct action".
They are: the proposed gas-fired power station at Kaukapakapa in the Rodney district; the Central Plains Water scheme in Canterbury; the proposed new cement works at Weston in North Otago; the Transmission Gully project north of Wellington; the Huntly power station; the proposed pylon-carried electricity transmission line between the Waikato and Auckland; the planned expansion of Auckland Airport; Solid Energy’s "Happy Valley" coal mine on the West Coast; and corporate dairy farming all over New Zealand.
"As this new movement takes shape," CCA declares, "we will need to come together across lines of race, class, education, culture and geography; we will need to meet each other, listen to each other, and exercise our power together in the streets."
Inspiring sentiments, and yet, I can’t help thinking that setting up one’s pup tents on the Parihaka marae, miles from anywhere, and expecting participants to accept without question the rather arcane (and to most folks just plain weird) "rules" of "self management" and "conducting collective meetings and discussions", is a pretty odd way of reaching out to the masses.
If you really want people to come together "in the streets", why not hold your gatherings in the main centres – where most New Zealanders live? Why set up a decision-making process in which just one person’s objections can stymie the wishes of an overwhelming majority. Why tell people that they mustn’t applaud the contributions of their fellow participants, insisting, instead, that they use "silent hand-clapping" – a technique which apparently involves "waving your hands when you agree".
Isolating people in the bush; requiring them to renounce conventional forms of human interaction in favour of a range of imposed and unfamiliar behavioural routines; getting them to participate in a succession of pre-arranged and highly tendentious "games": I’m sorry, but it all sounds uncomfortably like the behaviour of a self-selecting political cult – not a mass movement. What's truly depressing about CCA’s dotty organisational style, however, is that I’ve seen it all before, more than twenty-five years ago, just as the anti-nuclear movement was reaching its crescendo in the early 1980s. Writing about a group styling itself Peace Movement New Zealand (PMNZ) for the magazine New Outlook in 1983, I was particularly intrigued by the group’s ingrained hostility towards the methods of mass politics:
"The preferred method of operation … is the slow building of a network of kindred spirits and affinity groups. This cannot happen if the movement is swamped with people anxious to join up: large numbers of people inevitably have differences of opinion too stark to be resolved by consensus."
When I asked one of PMNZ’s non-violent activists if she believed her peace group would ever achieve the same degree of co-ordination and public impact as the anti-apartheid movement, she replied: "Oh no, we’re very different from HART. HART is a very hierarchical, top-heavy organisation."
It’s enough to turn you into a conspiracy theorist. Here’s poor old Planet Earth getting hotter and hotter, and the people who claim to be her best friends all evince a pronounced disinclination to organise humanity in ways that just might get the heat turned down. Perhaps, as Pete Postlethwaite says in The Age of Stupid, at some level, the CCA activists don’t actually believe the human race is worth saving.
Which is why, rather than the hippy-campers of CCA, it’s one of New Zealand capitalism’s most effective champions – Gareth Morgan – who deserves the silent handclapping of Gaia and her multitudinous brood.
Morgan’s courageous endorsement of the science behind anthropogenic climate change in The Listener and The Herald on Sunday has done more to advance the cause of reducing global warming than any number of "self-managed" pup-tents in the bush.
This commentary was originally published in The Independent of Thursday, 14 May 2009.
