20031212_R4

Source: BBC Radio 4: Today Programme

URL: N/A

Date: 12/12/2003

Event: Have the grand narratives of society been hijacked by the green lobby?

Credit: BBC Radio 4

People:

  • Tracey Brown: Managing Director, charity Sense About Science
  • Professor Derek Burke: Academic and former Vice-Chancellor, UEA
  • Tom Feilden: BBC science correspondent
  • John Humphrys: Presenter, BBC Radio 4 Today programme
  • Professor Steve Jones: Geneticist and science writer
    • Professor Chris Leaver: Emeritus Professor, Department of Plant Sciences, Oxford University
    • Bjorn Lomborg: Author, academic and environmental writer
  • Sarah Montague: Presenter, BBC Radio 4 Today programme
    • Professor Philip Stott: Professor emeritus of biogeography at SOAS, University of London
  • Dr. Mark Tester: Senior lecturer in plant genomics, Cambridge University

Sarah Montague: Here's a familiar story. "Planet Earth is suffocating under a cloying blanket of carbon dioxide, the victim of mankind's insatiable greed." Or how about this one? "The scientists who support genetic modification are funded by Big Business, so you can't trust what they say." Or here's another. "There's a conspiracy of silence over autism, and the medical establishment would rather sacrifice a handful of children than admit there's a problem with the MMR jab."

They're just some of the storylines that pressure groups and campaigners hope will win you to their cause. The question, though, is: how do we distinguish between a grand narrative that's true and one that panders to prejudices? Well, in the past we've turned to the evidence to sort fact from fiction but, as our science correspondent Tom Feilden reports, the validity of science itself is increasingly the issue at the heart of the debate.

[Sound of fireworks and cheering.]

Tom Feilden: Bonfire Night, 2001, and an effigy of the "Skeptical Environmentalist" Bjorn Lomborg is consigned to the flames. Lomborg's crime had been to question many of the received wisdoms of environmental alarmism.

Bjorn Lomborg: "...that man is killing the Earth with pollution, that he has plundered resources to exhaustion, that there are just too many...

Tom Feilden: But it was his cost-benefit analysis of the Kyoto Protocol that provoked the most vitriol. Condemned by activists and ostracised by the academic community, Professor Lomborg was subjected to an unprecedented show trial of his data and conclusions.

Bjorn Lomborg: People almost refused to look at it. It was a little bit like when Galilieo said to one of the cardinals: "Look in my binocular, and see that Jupiter has moons", and they were like: "No, we don't want to look at it, because we don't want to see this. This cannot be true."

Tom Feilden: But the reaction went beyond innate conservatism against new or different ideas.

Philip Stott: Society always develops grand narratives, or big stories to explain important things like climate.

Tom Feilden: Professor Philip Stott believes that Lomborg, and others who've challenged conventional thinking on issues like the environment, strike at a deeper nerve, one which goes to the heart of how we build a shared understanding of the world around us. The problem, according to Professor Stott, is that the grand narrative of global warming has been hijacked by what he calls the "new green left".

Philip Stott: A whole set of agendas that they'd been developing, right the way from the 1960s - population control, control of the car, anti-globalisation - all had been seeking, for some time, what we might call a "legitimising science". And with emissions of CO2 - they found it! It was perfect. Hammering growth, hammering the car, hammering industry, hammering big corporations, but above all, hammering America.

Tom Feilden: The grand narrative of global warming, that the Earth is dying, that it's all our fault and that someone, ideally America, must pay, is, he argues, overly simplistic and, as Bjorn Lomborg found to his cost, brooks no argument.

[Sounds of objects being packed.]

Mark Tester: It's probably echo-y, does it sound echo-y?

Tom Feilden: That may not be such a problem, when the scientific evidence is broadly in tune with the grand narrative. But that isn't always the case.

Mark Tester: Right, I've packed about 90% of my kit, and it's sitting in a ship, somewhere in the Indian Ocean, including my lecture notes that I have to give next week. [He laughs.]

Tom Feilden: Dr. Mark Tester, a senior lecturer in plant genomics at Cambridge University, is packing it in. Bluntly, he's had enough of Britain's hostility towards genetic modification.

Mark Tester: I've been pulled to Australia, attracted there because of the resources, but there is a negative dimension, without a doubt, which is due to the anti-GM atmosphere in the UK driving industry away.

[Sounds of machinery.]

Chris Leaver: This is my main research lab here.

Tom Feilden: And Dr. Tester is not alone. Professor Chris Leaver's finding it increasingly difficult to recruit top-quality postgraduates at Oxford University's Department of Plant Sciences. He's worried that negative attitudes towards biotechnology are fuelling a wider mistrust of science, with potentially disastrous consequences.

Chris Leaver: If society decides that progress and science is bad for you, and capitalism is bad for you, I ask: what are the alternatives? It's a bit like turning the engines off on an oil tanker - your ability to steer and direct that oil tanker will persist for a while, but eventually you are then dead in the water.

John Humphrys: ... half past 7, more than a hundred scientists have written to Tony Blair...

Tom Feilden: Concerned about the damage being done to Britain's prospects reached such a pitch, in the wake of the GM debate, that a group of leading scientists wrote to the Prime Minister. Professor Derek Burke came onto the Today programme to explain why.

Derek Burke: ... deep disappointment of the scientific community, because, ultimately, opinions are seen to be more important than evidence. We've seen that happen in the MMR debate, and now we're seeing it happen in the GM debate.

Tom Feilden: It's hard to blame environmentalists for doing what they do well, for taking on and winning arguments, for capturing grand narratives. But Tracey Brown from Sense About Science argues there's an issue here about political leadership and moral relativism that avoids responsibility for judging between arguments based on scientific evidence and those based on opinion.

