Environmentalism and fear

You will recall the disgraceful UK government ad, using a bedtime story to scare a little girl about the dangers of “climate change” (see here). Brendan O’Neill, writing in The Australian, analyses the motivation behind such actions:

Not surprisingly, the ad has caused a storm. Nearly 400 people have complained to Britain’s Advertising Standards Authority. Some are disturbed by the ad’s scientific illiteracy (how one gets from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s relatively sober reports about changing weather patterns to a cartoon dog drowning in a flooded city is anybody’s guess). Others have slammed the government for knowingly and deliberately – and with taxypayers’ money – scaring kids.

Yet the ad is only an extreme version of what has become mainstream environmentalist policy in recent years: terrifying children.

The environmentalist ethos, whether it is spouted by official bodies or radical, dreadlock-sporting campaigners, presents itself as caring and considerate, yet it is shot through with the politics of fear.

In place of grown-up, adult debate about the future, environmentalists continually use scaremongering – conjuring up horrid, squalid future scenarios based more on their fantastic imaginations than scientific fact – to try to force people to lower their horizons and change their behaviour.

And this green politics of fear is starting to have a detrimental effect on children.

As popular culture bombards kids with messages about a fiery, bunny-hostile future, and as many schools in Britain and elsewhere rebrand themselves as “eco schools”, devoted to reducing children’s carbon footprints as much as expanding their minds, so children are becoming paralysed by fear.

In 2007, a survey of 1150 seven to 11-year-olds in Britain found that more than half had lost sleep as a result of worrying about climate change.

“It’s making me and my friends go mad,” said a 12-year-old girl.

In the environmentalists’ desperation to get their message across, we are bringing up a generation of children scared out of their wits.

Read it here.