Challenge: Totalitarian Environmentalist Regime

MerryPrankster · Feb 12, 2004

The challenge I put forth is to play with history to the point that, either in the past or in the future (in the future, no POD is needed--just play with trends a bit), a totalitarian environmentalist regime comes to power somewhere in the world (bonus points if it's a developed country).

This regime basically tries a Pol Pot-style "back to nature" thing (or, if you want to be really extreme, tries to force its subjects back into a hunter-gatherer mode of existence) based on the reasoning that such a lifestyle is less polluting (ecological footprint and all that). Such a government would ban high technology (except for the ruling caste and military) and be as totalitarian as Pol Pot's regime.

If there are massive die-offs Cambodia-style (disease, starvation, execution, crushed rebellions, etc), so much the better; the people in charge believe there are too many people anyway.

Any ideas?

basileus · Feb 12, 2004

This thing has the same relationship with environmentalism as Pol Pot had with socialism, that is less than zero. In both cases, it's simply a sadistic delirium of power.

MerryPrankster · Feb 12, 2004

"This thing has the same relationship with environmentalism as Pol Pot had with socialism, that is less than zero. In both cases, it's simply a sadistic delirium of power."

This isn't a veiled attack on the environmentalist movement; I was actually wondering about possible political ideologies for the 21st Century (instead of Nazism and Communism, we'd have globo-capitalism, what you call "Islamic integralism," and possibly a totalitarian variety of environmentalism).

Tom_B · Feb 12, 2004

A variation on this idea is that health fascism gets out of control and some Dr. God Physician becomes ruler of a state where to improve people's health:

1] Eating of meat (maybe fish too) is forbidden

2] Agriculture is strictly organic with people forced into agriculture who had
other occupations

3] Alcohol, tobacco and all forms of recreational drugs are prescribed with all citizens forced to undergo frequent random drug testing (incl. for alcohol and nicotine)

4] Mandatory exercise program for all citizens

5] Private car ownership is restricted to a very small number (mostly the elite)

6] Concentration camps for the obese

7] All citizens are sterlized with long term hormone implants. To reproduce a couple must be screened before a committee and then they get counteragents to the implants that let them conceive.

basileus · Feb 12, 2004

As an environmentalist (and a Social Democrat in times of peace, ready to become the fiercest Jacobin in case of war), I judge highly unlikely that evironmentalism could ever evolve into something similar. You should have not an ideological movement with a solid scientific base, like today's environmentalism, but a fanatic religion which COMMANDS absolute respect for nature (and no respect, of course, for man, as if man wasn't part of nature!).
In that case, well, a "Holy Horror" is definitely more likely.

MerryPrankster · Feb 12, 2004

Good idea, Tom. Perhaps your idea could be the "mainstream" version of this future ideology (like the USSR was the "mainstream" sort of Communism), with the Pol-Pot-environmentalists as the "fringe" (just as Pol Pot was the "fringe" of Communism--percentage-wise, he was worse than Stalin or Mao).

Linkwerk · Feb 12, 2004

I think this sort of ideology could be best found in an insane sort of neo-pagan doctrine. Back to the old ways, back to nature, etc.

NapoleonXIV · Feb 12, 2004

Tom_B said:
A variation on this idea is that health fascism gets out of control and some Dr. God Physician becomes ruler of a state where to improve people's health:

1] Eating of meat (maybe fish too) is forbidden

2] Agriculture is strictly organic with people forced into agriculture who had
other occupations

3] Alcohol, tobacco and all forms of recreational drugs are prescribed with all citizens forced to undergo frequent random drug testing (incl. for alcohol and nicotine)

4] Mandatory exercise program for all citizens

5] Private car ownership is restricted to a very small number (mostly the elite)

6] Concentration camps for the obese

7] All citizens are sterlized with long term hormone implants. To reproduce a couple must be screened before a committee and then they get counteragents to the implants that let them conceive.

Make it mandatory Wellness instead of exercise, and make sure the populace is well doped with something not recreational but prescribed by a doctor for mental health. Then take a thoroughly clinical and modern approach to sex, seeing it as just another bodily function. Take the reproductive facility out of the unpredictable and unhealthy woman's body entirely.

