So I now had a climate change website, but no content. My basic — and totally naive — strategy was “if they build it they will come”, but they weren’t going to come without any content there at all, so I started writing some articles myself and began to hunt down various opportunities for publishing bundles of relevant information. Before I got very far, however, the site got discovered, not by hundreds of climate scientists looking for an outlet, but by hundreds of porn spam bots engineered specifically to exploit the vulnerability of self-publishing sites like mine. Soon, all my energies were spent, not generating content, but deleting in-appropriate links and pages and trying to wrap my head around complex strategies for spam filtering and cyber-security.
It was obvious I needed technical help — and therefore money — so I started casting around for investors. This was hard: in the mid-2000s, the financial community was still reeling from the double whammy of the dotcom crash and 9/11, and it wasn’t at all apparent that digital media was going to be the economic powerhouse that it subsequently has become. There was no start-up culture or community to speak of and very little narrative to reassure early stage investors other than the recent horror stories from 1999. To cut a long story I short, I ran out of money and had to go and find a job.
In the way of these things, my experience with WikiClimate helped me to find one. A contact at the Telegraph had noticed what I was doing and had recommended me. The Telegraph website was growing fast and needed someone to handle the burgeoning online team and launch new products, products which were to include an environmental channel, Telegraph Earth.
The Telegraph wasn’t exactly my spiritual home — I’m a lifelong Guardian reader, with politics to match — but in those days it was a much broader church than currently and there were some excellent science writers — including Roger Highfield and Charles Clover — on the Features staff. I’m also a long-term believer that there’s only so much value in preaching to the converted: trying to take the climate debate to the sceptical breakfast tables of the traditional Telegraph readership seemed like a worthy challenge. I applied, my unusual mix of literary, journalistic, digital and environment experience made me a good fit for the position, and I got the job.
In the beginning, it went pretty well. Once I’d got my bearings in the new role, I launched Telegraph Earth on the website to some fanfare and much support from the paper; this, after all, was the year that Tory poster boy & PM David Cameron took a trip to the Arctic, so hugging polar bears was on message. We commissioned some interesting articles and columns and built some cool digital tools, including an online carbon calculator powered by data from the Amee project. It all felt pretty good and I convinced myself that we were contributing in a small but meaningful way to what seemed to be a growing awareness of green issues in society at large. But it was an illusion, a false dawn. Nothing of the sort was going on.
In my innocence, I’d assumed that the Telegraph was getting into climate stuff because it believed in the growing importance of the subject for its readers and was trying to grow that constituency within its existing ranks as well as attract a younger readership. But the truth was that the project had been dreamt up by the marketing department to attract the “green pound”, and when it failed to do that within a few months or so of launch, Telegraph Earth’s already limited budget got slashed to, well, to nothing.
Editorial agenda versus marketing agenda… in many ways they are the same; they’re both kinds of economically motivated self-promotion. But the detail of the respective motivation differs substantially. As an editor I took a long-term view, allied to my belief that the public opinion was changing — and had to change; that we, at the Telegraph, should help drive that change; and that in doing that we would, ultimately, find ways to make it pay. The marketing department, however, took the short-term view. They were capitalising on a trend for “eco” they’d spotted within the Telegraph’s existing demographic. For them, Telegraph Earth was a way to grab some of the money swirling round it as it swirled, and then move on. Theirs was the approach that prevailed.
I don’t offer this as a particularly cynical comment on marketing departments in general or the Telegraph’s in particular, though it can certainly be read that way (and please do feel free to avail yourself of the undisputed pleasure of doing that). I offer it more as a reminder that we’ve seen waves of climate enthusiasm wash through society before and seen them morph into exercises in bad faith before the ink on the banners was dry.
If had just been Telegraph Earth, then maybe that would have been okay, just one of those things. But the episode turned out to be an early victory for anti-science and reactionary forces in the Telegraph in general. As the paper’s management, in thrall to wave after wave of opportunist consultants, lost its grip on what had started out as pretty successful digital strategy, and as the company has subsequently began to lose advertising market share to Facebook and Google, editorial budgets were slashed and slashed again. Many of the best journalists were made redundant or forced out, Highfield and Clover included, and in their place climate deniers such as James Delingpole were promoted.
