Knowing as we do that you’re not coming to this site quite as ‘new’ as you claim, perhaps you would understand if we expressed it like this…

We don’t think Talisker’s argument was any more respectful and rational than ours would be, were we to suggest that your views might have been preconceived, were it the case (for instance) that you were on the Climate Camp, or had many close (and, I might add, lovely and certainly well-meaning) relatives and friends who are very Green. It would suggest that your views are formed, not by your intellectual engagement with the arguments, ideas and debate, but by your association with others.

The point of searching for the terms Talisker introduced was intended to show that his form of textual analysis was ill-conceived, Ag, so your point is somewhat redundant and misdirected.

It’s a shame that you’ve decided not to visit the site in the future. It would at the very least help you to understand objections to the views you seem to sympathise with, and perhaps encourage you to develop a more robust defence of them.

I’ve just done a search of our blog posts, and I can report that the word ‘miserablism’ has not, as far as I can tell, been used on the Climate-Resistance blog. The term ‘anti-human’ has been used 3 times. And the word ‘misanthropic’ has been used 4 times. Of the results returned, one is a review of several articles on Spiked, and two are the same (misanthropic and anti-human both appeared in the same post). I make that 6 posts, out of the 156 articles posted to this site over the past 17 months. Our posts are normally quite long, but let’s take a conservative estimate, and say that the average post contains 500 words. The total word count of Climate-resistance is therefore 78,000, of which the terms in question appear just 7 times. Or 0.009% of all words.

So when you say that ‘funnily enough, these [terms] seem to crop up on your blog with remarkable regularity’, we get an idea as to what may be going on in your head such that you see conspiracies, and why you seem to fail to treat our articles (and Spiked’s, for that matter) with any sense of proportion.

I also searched Google for each of the terms (‘misanthropic’, ‘anti-human’, ‘miserablism’), each with ‘environmentalism. ‘Misanthropic’ returned one article by Furedi in the first 50 sites. ‘Anti-human’ returned 0 results relating to the individuals in question. ‘Miserablism’ returned 2 Spiked articles, and the Spiked Wikipedia profile, 1 Times article by Mick Hume, and 1 article by Daniel Ben Ami. So just 4 articles, showing that these terms are in general usage in relation to environmentalism, and by no means exclusive. You might want to grill the Pet Shop Boys about their use of the word ‘miserbalism’. Perhaps they are an ‘RCP-front’ pop-group. Your rather shabby textual analysis is no substitute for actually understanding the arguments which are being made. Nor is it any good for establishing the existence of conspiratorial networks of ex-trots.

We looked at the first and second articles you’ve linked to, relating to the cultural influence of misanthropic ideas such as particular expressions of radical Islamism, and the environmentalism of Pentti Linkola. The latter of which influenced the young Finn’s view of the world, and, presumably, his decision to shoot seven of his school colleagues. You claim that you belong to a breed of non misanthropic environmentalists. If this is so, why are you so upset that Furedi believes misanthropic environmentalism to be a problem?

And so, as a fluffy, nice Green, you wouldn’t share the views of the neo-malthusians, such as the Optimum Population Trust, and other’s views that population must be controlled. And surely, having such a view, you would agree with Furedi that the very idea of population control (amongst a number of other ideas) creates a very negative view of humanity, that must, necessarily, go on to be expressed as negative consequences. So what precisely is your problem with the third, fourth and fifth on your list? Surely you recognise that environmentalism has some nasty, misanthropic elements? And surely you must agree that they, as ideas, would have some effect on the way people – especially young people – view the world? Surely you need to distance yourself from that kind of environmentalism, and argue for a positive conception of environmentalism – the one that’s caught your imagination? But you don’t.

Tell us about this new, happy, human-friendly environmentalism which is espoused by the ‘vast majority of environmentalists’. We take care to read a great deal of environmentalist literature – it consumes many of our waking moments – and we’ve yet to see it. We’ve posted many articles, criticising the environmentalists who, we must assume, include those that belong to the nice, fluffy, human-friendly camp. We’ve tried to look into their ideas and influences. Clearly we’ve misunderstood them, because you’ve posted your comments here. But you don’t explain your objection adequately. Instead, you mutter stuff about ‘Furedi’, ‘acolytes’, ‘the RCP’. We’re left none the wiser as to how Caroline Lucas is supposed to be put into the nice green camp. Can you see why that’s a problem for you?

You make the claim that this unidentified form of environmentalism isn’t anti-human and isn’t anti-rational, because it’s got ‘science’ behind it. Well, we’ve looked at that claim on a number of occasions too, particularly when it has been presented as the foundation of a political argument. It rarely is quite as strong as you claim it is. But again, instead of picking us up where we might have missed a vital part of the argument linking climate change science to environmental politics, you instead talk about right-wing crypto-Marxist conspiracies. Can you see why that isn’t very convincing?