Brave New World

Tom_B · Feb 12, 2004

NapoleonXIV said:
Make it mandatory Wellness instead of exercise, and make sure the populace is well doped with something not recreational but prescribed by a doctor for mental health. Then take a thoroughly clinical and modern approach to sex, seeing it as just another bodily function. Take the reproductive facility out of the unpredictable and unhealthy woman's body entirely.

Brave New World

I see you know these people too. As far as sex you do have a point--the Health Fascists are often surprisingly proSex--as long everything is covered in latex.

Melvin Loh · Feb 13, 2004

New Age-controlled state ?

I agree with Linkwerk that a totalitarian environmentalist regime is best achieved by a neo-pagan New Age doctrine which somehow takes over a country and compels all ppl to forcibly go back to nature as part of the worship of the 'sacred gods of the earth'. Now, could that be made feasible at some point in the 60s or 70s ? Perhaps some sorta evil hippie-style largescale New Age-worshipping commune which totally eschews modern technology and other trappings of the modern world in the jungles of South America ?

DominusNovus · Feb 13, 2004

Well, there is the enviromental imperialism movement in OTL. Basicly, its what alot of people in 3rd world countries call the efforts of those in the 1st world to impose enviromental restrictions on them. There was a summit down in south africa (cape town, I believe), just a little while ago. The people there praised the poor people of africa who were still living in huts and drinking filthy water. While, of course, living in posh hotels and drinking bottled water.

Anyway, maybe you could have a regime of such people impose their will on a third world nation.

Steffen · Feb 13, 2004

i hope I don´t push on a flame war.

My observations of the green movement
It is fairly easy to think of a fundamentalistic environmental movement,

they have everything to form a creed:

- believe in a vengeful god-like entity: Nature
"Mother Nature" "The Will of Nature" "the revenge of Nature?"

- they urge their followers on symbolic rites:
- seperation of garbage (here, to a point it gets obscure)
- renunciation of "luxury", giving everybody a guilty conscience for living in the first world
Aided by the popular "the end is near" rhetoric.

So, it is already a kind of religion. Can it become fundamentalistic?

Of course. Is it already?

aktarian · Feb 13, 2004

Anybody played Call to Power? There you have Ecotopia as a form of gov't. They are environment friendlly and can support large militaris to wage wars on poluting nations. Interesting concept, one that I often switch to.

basileus · Feb 13, 2004

Anyway, the environmentalists I know don't call for return to caverns nor call for maintaining Third World People in misery, but press for development and adoption of the most modern "clean" techs (hydrogen cells, eolic, solar cells, controlled nuclear fusion, wave plants, geotermal exchange etc.) even if they are costly and definitely NOT in the interests of the powers that be. Remember just that when you see environmentalists subtly depicted that way: someone is successfully brainwashing you, and behind that brainwashing there's a lot of money.
The movement I'm involved in looks forward to really enter the XXIst century, some other people in power wants to contiunue to live in the XXth, in all senses.

DuQuense · Feb 13, 2004

jonesville

Does it have to be a whole country, I can easy see a Jim Jones Type setting up a Eco Utopia in Belize or Guina [ect] then Going more and more Wierd, [out on your hand and knees pulling up Dandy lions cause the're not native to the region]

MerryPrankster · Feb 13, 2004

"adoption of the most modern "clean" techs (hydrogen cells, eolic, solar cells, controlled nuclear fusion, wave plants, geotermal exchange etc.)"

I agree with your environmentalist friends on that one, Stefano. There's a book in the US entitled Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution, which has many such ideas (very interesting--perhaps its available in Italy).

As I said, this isn't an attempt to start a flame-war. The people who would set up such a state would be the "lunatic fringe" of the environmental movement.

Melvin Loh · Feb 14, 2004

WI UN world govt ?

Also, WI the UN's extremist elements, in the form of a New Age philosophy with an extreme environmentalist 'Earth Mother' worshipping ethos represented in the UN building in NY, somehow becomes the world govt, and imposes its neo-pagan enviro-fascist doctrine on the rest of the world ?