The quality of reporting in the paper declined across the board, with the result of course that the readership declined still further, and to fill the void the owners and senior management began to align increasingly closely with the gathering forces of UKIP and Brexit, with Boris Johnson as their highly visible — and highly compensated — mouthpiece. I was the editor of the Telegraph Weekly by that point, but even from that relatively privileged position my budgets were so tight and my few staff so stretched that I found myself powerless to do anything about it other than avoid publishing Johnson and Delingpole and put environmental issues on my front page as often as I could. But it felt increasingly hopeless, and when the news came through that the Weekly was to be shut down altogether — in what I now might wonder could have been a political savvy attempt to help disenfranchise the paper’s expatriate audience ahead of the Brexit referendum, if the paper’s C-suite hadn’t repeatedly shown itself to lack any kind of strategic foresight — I myself took voluntary redundancy, and left.
Midland is my howl of anguish at those years of frustration, the years when we all knew perfectly well about the realities of climate change but failed as a society to take them with the seriousness they deserved. Hence my tale set in 2006, on the eve of the financial crisis, in which middle class personal issues play out against a backdrop of growing financial and environmental debt, the latter illustrated by a motif of dying whales and poisoned seabirds and despairing activists and the transformation of the natural world into a mechanised contraption peddled — inefficiently — by men.
“What’s the biggest breakthrough in climate science since 1979?” goes the joke, the punchline been that there hasn’t been one, that we’ve known pretty much what we know now for the last thirty years. The difference now, of course, is that we’re starting to actually experience it here in the coddled West. Now it’s our weather that’s becoming unstable and breaking all records, it’s our property and populations that hurricanes and floods and fires are destroying, and our insurers and central bankers that are starting to wring their hands in alarm. And now, finally, the climate deniers are becoming regarded as about as crazy as flat Earthers and are starting to being denied the privileged access to mainstream media they’ve enjoyed for far too long.
And so Extinction Rebellion feels different too, feels like it’s being taken more seriously than climate protests of the past, but I thought that about the Kyoto Earth Summit in 1997 and then we had George W. Bush and the second Gulf War, and I thought that about An Inconvenient Truth and Telegraph Earth, and then we had the Trump administration and the distraction from making any sensible decisions about anything at all that is Brexit.
On the other hand, we are now being helped by our technology: wind and solar power have come of age and are beginning to be deployed at scale; batteries are bring electricity from everything from cars to grids; the Internet continues to evolve as a political tool and while it has created filter bubbles that have promoted ignorance and denial, it is capable of bursting such bubbles too.
The social context is changing, now, as well. The feelings I had as a younger person about environmentally damaging events do not feel weird and fringe any more. They feel normal. No one laughs now if, for environmental reasons, you carry your own coffee cup or don’t fly or cycle everywhere or stop eating meat or put solar panels on your house. They used to laugh, but now they catch your eye and nod and try to bond by saying they haven’t done that but they’ve made some other change because we all need to do something because it’s getting serious now and they’re worried about the world we’re leaving our kids and it’s just too overwhelming now to continue to ignore.
So now’s the time for protest. Because when protestors express the prevailing opinion, then protest works, the forces get focused, and things start to change. Working through acceptable channels, as I’ve tried to do in my lame-ass way and as many other more focused and more savvy and more capable journalists, film-makers, lawyers and activists than me have done for decades, has not been enough. Sure, it has helped. But now we are out of time.
Despite carbon credit systems and international agreements and promises and good intentions of every kind, our governments have not followed through and our economies have failed to price environmental externalities into the price of the goods, services and energy sources that we all enjoy. We either change our habits now, or many if not all of us and a good proportion of the species we share the planet with — particularly the ones we’re most fond of — are going to die. “Business as usual” needs to have these costs put on its bottom line. If that doesn’t happen through legislation, it needs to happen through disruption, until it’s cheaper and more popular for governments to enforce carbon-reduction policies than not.
Needless to say, this disruption must be carried out non-violently, with good humour and a smile. Right now, one of the great virtues of Extinction Rebellion as a movement is that it has managed to internalise that. The comparisons with the campaigns of Gandhi and Mandela are apt, and need to continue to be apt, as the movement must continue with strict non-violence, whatever the provocation. And it will be severely provoked as things — quite literally — hot up. And they’ll hot up in more ways than one. As I was walking past the protest in Piccadilly last month (see picture at the head of this letter), some delivery guy whose day was being disrupted was berating the protestors for being idiots, saying — bizarrely — that he was going to through an apple at their f***ing heads. It might start with an apple, but there will be points, when things start to bite, when it will be something a lot more dangerous than that.
These protests must remain calm, they must remain cool, however hot things get. If we don’t manage that, we are lost.
Good luck!
Jim