The Age of Global Warming: A History (6 page)

European fascism, where it had a programme, emphasised forward-looking technological planning and urban development … Germany was the exception, with a tradition, in practice as well as in theory, of looking to nature for philosophical guidance.
[30]

That tradition pre-dated Hitler’s rise and was appropriated rather than created by Nazi ideologists. Indeed, the word ecology,
Oekologie
, was invented in 1866 by Ernst Haeckel as the science of relations between organisms and their environment.
[31]

In the 1920s and 1930s, German ideas permeated Britain. They added to an array of ideas championed by prominent literary figures of the age: D.H. Lawrence and the distinctive German brand of serious nature and sun worship and healthy exercise;
[32]
the Catholic socialism of Hilaire Belloc and G.K. Chesterton (advocates of giving every worker three acres and a cow); T.S. Eliot’s revival of the Christian society and medieval parishes. These disparate voices shared a common loathing of (sub)urban bourgeois culture and hostility to liberal industrial capitalism.

In their criticisms of capitalism and its exploitation of nature, there was little to distinguish Left from Right. Just six months before the outbreak of the Second World War, T.S. Eliot wrote about ‘the evil in particular institutions at particular times’. These included ‘problems such as the hypertrophy of the motive of Profit into a social ideal, the distinction between the use of natural resources and their exploitation, the use of labour and its exploitation, the advantages unfairly accruing to the trader in contrast to the primary producer, the misdirection of the financial machine, the iniquity of usury, and other features of a commercialised society’.
[33]

These ideas were seeded in the fertile political soil of nostalgic patriotism that located the essence of England in the English countryside, a country where the desire of people to have their own garden is visible to anyone flying over London into Heathrow airport. ‘The sounds of England, the tinkle of hammer on anvil in the country smithy, the corncrake on a dewy morning, the sound of the scythe against the whetstone, and the sight of a plough team coming over the brow of a hill, the sight that has been in England since England was a land,’ words spoken by Stanley Baldwin in a nostalgia-laden St George’s Day address in 1924.
[34]

British politicians began to respond to the consequences of the rapid expansion of England’s cities. Electric trains had extended the reach of the suburbs and, in the inter-war years, the motorcar was further extending it. In 1935, Baldwin’s government passed the Restriction of Ribbon Development Act, designed to limit unplanned suburban spread. Protecting the countryside from expanding cities was an outgrowth of nineteenth-century agitation for social reform of curing urban problems through town planning. Ebenezer Howard proposed the garden city as a peaceful path to reforming industrial society. ‘The key to the problem,’ Howard wrote in 1898, ‘is how to restore the people to the land, that beautiful land of ours, with its canopy of sky, the air that blows upon it, the sun that warms it, the rain and dew that moisten it, the very embodiment of Divine love for man.’
[35]

In 1926, Sir Patrick Abercrombie, one of the leading town planners of the age, founded the Council for the Protection of Rural England. Was this an English version of Muir’s communion with nature in Yosemite and the foundation of the Sierra Club in California? Peter Hall, the leading authority on the English planning system, detects a different motive. Rural England was a place of segregation and social stratification.

The more prosperous members of the old county society, joined by selected newcomers from the cities, have sought to defend a way of life which they regarded traditionally as their right. The weapon they have used, and it has been a powerful one, is conservationist planning. The result has been to segregate the less affluent newcomers as firmly as ever the medieval cottagers were.
[36]

By contrast, George Orwell’s England embraced the urban England where Labour drew its support, ‘the clatter of clogs in the Lancashire mill towns, the to-and-fro of the lorries on the Great North Road, the rattle of pin-tables in the Soho pubs’.
[37]
There was a lively debate within the Left’s intelligentsia between urban socialists and rural distributists, the former pushing for the nationalisation of the means of production, the latter for the expropriation of landowners and the redistribution of land to the rest of society.

In 1928, Hilaire Belloc chaired a debate between George Bernard Shaw, speaking for socialism, and G.K. Chesterton championing distributism. Belloc, himself a distributist, summed up. Industrial civilisation, he prophesied, ‘will break down and therefore end from its monstrous wickedness, folly, ineptitude’ or it will lead ‘the mass of men to become contented slaves’.
[38]
Before the First World War, Chesterton had written of the need for a Peasant Proprietorship in
What’s Wrong with the World
. ‘If we are to save property, we must distribute property, almost as sternly and sweepingly as did the French Revolution,’ a sentiment closer in spirit to Robespierre than Edmund Burke.