Akiyama · Feb 14, 2004

I used to be a member of the Green Party in the UK. In my experience, the people involved in Green politics are more likely to be "romantics" than "realists". Hardly anyone in the Green party in the UK is prepared to look at things objectively from a scientific or economic viewpoint - it's an ideology. A lot of Greens are also into Anarchism, Socialism, Feminism, New Age mysticism (crystals etc.), Veganism and that kind of thing. They are viscerally anti-science and anti-business - cartoons in the Green Party magazine always depicted male scientists and businessmen as being responsible for all the world's problems. And there really are political groups in Western countries advocating a "back to nature" philosophy - if you don't believe me walk into any radical bookstore that sells amateur left-wing political magazines.

I don't want to start a flame war here, so I'd better make it clear I am NOT saying that I personally don't believe there is a scientific case for environmentalism. Actually, I believe the degredation of the environment is a much greater threat to the world than Al Qaida. I just want to make a point about the type of people who become politically active environmentalists.

The modern Green movement started in the 1960s after the publication of Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring" (1962) and I think it ran out of popular support in the 1990s. I think a good POD for a more environmentalist world would be to have the US launch a pre-emptive war on the USSR prior to the USSR developing the atomic bomb (this was seriously considered at the time). This leads to a capitalist Russia, Eastern Europe, China and South East Asia. By the 1980s Russia and Eastern Europe have a standard of living equivalent to that of Europe, and China and South-East Asia have a standard of living equivalent to that of Taiwan or South Korea. This would mean vastly more international trade and investment than in OTL, making the whole world much richer. Environmental problems such as pollution, ozone depletion, global warming, deforestation, resource depletion etc. would occur more rapidly and on a larger scale than in OTL. Suppose mainstream political parties are slow to react to public concern about the environment with anything other than soothing words, after all they have business interests to keep happy. That would leave the way clear for a Green party to win an election. The party has a charismatic leader who is also a canny politician - he presents his party as more moderate than it really is. When in power he doesn't bother about legal niceties such as property rights or elections - we have an IMMEDIATE ENVIRONMENTAL CRISIS here and the end (saving the planet) easily justifies any temporary measures. Probably the leader's ultimate ideal is a kind of primitive communism anyway. When I was in the Green Party their manifesto held "News from Nowhere" by William Morris (1891) to be the kind of society they were working towards.

Incidentally "News from Nowhere" is a very cool book - it's a Victorian time-travel story in which an average joe wakes up 150 years in the future (he takes a while to figure out what happened to him) to discover that England has become a kind of medieval communist utopia. It's more readable than "Brave New World".

I have quite a few books by "realist" environmentalists that discuss how the coming environmental catastrophe is nearly upon us and the kind of new political order needed to cope with the realities of our living in a world of limited resources (all of these were published in the early 1990s). Some of them are written from a "right-wing" economic-liberal social-authoritarian viewpoint and some of them from a "left-wing" economic-authoritarian social-liberal viewpoint but there are two things all of them are in agreement upon - we need a much stronger world government and we need enforced population control.

Oh, and you might find this amusing - the UK Green Party doesn't have a leader - it has two "principal spokespersons" (one male and one female, natch), who stand for one year - but have no influence on party policy (party policy is a totally democratic process in which every member can participate - which leads to a VERY long, detailed and eccentric manifesto). A UK Green government would not be totalitarian (disbanding the army being one of their objectives - if an enemy invades the population is to engage in Ghandi-style passive resistance) but it would be . . . interesting.

MerryPrankster · Feb 14, 2004

Akiyama,

You say that many Green Parties tend not to think rationally. Neither did Pol Pot--he figured that the Cambodian people, who built Angkor Wat, had to be capable of anything and anyone who said otherwise got killed.

Mind, I'm NOT comparing environmentalists to Pol Pot.

I think Akiyama's scenario of a "Green Hitler" arising due to fears about environmental problems is good. However, a POD as radical as a US pre-emptive strike on the USSR isn't really needed. If something like Chernobyl or Bhopal happens in an industrialized Western country (unlikely given all the safeguards...Chernobyl was shoddy Communist engineering and in Bhopal, the Indian gov't insisted on less-qualified Indians running all the safety stuff), that'll probably re-energize the environmentalist movement.

Especially if there were signs that this disaster could have been prevented, but the property rights of the owner of the chemical plant, nuke facility, etc. prevented some sort of regulation/inspection. That could lead to revulsion against "excessive" property rights and thus enviro-Marxist or enviro-fascism.

tom · Feb 14, 2004

There was a book like this...the nature push is so strong and global that the end of global warming starts a new ice age.