The green movement and global warming...

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Damning development: the Greens and the Narmada project

People in India are struggling to emerge from the backward condition in which they find themselves. The Indian government is trying to build a hydroelectric dam on the Narmada river to provide clean water and the electricity which is vital for industrial progress. It will submerge 350 square kilometres of land and provide enough electricity to supply almost 5,000 villages in north-west India. It will provide clean drinking water for 30 million people and it will be an enormous boost for economic and industrial growth.

Not everyone is keen, however. Lisa Jordan is a director of The Bank Information Centre, an environmentalist group which tries to stop the World Bank from funding large-scale development projects in the Third World that are deemed environmentally unfriendly. She is keen to preserve traditional tribal life. "This is genocide of tribal people who have lived in the forests that are being drowned for centuries. They're one of the oldest living populations on this earth that have been documented. These are the cultures that pay because of a large dam being developed to pipe water to a larger agriculture system, to provide electricity, to provide the dream."

But locals are not so keen on preserving things as they are. "Instead of saying that we want this particular life to be encased like a museum, we must say that we want progress," one woman told Against Nature. "We want development of a particular kind and therefore we need larger dams."

Environmentalists are worried about the damage the dam will do to wildlife in the area, but supporters of the dam are equally appalled that the environmentalists are so concerned with preserving bio-diversity at the expense of human development.

"What exactly is the value of all this bio-diversity?" asks Wilfred Beckerman. "This idea that you have to preserve every scrap of nature, even though destroying it might confer enormous benefits on people whose standard of living and quality of life is so low as to be unimaginable for the vast majority of people in the Western world, I think is scandalous. I just get very angry when I hear this sort of thing. Whose side are these people on?"

As it happens, no pristine forest will be destroyed by the Narmada dam and the only endangered species to be affected is a colony of sloth bears, for which the Indian government is building a wildlife reserve nearby.

But the Greens say they aren't just concerned about the natural destruction of the dam. They point to the number of tribal people who will have to be resettled elsewhere. Brent Blackwelder, chairman of Friends of the Earth US, says more than 100,000 people will be uprooted from their homes. But according to the Indian government and the World Bank, the project will displace 70,000 people, who will be given farmland elsewhere with the benefits of roads, schools, electricity and clean water.

Critics of the Greens say environmentalists themselves are prepared to push tribal people off their land to make way for wild animals. Nature reserves founded in India by the World Wildlife Fund have displaced at least 25,000 people simply to make way for tigers.

Five years ago Dr Patel welcomed environmentalists' concern about tribal people and was even persuaded by the Greens to campaign against the dam. Today, he believes the real concern of environmentalists is to block progress. He is now a fervent supporter of the dam and accuses the Greens of seeming to care more about animals than people.

Many environmentalists argue that if people in the Third World want electricity, they should use solar power or wind power. But not only would solar and wind power fail to meet the need for clean water, environmentalists themselves admit that they would be fantastically more expensive. To produce the same amount of electricity as the Narmada dam using wind power would cost at least six times as much. Using solar power would cost more than seven times as much— and even then it is doubtful that it could be done. The Narmada dam will produce 400 times as much electricity as the largest solar panel installation currently in existence.

Local Indians such as Dr Patel dismiss all the Green arguments against the dam, saying that the dam will change things, but there can be no development without change.

Green pressure on the World Bank has led to funding for the Narmada dam being withdrawn. Consequently, work on the dam, which began in the early 60s, has all but stopped. Most environmentalists believe it will never be completed.

In addition, leading environmentalists have estimated that they have effectively blocked around 300 hydro-electric dams in the Third World, denying many millions of poor people the benefits of electricity and clean water.

Tom Blinkhorn of the World Bank thinks many people in the West who contribute to environmental organisations don't realise the implications. "What they don't see is the tremendous poverty that exists in other parts of the world, and that if we are going to help people address that poverty, we need to do it through large dams and activities that many organisations in the Green movement are opposed to. I think a lot of the constituency for Green groups simply do not know about the problems in the Third World."

Conservation and conservatism

There have been many attempts in the past to block social and economic progress. But few have been as successful as today's environmentalist movement, which uses the threat of a global ecological crisis to override the wishes of those people who most need the benefits of progress. And it's not only dams that the Greens campaign against.

"Western environmentalist sentiment has been successful ...in blocking a whole range of industrial facilities," says Gregg Easterbrook. "Factories, roads, logging— even well-regulated logging— have been vehemently opposed."

Steve Hayward argues that it's immoral for rich environmentalists to impose their ideology on Third World countries, where people are poor and disease is rampant. "The best thing that could happen to those countries is to industrialise rapidly ... so they have the resources not only to be healthier but also to protect their environment. To stand in the way of that is wrong and dangerous in my mind." After all, adds Gregg Easterbrook, we became affluent through industrialisation and exploiting our resources.

Greens are often portrayed as left-wing radicals, battling against a backward-looking establishment. But they are in fact part of a long tradition of conservatism that idealises nature and the past. These conservative instincts motivated 19th-century figures such as Nietzsche and Wagner, and movements such as the Romantics, who were horrified by England's 'dark satanic mills' (as William Blake described them) and dreamt of returning to a mythical past of medieval knights and maidens, and even the Boy Scout movement, which in its origins combined a mystical affinity with nature, Right-wing nationalism and a hatred of degenerate modern life.

"What we today call 'environmentalism' is ... based on a fear of change," says Frank Furedi. "It's based upon a fear of the outcome of human action. And therefore it's not surprising that when you look at the more xenophobic right-wing movements in Europe in the 19th century, including German fascism, it quite often had a very strong environmentalist dynamic to it."