Red, Green, and Blue

The four animal rights activists found guilty of blackmailing companies that supplied Huntingdon Life Sciences are certainly reprehensible, their behaviour was appalling and their actions verged on the psychopathic, but they are also an example of why the current way of doing environmental politics just doesn’t seem to be working.

The four were part of Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (Shac). Huntingdon Life Sciences is an animal research centre that tests products for safety (ie testing products on animals, safety being ours, not theirs) and Shac aimed to create a ‘climate of fear’ that was intended to force other firms to sever ties with what is one of the largest animal testing labs in the world. Their tactics ranged from hoax bombs, night visits to people’s houses and factories, through to criminal damage and threats of violence. Their nuisance phone calls and letters included sending used sanitary towels in the post, and claiming people were paedophiles.

What has all this to do with environmental politics? Well, it’s the nature of ‘the cause’ that drives extreme behaviour, and conversion to ‘the cause’: whether it’s global warming or anti-vivisection, can turn people from ‘unconcerned’ to ‘zealot’ in a single day.

What Animal Cruelty can teach us about Environmental Politics

And that’s why those who claim they ‘understand’ the nature of the environmental disaster and have the answers to the planet’s problems need to find different ways to express both the problem and the solution. And why those who don’t care about the problem, or don’t believe there is one, need to think again.

Most of us - and by ‘us’ I mean the world’s population with consumer choices – prefer not to think about what is done in our names. We buy toothpaste and antibiotics and contact lens cleaner and choose not to think about what makes us confident that we can use all those products on our bodies without care. Thinking about the pain and harm done to rats and mice, monkeys and rabbits, so that we don’t have to endure pain and harm ourselves is too much for us.

For a very few though, that realisation happens. The recognition of our comfort being built on the pain of animals occurs, and that recognition changes life, forever. From then on, the few cannot use toothpaste and antibiotics and wear contact lenses without immediately, irresistibly, unavoidably thinking of the horror inflicted on another living thing for their sake. For the few, this becomes unendurable and allows them to become extremists. In fact, it forces them to do so, because they cannot bear the idea that most people are unwilling to understand this fact: so bringing the fact home to the individual becomes their focus.

In exactly the same way, those who ‘get’ the nature of climate change thunder ever more loudly about sea levels rising, island states drowning, water running out, food shortages, forests dying …

And that’s exactly not the way to get most of us to listen.

Cruelty-free Environmental Policy?

Great work has been done in creating cruelty-free cosmetics and toiletries, although cruelty-free medicines are proving to be a completely intractable issue. Perhaps there’s something to be said for taking the cruelty-free approach to the environment? We might be able to deal with carbon, but not sea level, or perhaps we can tackle potable water but not our addiction to petroleum? Instead of insisting, like Shac, that we’re right and they’re wrong and anything and everything is fair in showing ‘them’ how wrong they are, we need to start thinking in terms of making ‘environmental politics’ into an attractive and easy consumer choice. That way we might find consumers driving the politicians into make better decisions, instead of ‘us’ bullying them into doing what we want.

Beagle and kitten photograph courtesy Claudio Matsuoka at Flickr under a Creative Commons Licence

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