Neither do we find the concerns on the Green Party site that you have linked to particularly convincing. No doubt they are expressed as well-meaning. But that is not the point. Discussions about political ideas and ways of looking at the world cannot be about the feelings of proponents of various causes, because nobody has any way of establishing the truth of their feelings. Saying ‘we care about old people’ one moment, while arguing for the raising of prices and the reduction in standards of living the next is simply inconsistent. Saying that we care about poor people, while chastising ‘consumer culture’ the next (most people –never mind the poor – don’t actually get to spend spend spend with the abandon which is attributed to them) is inconsistent. Saying that you believe in democracy while calling your detractors ‘deniers’ equivalent to ‘holocaust deniers’, and calling for the closing down of debates and the censure of certain documentary films because they ‘mislead the public’ is inconsistent. Yet those are the actions of the subject of the above post.

Where is the ‘nice’ environmentalism?

Here are a few from many possible examples:

Furedi on the ‘culture of death’ – here he seeks to blame a high-school massacre in Finland on ‘anti-humanist’ environmental thinking.
http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/4065/

Brendan O’Neill churns out a point-by-point rehash of Furedi’s Finland massacre piece in the Guardian’s Comment is Free spot.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2007/nov/14/ratinghumanity

Furedi at it again – this time the ‘culture of death’ is fingered for the spate of suicides amongst teenagers in Bridgend. It seems there no limits to the devious ways in which this misanthropic, anti-human environmentalism is eating away at the minds of our young people. Be afraid…Be very afraid! (And remember, this is the author of ‘The Culture of Fear’ speaking.)
http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/earticle/4632/

Furedi believes that arguments in favour of birth control are motivated by environmentalism’s ‘loathing of all things human’. What else could possibly explain such madness?
http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/printable/5521/

Giving an imaginative new twist to a familiar theme, O’Neill argues that calling for conservation of water resources ‘reveals the discomfort with human life itself that courses through the veins of environmentalism, and the contemporary sense of shame about humanity’s presence on the planet’.
http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/5603/

Neil Davenport re-iterates the Furedi-ite orthodoxy: at the root of environmentalism ‘lies a sentiment that humans no longer have a place on the planet’. What self-respecting member of the Spiked/RCP sect could dare to doubt it?
http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/3473/

You ask how I take issue with your own pretty much identikit views. Well, it’s fairly basic, really. The vast majority of environmentalists are motivated by the very opposite of ‘misanthropy’, which is to say they wish to protect human life and livelihoods by preserving the very conditions that make these possible. The most likely scenario in which humanity may be reduced to conditions of mere scrabbling for survival is through rapid and irreversible changes to the climate systems that have provided a relatively stable and favourable environment for human societies to develop since the end of the Ice Age.

Far from being anti-rational or anti-humanist, most environmentalists place a high value on the extremely strong scientific evidence for anthropogenic global warming, and believe that it is possible by an effort of human political will to change patterns of carbon usage in order to avert the severe social and economic consequences that would result from acceleration of this warming. Most – rightly, I think – see this as the greatest challenge of our times, though by no means the only one.

As to your observation that death ‘is all they [the Green Party] can talk about”, I’d simply refer people to the Green Party website at http://www.greenparty.org.uk/, where this assertion may readily be put to the test. The main items on the front page concern council housing, the awarding of the UK Census contract to a US-based arms manufacturer, pollution taxes, the treatment of Mongolian dissidents, discrimination faced by ethnic minority lawyers, heavy-handed policing of climate protestors and the performance of Boris Johnson as London mayor.

I dare say, however, that anyone versed in Furedi-ite analysis would have little trouble seeing through such flimsy attempts to mask the misanthropic, anti-human agenda of the Party of Death.

Because it is all a conspiracy with Tin Hat Talisker.

The idea that anyone can reach a conclusion of any kind through nothing more than reasoned analysis of the arguments being presented must seem pretty exotic to someone whose whole outlook on life is framed in ideological terms.

But then, if your life IS solely framed in ideological terms, it’s hard to see how anyone else’s is not.

What we wanted to show was how Greens generally, and Lucas in particular are unable to frame their ideas in any other terms than death. Death is used as a vehicle to persuade people to accept the arguments for lower horizons and ‘sustainability’, because they fail by themselves.

Perhaps you are right that the expression in question over-eggs the point. But if it’s all they can talk about, the cap fits.

No less a clown is Talisker.

Talisker, something seems to be preventing you from expressing your objection to IoI/Spiked/Furedi lucidly. After umpteen comments here, you’ve yet to state why an association with them is a bad thing. Yet we’ve given you all the space below our posts you need to outline whatever it is you want to get off your chest. All we can understand from your comments here is that we’ve written a just couple of articles and book reviews for Spiked & the IoI over the last few years, which somehow renders us unthinking ‘acolytes’ of Furedi. It would be no more meaningful for us to state that anyone who has ever written for or agrees with the Guardian is a brainwashed moron who lives under the spell of George Monbiot. We are not Spiked/IoI/Furedi. So if you have some grievance that you’re trying to convey, you’re failing on two substantial counts. All that happens is that you look a bit… well… mad. Why don’t you try saying what it is that you don’t like, rather than conspiracy-mongering like some latter-day McCarthyite?

You mentioned that “Furedi pronounced some time ago that environmentalism is a ‘death cult’”, yet we don’t seem to be able to find any such article indexed on Google. Might you point us to it? Or were you just making stuff up? Thought so.