Tracey Brown: Time and time again, now, we see this kind of pull back from a willingness to judge evidence, a willingness to put forward policy based on evidence and, rather, a sort of desire to try to push the discussion in different directions, without ever taking responsibility for the consequences, in terms of progress.

Tom Feilden: There's a vacuum.

Tracey Brown: There's a vacuum.

Sarah Montague: Tom Feilden reporting. Well, we're joined now by George Monbiot, the Guardian columnist and author of Age of Consent: A Manifesto for a New World Order, and also by Professor Steve Jones, who's Professor of Genetics at University College London. Good morning to you both, gentlemen.

Steve Jones: Good morning.

George Monbiot: Morning.

Sarah Montague: George Monbiot, do you think that there is something in this suggestion that the green lobby has hijacked many of these grand narratives?

George Monbiot: I wish - we are having such a struggle to get our views across, at the moment. There hasn't been a series anywhere on British TV now for 13 years from an environmentalist perspective. During that period, there have been several one-off documentaries and two prime-time series saying there's nothing to worry about. We are struggling in every medium to try to get anyone to pay attention to the seriousness of the environmental problems.

And the grand narrative, which I feel that package constructed, is the one which we are hearing almost everywhere, which is that somehow, what scientists are saying, and what environmentalists are saying, are the opposite. Take something like climate change. The - almost every single climate scientist on earth is saying there is such a thing as man-made climate change, and it's a problem. The environmentalists are saying precisely the same. It's those scientists who are the Galileos, and the Inquisition takes the form of the Republican senators who say this whole thing's a hoax, of the corporate stooges who are trying to buy their way out, through public relations spending, of any commitment to do anything about climate change at all.

Sarah Montague: Professor Steve Jones, that's true, isn't it, that often it is the scientists themselves who are taking the same position as the environmentalists.

Steve Jones: I think that's certainly true, but I think what the problem is, is not that the public doesn't understand science, that they don't understand the scientific method. And the scientific method involves disagreement, you know - "we don't know". And Lomborg, I know, is contested by some and believed by others, and I'm not, by any means, convinced that the answer is yet clear. But the problem lies - and I think climate change isn't a particularly good idea, because the consensus among scientists is, as far as I can see, is exactly as George Monbiot says - but there are other areas -

Sarah Montague: But it's other issues, really, isn't it, where the dispute arises.

Steve Jones: It's the philosophy of testing an idea and throwing it out if it doesn't turn out to be right, versus this dogged conviction that whatever the evidence, and whatever your idea, it's your idea, so it must be right. And that's the problem. I mean, it's a problem -

George Monbiot: Stephen - this does not divide us in any way at all. I want ideas rigorously tested. We all do, because, unless they're rigorously tested, we continue to succumb to the myths which underpin this grand narrative of progress, and the fundamental myth, which needs to be tested desperately, is this idea that we can continue to spend more and more, consume more and more, in a planet with finite resources, without any adverse consequences for anything or anyone.

Sarah Montague: But George - but George Monbiot, you say that you don't effectively have a voice, that there hasn't been a series, and yet there has been plenty of appetite within the media, we've just seen, with headlines like "Frankenstein Food" - there's an appetite for some of the melodrama that some of these stories result in.

George Monbiot: Yes, there's no question. And I think, just like Steve, that there has been some grossly irresponsible reporting, particularly in the tabloid press, of some of the issues surrounding genetic engineering. Now, I think there are some problems with genetic engineering, and they mainly circle around the ability of the corporations to patent the genes, and to patent every step of the food chain, from farm to fork. They do not, on the whole, centre around food safety problems, but those are the ones which are picked up, because they make good tabloid copy and everybody gets into a foaming state about them. But they're a distraction from the real issues.

Sarah Montague: Professor Steve Jones, it is the reporters who are being irresponsible, here.

Steve Jones: It's always the reporters to blame, isn't it. [They laugh.]

Sarah Montague: Tell me about it.

Steve Jones: Um, I'm not convinced of that - I think George is being a little bit Jesuitical, here, I mean, I know he's very solid on the science of GM, but the green movement, broadly defined, picks up these scares - that it's poisonous, that it's destroying the landscape, that it's - and all these other things. Um, and generally, they're not true. And the problem is: when you're arguing with somebody who's perfectly happy to peddle untruths or half-truths - and I don't mean George Monbiot here - and you yourself, as a scientist - and this sounds pompous, but is true - you yourself are only interested in the facts, then you're bound to lose. That's the problem.

Sarah Montague: That's quite a claim, that you're only interested in the facts, I mean - how do you know how much you're being influenced by that?

Steve Jones: Well, why else would anybody be a scientist, if they weren't interested in the facts? It would be a completely pointless - it would be a pointless profession to follow.

Sarah Montague: No, but each of us has our own prejudices, and may be coloured.

Steve Jones: I would like to believe that when it comes to science, I would like to believe that that isn't true. If it turned out that evolution was false and hadn't happened, the Creationists were right - that's unlikely, I'd have to say - I would grind and curse and swear but I would admit it. Creationists will never admit the other way - that's the problem, the problem of certainty.

Sarah Montague: George Monbiot.

George Monbiot: I think that's broadly correct, and I think that once you have embarked on your scientific methodology, it is the facts which guide you, that the problem arises with the political and economic circumstances in which science takes place, and there is such a thing, of course, as corporate funding, there is such a thing as the stuffing of government research councils with corporate executives, and the result of that is that the questions scientists ask and then try to answer are often quite limited in their scope and often designed to produce narrow technological applications to existing science, rather than explore new areas of blue-sky science. So what that does is to really produce almost prefabricated answers.

Sarah Montague: George Monbiot, Professor Steve Jones, thank you both.