I thought I’d done with resistance or rather that resistance had done for me…
Nearly 40 years tied to the mast of the environmental cause, following my passion and purpose, striving to be a ‘positive nuisance’ in service to Gaia. Standing up at conferences, in public meetings, putting the ‘evidence’ before politicians and the media here in the UK, Europe, even making pilgrimages to the UN (that aspirational edifice of international cooperation or lost causes, now overshadowed by the nemesis of all its values Trump Tower).
Was I standing up for Nature or rather myself, for my ego? To be seen to be of use, to have purpose, to be part of a movement – against the mainstream, for something ‘better.’
“Who stands up for the butterflies?” the late, great campaigner Andrew Lees asked rhetorically, at a time when very few people did. The best campaigner I’ve known, whose tenacity & spirit inspired me, Andrew succumbed exhausted to a heart attack in the midst of the dwindling Madagascan rainforest, fighting to stop it being mined for the mineral ilmenite from which titanium dioxide is extracted for that most ‘vital’ of human needs… whitener used in toothpaste and paint.
Metaphorically my heart for the fight gave out, as it almost did physically, a couple of years ago. Worn out with pushing the environmental boulder uphill each day, only for it to roll back down. If not all the way to the bottom, then at least halfway down, mocking my and colleagues’ efforts as those of nursery nonsense characters marching futilely up and down the same hill.
Four decades ago, when I set off in the foothills of the environment movement, the ‘cause du jour’ was ‘Saving the Rainforest.’ ‘An area of rainforest the size of Wales is lost every year’ was the dire catechism I intoned daily. Actually it was a much greater area, a ‘loss’ that continues apace today with the comparator updated to an area ‘the size of Portugal.’
What’s the point, given such relentless losses, the ongoing challenge and overwhelming enormity of ‘Saving the rainforest, the whale, the gorilla, the turtle dove, the bees, ourselves, anything?’ No wonder Andrew had a heart attack, alone in the heart of the Madagascan forest, one man taking on the mining behemoth Rio Tinto Zinc.
But hang on, my heart didn’t give out. I didn’t have a heart attack, I was ‘saved’ – saved by my GP who identified the symptoms and sent me for the tests that identified my blocked arteries, saved by the brilliant cardiology team, who as they self-deprecatingly put it, ‘re-plumbed’ me. Saved indirectly by the rainforest, as the neuromuscular relaxants that assist in open heart surgery, although no longer synthesised from curare the plant-based sticky paste used on ‘poison arrows’ by indigenous hunters to paralyse their prey, are alkaloids identified and developed through its earlier use.
Andrew died, but not in vain, his campaign lives on 1 . Rio Tinto Zinc’s monstrous mining operation at Mongabay in Madagascar has not been paralysed as if by a curare-tipped arrow or blow-dart – but resistance to its rape of the rainforest has grown, led by a new generation of local campaigners, inspired by and taking forward Andrew’s determination to fire his dart into the heart of the beast.
No single dart, person or ego can or will succeed. Resistance is not a solo act. Nor is it a rational act. On the evidence, resistance to the ongoing extraction, consumption, destruction and exhaustion of our planet’s biodiversity and natural resources is doomed to fail. “Resistance is futile!” the doctrine of dictators, demagogues, and neoliberal economists, satirised in the all-other life-form assimilating Borg of Star Trek fame, seems triumphant.
But resistance is not rational, rather it is romantic, against the odds, and despite the facts. It is an idea, a consciously naïve hope, an individual belief that collectively can change the future. Never better expressed than by the great romantic writer F Scott Fitzgerald in the final lines of The Great Gatsby: “Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter — tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning. So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
1 https://news.mongabay.com/2023/04/rio-tinto-must-repair-the-damage-caused-by-their-madagascar-mine-commentary/
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/apr/04/rio-tintos-madagascar-mine-may-face-lawsuit-over-pollution-claims