Orwell was dismissive of the distributists, writing that a return to small-scale peasant ownership was impossible.
[39]
In
The Road to Wigan Pier
, Orwell wrote of what he called the Chesterton-type of writer, who wanted ‘to see a free peasant or other small-owner living in his privately-owned and probably insanitary cottage; not a wage-slave living in an excellently appointed Corporation flat and tied down by restrictions as to sanitation’.
[40]

After the First World War, the younger generation espousing return-to-the-soil ideas broke off in an entirely new direction. In 1920, a leading member of Baden-Powell’s Boy Scout movement, the twenty-six-year-old John Hargrave founded the Kindred of the Kibbo Kift, the name purportedly an ancient Kentish dialect meaning proof of great strength. Hargrave’s movement had a programme of open-air education, camping and naturecraft and the Brotherhood of Man. A Quaker and a pacifist, Hargrave – White Fox to his followers – believed society could only be regenerated by training a cohort of the strongest few. Inspired by North American Red Indians (the movement adopted totem poles), the Kibbo Kift combined Nordic sagas and Saxon dress. 

How could anyone have taken Hargrave and his movement seriously?

An idea seizing the imagination of the leading minds of one age can appear bizarre or absurd to a later one. Within three years of its founding, Hargrave had signed up some of the luminaries of the 1920s to his Kibbo Kift advisory council: Norman Angell, author of the celebrated pre-war book,
The Grand Illusion
, a future Labour Member of Parliament and winner of the 1933 Nobel Peace prize; the evolutionary biologist Julian Huxley; the Belgian playwright Maurice Maeterlinck and winner of the 1911 Nobel Prize in literature; the Indian poet Rabindrath Tagore and H.G. Wells. D.H. Lawrence was put off by Hargrave’s impractical ambition, but, for all that: ‘He’s right and I respect him for it … If it weren’t for his ambition and lack of warmth, I’d go and Kibbo Kift with him.’
[41]

In 1923, Hargrave first met Major C.H. Douglas, the theoretician of the Social Credit movement. Social credit, a now forgotten monetary explanation of the economic difficulties of the inter-war years, was based on Major Douglas’s cranky A+B theorem. It earned Douglas a mention in Keynes’ 1936
General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money
– ‘a private, perhaps but not a major in the brave army of heretics’.
[42]
Eight years later, the Kibbo Kift became the Green Shirt Movement for Social Credit. Now the Green Shirts had a comprehensive solution to society’s problems, an economic prong and an environmentalist prong together providing a critique of capitalism and urban industrial society. Accompanied by a corps of drummers, Green Shirts marched through English towns and cities, singing the Anthem of the Green Shirt movement:

Dead Men arise

From the catacombs of Death!

went the refrain, the anthem ending with the stirring cry,

Wake, now, the Dead!

By numbers held in thrall;

On this fruitful Earth

There is Earth-wealth for all!

While Hargrave and the Green Shirts looked to the past and to Red Indians and Saxons, for inspiration, others looked across the English Channel. ‘England is dying, capitulating to the forces which she herself has set in motion,’ reads the preface to a book published in 1928.

Germany is the sole country where there is a positive challenge to the mechanism and commercialism which we associate with America, but which we in England take lying down, without real protest or power to discover an alternative. If contact with Germany cannot stir the faint-heart hopes to a new quickness which will attune us with the forgotten genius of our own Britain, some of us might realise that Germany is fertile soil in which we may plant the seeds of our experience with the surety of their having increase.
[43]

Britain and Germany: A Frank Discussion Instigated by Members of the Younger Generation
, was co-edited by Rolf Gardiner, who had briefly been a member of the Kibbo Kift and had originally introduced Hargrave to Major Douglas and social credit.

In a chapter, ‘Have the Northern Peoples a Common Destiny?’, Gardiner repudiated sterile internationalism and rejected Hargrave’s pacifism. ‘Should some polity arise which calls forth a genuine star-like quality in the blood of men we should be prepared to fight and die for that quality,’ Gardiner wrote.
[44]
Europe’s artificial states should be dissolved to reveal the real frontiers of ‘race and culture, and they are made manifest in the form and effluence of landscapes, of regions inhabited by past generations.’

Gardiner disdained the British Union of Fascists for being too lower middle class and urban for his taste. Instead, national regeneration would come about through an alliance of aristocracy and yeomanry.
[45]
Together with the Earl of Portsmouth, Gardiner was the leading advocate of organic farming, the pair paying a visit to Walther Darré, the Nazi agriculture minister. Their journal,
The New Pioneer
, was edited by an ex-member of the National Socialist League, an organisation that criticised Moseley’s fascists for being insufficiently anti-Semitic, and devoted much of its space to Gardiner’s back-to-the-land programme and organic farming.
[46]

