Destructive Preservation

What the saving of their souls was for the ancients, saving of electricity has become for the moderns

by Theodore Dalrymple 

The one thing that many environmentalists seem not to care about is the environment. By this I mean its visual appearance. They would happily empty any landscape or any city of beauty so that the planet might survive. Like the village in Vietnam, it has become necessary to destroy the world in order to save it. And, of course, destruction of beauty has the additional advantage of being socially just: for if everyone cannot live in beautiful surroundings, why should anyone do so? Since it is far easier to create ugliness than to create beauty, equality is to be reached by the former rather than by the latter. 

The indifference of environmentalists to aesthetic considerations was illustrated by a friend, who kindly forwarded to me a brochure about a fully ecological house, erected (or assembled, since it was pre-fabricated) in the centre of Paris in front of Haussmann-style buildings. Needless to say, it completely destroyed the harmony of the surrounding townscape. 

It looked like a three-dimensional Mondrian, all boxes and bright colours. Inside, it was more a laboratory than a home, the kind of sterile environment necessary for in vitro fertilisation. However much it might have been heated by the sun, it lacked warmth. It was a proper place for androids, not for humans.

The brochure claimed many advantages for it, not the least of which was that the residents could monitor their energy consumption electronically hour by hour, minute by minute, in order to minimise it. Thus they could ensure that they never forgot their own impact on the environment, and were never totally free of anxiety about it. What the saving of their souls was for the ancients, saving of electricity has become for the moderns. 

No consideration was given in the brochure to such questions as the harmonisation of new houses with the pre-existing townscape or landscape, or how these cheap and gaudy constructions would look after a few years of wear and tear; but the smallness of the houses was vaunted as an enormous social advantage. There simply was not enough room, not enough land area, said the brochure, for everyone to occupy as much space as he wanted. 

This was an odd claim, because the house was by no means as efficient in concentrating the population as – the very Haussmann-style buildings in the front of which it was assembled, which manage so marvellously to combine elegance, grandeur, human scale and density of population, and which are now so desired and desirable as places to live that they have become too expensive to buy for anyone who does not already own part of one. Oddly enough, no one has ever suggested building as Haussmann did, albeit with such energy-saving devices as ingenuity might supply. The past is the one thing we don’t want to learn from, especially if we are architects. 

To go from the sublime to the ridiculous, I recently saw an example of environmentalist brutalism in a city not quite as famed as Paris for its beauty, namely Liverpool. Actually, Liverpool was once, at least in parts, a rather grand city, other parts of it being hideous beyond description, of course. It was once one of the largest entrepots and passenger ports in the world; the proceeds of the slave trade in the eighteenth century had been invested in elegant Georgian buildings and the proceeds of the hugely expanded trade of the Victorian and Edwardian eras in grandiloquent municipal buildings. 

A combination of economic change, the Luftwaffe, modernist bad taste, municipal corruption and union intransigence have reduced Liverpool to a kind of lived-in ruin, but it is not difficult to see a few remains of elegance and grandeur in it. I spent a few weeks in a part of the town where early Victorian stucco villas still stood, in a state of decay thanks to multiple occupancy, but not utterly beyond repair: the kind of houses that in more fashionable towns would cost a small fortune, though in Victorian times they had been built for only the lower reaches of the bourgeoisie. 

One of the reasons that the area would never be renovated, however, was the council’s insistence that each house had three large plastic trash-bins on wheels, each a bright colour: green for the bottles left over from last night’s drunken orgy, red for stolen goods now surplus to requirements, purple for dead bodies and used syringes, all in fact that a modern British urban household needs to disembarrass itself of. 

These bins completely dominated the appearance of the street; the eye simply could not avoid them. They were so ugly that to maintain the appearance of the houses would have been futile; the potentially elegant street would have remained an ugly dump, and therefore nobody did try to maintain the appearance of the houses. The justification for the bins, of course, was ecological: indeed, it was printed on them, like religious instruction. 

Even very pretty villages in England are now ruined by this kind of environmentalist philistines. 

Yet another example of environmentalist brutalism is, of course, the wind turbine. I am not informed enough to judge of their efficiency in terms of saving energy, let alone of their role in saving the planet, but I can certainly judge of their appearance. So could the late Senator Edward Kennedy who, though in favour of wind farms in general, was not in favour of wind farms anywhere he might have to look at them. 

The minister in the last British government who was supposed to be in charge of the country’s response to climate change (no problem, real or imagined, is without bureaucratic opportunity), and man called Edward Milliband, said in a speech that it should now be regarded as socially unacceptable to oppose the establishment of wind turbines in one’s own area. In other words, it should be deemed impermissible, a kind of social gaffe, even to question their efficiency, their noise, their effect on the beauty of the surroundings. 

