Environment

Famed ant specialist and sociobiologist E.O. Wilson passed away on December 26, age ninety-two. He came to national attention in 1975 with the publication Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, which is one of those books that steamrolled into public consciousness. It may not have been as revolutionary as Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, but not for want of trying. Wilson had something new to say about how evolution works and it provoked responses every bit as harsh as those Darwin encountered a century earlier. He was especially reviled by his Harvard colleague Richard Lewontin, one of the founders of molecular evolutionary theory, who saw no validity at all in Wilson’s interpretation of social structures as embodying evolutionary strategies.

Typically for my generation, I woke repeatedly as a kid with my pyjamas soaked in sweat because I’d had yet another nightmare about nuclear war. While I rarely dream about mushroom clouds any more, a dark cloud of one shape or another has dogged me like a sooty, vaporous stray for my entire life. For my conservative classmates in the mid-1960s, American democracy was on the cusp of being overtaken by communism, even if they weren’t sure what that bogeyman was. Yet don’t imagine liberals like my parents were by contrast keeping sensibly calm and carrying on. The left has manfully merchandised the end of the world since I can remember.

With a laboratory leak in Wuhan looking more and more likely as the source of the Covid pandemic, the Chinese authorities are not the only ones dismayed. Western environmentalists had been hoping to turn the pandemic into a fable about humankind’s brutal rape of Gaia. Even if “wet” wildlife markets and smuggled pangolins were exonerated in this case, they argued, and the outbreak came from some direct contact with bats, the moral lesson was ecological. Deforestation and climate change had left infected bats stressed and with nowhere to go but towns. Or had driven desperate people into bat-infested caves in search of food or profit. Green grandees were in no doubt of this moral lesson. “Nature is sending us a message.

“UN Global Climate Poll: ‘The People’s Voice Is Clear – They Want Action.’” So ran a typical headline in the British newspaper the Guardian in January. Yet this month, a poll released as world leaders met at the Glasgow Climate Change Conference prompted a very different Guardian headline: “Few Willing To Change Lifestyle To Save The Planet, Climate Survey Finds.” Huh? Yes, surveys are essentially universal in showing people worldwide are terribly concerned about Global Climate Change (GCC) and support efforts to mitigate it, often no matter how drastic. But those polls may reflect a false perception.

President Joe Biden is set for his rendezvous with climate destiny at the Scottish Event Campus in Glasgow on Monday. The president left Washington on Thursday empty-handed after congressional Democrats abandoned an attempt to put his infrastructure and climate package to a vote. “I need you to help me. I need your votes,” Biden implored them. “I don’t think it’s hyperbole to say that the House and Senate majorities and my presidency will be determined by what happens in the next week.” At least he wasn’t invoking anything as serious as the future of the planet to get their backing. Nancy Pelosi weighed in, according to Politico’s Laura Barrón-López, telling her colleagues that overseas parliamentary leaders had asked whether American democracy can survive.

When I went to Poland not long before Covid, I found a country more bitterly divided by a culture war even than we are. So I would not rule out EU leaders being right that the current government there has intruded on the independence of the judiciary for its own political ends. This is the background to recent Brussels fury that the Polish Constitutional Tribunal (supreme court) asserted the primacy of Polish law over that of the EU earlier this month. The problem never arises in the EU, of course, because there the European Court of Justice has never had an independent judiciary to be tampered with. It has aways been the purpose of the ECJ to make sure that its judges use European law to advance the European Union, which democracy tends not to. In that sense, all its judges are political.

Doom and gloom Sir: The depressing article by Tom Woodman (‘You must be kidding’, 16 October) confirms my growing fears about the damage being wrought by the promoters of apocalyptic climate change, which has become a dangerous cult with alarming echoes of millenarian doom which has stretched through many previous centuries. While sensible care for the environment is a good thing, the descriptions of a frightening future of the imminent end of the world through drought, flood and fire now imbues every aspect of education and politics. Constantly bombarding young people with the news that the end of the world is nigh has led many of them into completely unnecessary visions of death and disaster.