When Peter, self-proclaimed ‘The Great’, of Russia wanted a new capital to exemplify his abandonment of the primitive ways of the Russian past and his seamless transition into civilized European culture he took an expedition into the barren marshlands near the Swedish border and stuck his bayonet randomly into the peat. He also, with gross immodesty, named the city after himself. It was then renamed for Lenin, head of the centralized communist state that followed. Perhaps St. Putinsberg will follow shortly? St. Petersburg, the Baroque jewel of the Russian Baltic, was built in four months by 20,000 forced labourers, more than half of whom died.
The development of Brasilia, a new capital built on the edge of Brazil’s resource-rich interior, was a more recent tribute to the conquest of nature by the arrogance of the state. The decision to build the city was made by constitutional decree in 1823, although its creation was an outgrowth of post-war modernist excess: we will because we can. This in spite of the chosen site being was over 360 miles from the nearest paved road, 75 miles from the nearest railway. The purpose of its siting was precisely to encourage the sort of ‘exploitation’ of the forest resources which has led to the destruction of an area of rainforest the size of Poland every year.
Before we had great leaders and sophisticated nation-states people planned and built their own cities in response to their need for resources. Locations by rivers were originally favoured, making water for people, animals and crops readily accessible, and also facilitating transport for goods that needed to be traded. It was industralisation that led to the creation of towns close to the sites of important resources, such as the settlements in the South Wales coalfield or South Yorkshire. And once those resources could be found cheaper elsewhere the settlements and their people were left abandoned. This is the inefficiency of the market system, motivated by profit and operating in the interests of the few who live from those profits.
To facilitate the movement of people and resources an increasingly powerful legal apparatus has been required. In the case of the Soviet Union we have learned to be critical of the creation of, for example, the town of Pripyat, home to around 50,000 people in its heyday, and now an abandoned mass of tower-blocks that provide home only to stray dogs and old people who feel that their life expectancy will be unaffected by the continuing radiation from the Chernobyl power-plant that the town was built to serve. It is not communism that motivates this hubristic manipulation of the destinies of thousands but the centralized, unaccountable state. Think of the forced evacuation of Imber in Wiltshire to suit the interests of the military, or the inundation of Treweryn to satisfy the water greed of industrializing Liverpool.
When faced with such a historical legacy it is easy to whinge or to despair. But as Greens we do have a workable and working alternative in the form of bioregionalism, an economic system that is rooted in ecology and which requires us to borrow our resources from our local environment. The difference can be illustrated by comparing the plans for development of the Thames Gateway with the work of the London Food Commission. The building of up to 40,000 new homes in the natural floodplain of the Thames is driven entirely by the commercial needs of the City of London. Docile workers must be found and housed, and their need for water in an increasingly dry part of the country must be met by some technological means. The consequent development of the floodplain can only increase the threat of flooding in London itself, with less land to absorb the excess rains caused by climate change. These plans indicate the short-sighted and profit-focused planning that we are subjected to. By contrast, a new body called London Food has developed a food strategy for London, with the aims of limiting London’s environmental impact, reducing its waste and increasing the health value and quality of food consumed. This coincides exactly with a bioregional approach where cities provide for some of their own food needs through allotments and city farms rather than sucking resources in from an ever-expanding hinterland, impoverishing the city itself and increasing transport-related pollution.
Sadly, London Food is a rare example of positive action, and unsurprisingly one inspired and led by Green Party member of the GLA Jenny Jones. In most other cases the response of the state to the disasters that the capitalist economy is generating is a disempowering and violent one. Behind the ballot box we find the mailed fist. The debate over the return of nuclear power is already blighted by the suggestion that the planning process will be curtailed. In other words our rights as citizens to object to life-threatening pollution being sprayed into our back gardens will be abolished. More depressingly George Monbiot is arguing for such a destruction of our basic rights not only in the case of nuclear but also to support the building of windfarms. This is quite unnecessary, since research has shown that communities who benefit from the wind energy generated are prepared to tolerate the loss of amenity (for which read: ‘view’).
In a recent presentation to the Association for Literature and the Environment in Aberystwyth George also engaged in a breath-taking performance of hubris when he began trading off lives lost through radioactive pollution from a resuscitated US nuclear industry (around 20,000 by his estimate), with lives lost as a result of the worst effects of climate change (a vaguer, arm-waving estimate reckoned in billions). This sort of thing makes anybody look silly as well as dangerous. I criticized similar calculations routinely produced by the nuclear industry in their self-justification in a report produced for the European Committee on Radiation Risk in 2003. Pro-nuclear estimates suggest fewer lives lost from nuclear radiation compared with the dangers of coal-mining, missing the point that one group of people chose to face the risks while another did not, and the deeper point that no bureaucrat has the right to usurp the divine right to life that we have all been granted. Louis de Bernieres makes the same point considerably more elegantly in his latest novel Birds without Wings:
It is not possible to calculate how many Armenians died on the forced marches. In 1915 the number was thought to be 300,000, a figure which has been progressively increased ever since, thanks to the efforts of angry propagandists. To argue about whether it was 300,000 or 2,000,000 is in a sense irrelevant and distasteful, however, since both numbers are great enough to be equally distressing, and the suffering of individual victims in their trajectory towards death is in both cases immeasurable.
Here we come to the crux of the problem which is, as Schumacher pointed out at the outset of our movement, one of scale. It is easy to become enraged by the myopia and extraordinary arrogance of the fascist state but perhaps more helpful to understand this as an inevitable consequence of the sort of category error politicians make when they consider themselves capable of making decisions that affect the lives of so many. As the political system is limited and accountability reduced they feel their power expand until they are literally capable of playing God, whether causing the lives of tens of thousands in Iraq as Blair has done, or causing the deaths of millions in the holocaust. Localisation is not only economically efficient it is also democratically necessary because it is the level at which we can genuinely take responsibility for our decisions. Based in Whitehall it may be merely a stroke on a piece of paper that condemns 2,000 children to die from radiation; a local councilor or MP is unlikely to make the same decision when faced with the mother of the one child who died in their ward.
As capitalism blunders towards its latest crisis—caused in this case by its encounter with the final frontier: the limits of the planet—the forces that hold it in place become ever fiercer. Whether in the name of anti-terrorism or energy security we are being sold safety at the cost of our liberty. The terrorists had their own objections to the imperialist ambitions of US capital, hence their apposite choice of target in the Twin Towers, the world trade centre. Our objections are less ideological and more survivalist but they also threaten the economic project and they also will be opposed first by our disempowerment and then with violence.
In this context the championing of the local should be seen less as a retreat and more as an opportunity to create an example of what can be achieved. Within our bioregions we can create for ourselves peaceful and well-resourced communities. Without the drive to extract profit there is plenty for all, provided by a bountiful nature. Outside the clamouring needs generated by the media and advertising industries we can establish our own standards of well-being and allow our creativities to flourish.