The complexity of the various cross currents of the non-traditional Right can be seen with Henry Williamson, author of
Tarka the Otter
, published in 1927, and one of the greatest nature writers of the twentieth century. Having fought in the First World War, Williamson ended it strongly sympathetic to Germany and a Bolshevik. On returning from the 1935 Nuremburg Rally, Williamson expressed his revulsion of the rootless civilisation he saw in London, ‘hoardings, brittle houses, flashiness posing as beauty, mongrel living and cosmopolitan modernism.’
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Two years later, he joined Moseley’s British Union of Fascists. Agricultural reform was central to Moseley’s plan to recreate British society. Under the Fascists, land use throughout Britain was to be centrally planned and organised, with programmes of re-afforestation, sewage disposal and building motorways to create jobs and re-cycle materials.
[48]

Brown Shirts and Green Shirts clashed on the streets of Britain’s cities. According to Bramwell, ‘the Green Shirts had an element of Quaker niceness, of world unity pacificism’ completely at variance with the violence and anti-semitism of Oswald Moseley’s fascists.
[49]
In 1937, the Public Order Act swept the Brown Shirts and Green Shirts off the streets. The Second World War rendered environmentalism irrelevant, putting some of its more vocal pro-German supporters behind bars. In 1944, the Green Shirts were being written off by Labour MP Tom Driberg as a ‘small, fantastic cult of nature worshippers’.
[50]
Hargrave dissolved the organisation in 1951.

Gardiner and his circle found a more successful route into the post-war era. In June 1945, he co-founded the Soil Association and for many years sat on its council.
[51]
Until the early 1960s, its journal,
Mother Earth
, was edited by the former British Union of Fascists’ agricultural secretary, who had spent part of the war in prison. Sixty years after it was founded, eighty per cent of the organic food sold in Britain’s supermarkets was being certified by the Soil Association.
[52]

Thus British environmentalism emerged from an alien gene pool from the Progressive policies of Theodore Roosevelt a decade or two earlier, with a strong anti-democratic virus and narrative of national decay. To British environmentalists, American culture exemplified all that was wrong with the modern world. ‘The English have now reached a point in their history where they must seek a new focus,’ Gardiner wrote in 1928; ‘the saga of our nationhood and Empire is finished.’
[53]
Britain had to reject materialism and accept where its true destiny lay: ‘Germany is once again a young and puissant nation, pulsating with life and hope, and, like Faust, striving for possession of her own soul.’
[54]

In German culture, nature – especially trees and forests – is part of national identity as in no other European country. The Nazi seizure of power in 1933 means that this aspect of German culture became entwined with National Socialist ideology. And here one comes to an awkward truth for the post-1945 environmental movement. Were it not for its crimes, the Nazi record on the environment would have been praised for being far in advance of its time. Nazi Germany introduced anti-vivisection laws. It was the first country in Europe to create nature reserves. In 1934, the Nazis required that new tree plantations should include deciduous trees as well as conifers. In 1940, the Nazis passed hedgerow and copse protection ordinances to protect wildlife as its armies were laying waste to Europe. Following the annexation of part of Poland, one sixth of the new territory’s arable land was reserved for new forests and woodland. At the height of the war, Hitler vetoed Ministry of Agriculture schemes to drain and reclaim moorland.
[55]

How far could these environmental policies be described as specifically Nazi rather than reflecting more generalised German values and priorities? Put another way, how central was protecting the environment to Nazi ideology? 

The story of organic farming in the Third Reich illustrates the Nazis’ real priorities. Walther Darré, in charge of the agriculture ministry until 1942, was a convinced Nazi; the titles of two of his books give a flavour:
The Peasantry as Life Source of the Nordic Race
(1928) and
A New Nobility of Blood and Soil
(1934). He was also a supporter of bio-dynamic (organic) farming that had been advocated by Rudolf Steiner in the 1920s, even though Steiner had been an early opponent of the Nazis before his death in 1925.

Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy, was a follower of Rudolf Steiner’s teachings on the threat to human health posed by artificial fertilisers and Himmler, the head of the SS, encouraged organic farming. Others in the Nazi leadership, such as Goering, were strongly opposed. Following Hess’s flight to Britain in 1941, Darré was marginalised, the Gestapo led a crack down on organic farmers and the technocrats in the regime focused on maximising what farms could produce. The Nazi project was not about saving the planet, but about world conquest, the extermination of the Jews and the enslavement of peoples deemed racially inferior. 

To become an international movement and make a global impact in the post-war world, environmentalism needed what its European versions in the pre-war period would have abhorred; mass international travel and communications, multinationals and global consumer brands, a transnational entertainment culture – all the things that go to create a global village. Hitler’s defeat in 1945 and the depth of Nazi barbarism meant that post-war environmentalism wouldn’t speak German as its first language. In Britain, environmentalism’s high Conservative lineage and the stain of its association with National Socialism also meant that the next burst of environmentalism would be led from a different social class and from a different part of the political spectrum.

Environmentalism needed to be Americanised. In the post-war world, environmentalism spoke with an American accent – descended from Thoreau and Emerson, Pinchot and Muir and the environmental politics of Theodore Roosevelt.