I suspect - though of course I cannot prove - that the real motive the espousal of wind turbines, at least in Europe, is quite other than the avowed one. It is not so much the need to save the planet as the desire to exert power (of financial corruption I will not speak). 

In this respect I am reminded of Soviet-era iconography, particularly in its early phases, when drawn images of the countryside always included chimney-stacks in the distance belching black smoke. As we now know, the Soviets produced neither for profit nor use, but for power – their own, of course. The logic of the iconography was as follows: where there’s black smoke from chimney-stacks there’s a proletariat, where there’s a proletariat there’s a Party, and where there’s a Party, there’s no getting away from it, even in the remote countryside. 

The purpose of the wind turbines is not, therefore, so much to produce electricity as to produce an effect, that of inescapability. You cannot look at a landscape with turbines, however distant, and not fix your eyes on them; they dominate, even from afar. Old ideologies might be dead, but environmentalism has taken their place with elegant ease. The power the turbines produce is more political than electric. They are the final triumph of the town over the country, of the metropolitan over the provincial, the utilitarian over the deontological. 

This is not to say that the desire to minimise waste and pollution is not laudable. This is the aspect of environmentalism that I think is the most valuable. I confess, for example, that I find suburban gas-guzzlers offensive and as absurd as the Marlboro Man (who is about as genuine as Piltdown Man), but my reaction is as much cultural as ecological. I am appalled that, in a country such as Britain, and no doubt in all similar countries, a third of food is thrown away, either by supermarkets or individuals. No doubt less wastage might have a depressing effect on the GDP per capita: in which case, so much the worse for the GDP as a measure of the perfection of human existence. 

Once again my objection to such waste is as much cultural as ecological: that people should carelessly waste that which for the vast majority of human history was a struggle to produce in even barely sufficient quantity seems to me a species of sacrilege. It implies a grossness in the approach life, a taken-for-grantedness of what should not be taken for granted, a lack of attention to what one is doing, that is not the way to a fulfilled human existence. 

I am in favour of the refusal of supermarkets in Ireland and France now to hand out plastic bags, first because plastic bags are hideous in themselves, and second because they are indestructibly horrible once they escape into the environment. It is surely not too much to ask people to take sufficient thought to bring a bag with them when they shop; such thoughtfulness might (who knows?) even induce a more mindful attitude to what they are doing. 

I am not, therefore, against actions taken to protect or preserve the environment that are above the level of individual conduct. It seems to me, though, that rather than indoctrinate children in the shibboleths of current ideological environmentalism, as seems to be happening in or schools, we should attempt to induct children into an attitude of mindfulness towards the world, iin which they learn not to take all that is around them for granted in the pseudo-sophisticated manner in which they do so now. 

For example, children should be taught to draw, preferably still-lifes. They would learn thereby to observe closely (military officers in the age before photography were taught to draw for intelligence-gathering purposes, and it is astonishing how many of them, who had presumably seen the rough side of life, ended up by producing tender drawings of the world for their own delight), and thus learn to appreciate the quieter pleasures that do not requite very much in the way of consumption. As the ancient author said, it is not in the fulfilment of desires, but in their limitation, that freedom resides. (Within reason, of course.) 

Not every child will learn the implicit lesson taught by drawing, but this is hardly an objection. Most children will not change their conduct, their tastes or desires because of indoctrination with environmentalist shibboleths either, and those that do will probably become shrill ideologues of the kind for whom the price of certain current sacrifice is worth paying for the prospect of a distant utopia, and for whom the vision of that utopia (and its supposed apocalyptic alternative) is more real than the actual harm done in trying to bring utopia about that is before their eyes. Surely we had enough of such visionaries in the last century. The wish is mistaken for the fact: and so you ruin Paris and a thousands landscapes, but this is vastly less real to you than the marvellous distant prospect of renewable energy that shimmers in your eyes like a mirage in the desert. 

There is another aspect to the hideous ecological house of Paris, the brightly-coloured waste bins of Liverpool and the wind turbines in idyllic rural settings: Man’s (or at least certain men’s) delight in destruction as a good in itself. Mediocre but ambitious people – of whom, it seems to me, there are more than ever before in human history, the ambitiousness being what is new, not the mediocrity – are offended by the very sight of achievements that they know they cannot possibly match. They are not inspired by them, except to hatred and resentment. It offends them that the world should have achieved quite a lot before their advent into it; their response is therefore a destructive one. In Europe, architects rarely consider the harmony of what they build with what already exists, rather the reverse. That is why, in so many old towns in Europe, a harmonious assemblage of buildings, constructed perhaps over centuries, is comprehensively destroyed by one modernist structure. The hatred and resentment seeps out of it, like radon out of granite. Environmentalism is (or perhaps I should say can be) the new justification for the destructive urge born of resentment, all the more dangerous because of its plausibility.