Do we care about our planet, our nation, our cities, towns, and villages, our mountains, beaches, wadis, and our seas? Do we covet the quality of the air that we breathe as much as we do the shiny new motor vehicle sitting in the driveway?
I don’t know, but rarely does anyone ask us. We have thousands of people lambasting and criticising us for our failures without pausing to consider our culpability, our responsibility for the deteriorating state of this amazing nourishing planet. They tell us what we “have to do,” “must do,” and what it’s our “responsibility to do.” It’s funny isn’t it, even amusing in a grotesque way, how everything is our fault? William Feather wrote that “Everybody loves to find fault in others, as it gives them a feeling of superiority,” which is a great line when you think of those who berate us so vociferously over climate change, global warming and the environment from their pedestals, they turn us off it.
Greta Thunberg is a headline making environmental activist the media and politicians fawn over. Just 18 she is a self-appointed, passionate, and combative spokesperson for youth. She told the UN in 2019 in her naivety and arrogance, “I want you to listen to the scientists, I want them to unite, and act.” There are millions of us want the same things, but we clean beaches, pick up litter, and if we have a choice usually choose a ‘green’ alternative. We do, we want, and we will never say “I.”
Indeed, if we look at lobbyist environmental activists, we find that paragon Elon Musk, that ‘space-hopping’ paragon of electrical virtue, and man of Tesla, the richest man in the world. He thinks we should all be driving EV’s, but for the environment of course. Not to make him richer. Also, on the list is the remarkable Leonardo de Caprio, an actor, a thespian, a ‘pretender,’ who is described by Iberdrola, a wind-power provider, as a “ferocious environmental activist.” He though, is not to be confused with Leonardo Da Vinci, who had real talent, real genius.
Most notably however, we find Dane Inger Andersen, Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Program, touted as a beacon of environmental activism, an icon, yet in practical terms with more than thirty years investment in her job, what has Andersen achieved in making industry responsible for their mess? William Nordhaus, a Nobel Prizewinner in 2018 for his modelling of the impact of climate change upon global economics, has his work changed the environmental outcome or consequences of a single manufacturing process?
Looking at social media environmental influencers simply reinforces the cynicism I have for this cause célebre as Kathryn Kellogg, Immy Lucas, Natalie Kaye, Blue Ollis, Lauren Singer, Heather White, Kamea Cheyne, Tara McKenna, and Wandering Kamya, most prominent on social media, surely owe more devotees to their supermodel appearances than their ability to collect rubbish, that’s for sure.
Finding fault is easy… finding solutions is just a touch more difficult, and that must surely now be dawning on those who have made, or enhanced their reputations on a global scale, not to mention allowing them to maintain globetrotting feats that would make Columbus blush, and line their pockets to boot! Cardboard cutout activist’s piggy-back on causes, and business, commerce, and industry all ignore them, hypocrites complain about them, politicians use them, and you and I, it appears, are expected to fix them.
Making conservation a celebrity cause has much more relevance to the man in the street with Sir David Attenborough, Steve Irwin, David Bellamy, and their ilk showing us the consequences, not of our folly, but the folly we all allow to happen. The ‘real’ conservationists rub shoulders with us, like Dr Nigel Winser, Suaad al Harthy, Dr Khalid al Farsi, Rob Baldwin, Haitham al Rawahi, Dr Mohammed al Kindi and so many more, actually getting their hands dirty, being involved, walking the walk.
