What Channel 4 Got Wrong

Last night saw the head-bangingly inaccurate documentary "What The Green Movement Got Wrong" broadcast on Channel 4. I had said on Sunday that it's perhaps a conversation that the green movement needs to have, but quite frankly I was giving the programme too much credit - it was a one-sided travesty that didn't even attempt to portray anything but it's own agenda.

And that agenda was that environmentalists are unscientific, stuck-in-the-past hippies who do more harm than good because they blindly follow "causes" without looking at the facts surrounding them.

The evening was split into two parts, the film followed by a studio "debate". To be fair to Channel 4, the debate was a more even-handed event - in fact I would go so far as to say that the representatives from Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace, backed up by George Monbiot, fairly trounced the "new environmentalists" and knocked their arguments into the long grass.

The film started with a short history of the environmental movement in America (curiously absent was a history of the green movement in Britain). This was the context in which to paint all environmentalists as hippies who are stuck in the 60s, dreaming of a Utopia where they can live in the forest and partner-swap while dancing naked around the campfire.

If that's your thing, then fine, but unlike the stereotype the green movement has moved on.

After claiming that environmentalism had failed and that was the real reason behind climate change being so bad with no one doing anything about it, we were on to the subject of nuclear power. The real heartbreak of the night for me was seeing Mark Lynas, an author I admire, being caught up in this and perpetuating some myths. If you haven't read his book Six Degrees then I highly recommend it.

Here, Lynas was sent off to Pripyat, the town in the Ukraine next to Chernobyl to have a guided tour of the abandoned houses and schools. The film claimed that "only" 9,000 people were directly affected by Chernobyl, and therefore it wasn't that bad.

It then went on to claim that the environmental movement were responsible for every coal-fired power station that was built in America after the Three Mile Island Incident. I think it was the guy from Greenpeace who pointed out in the debate afterwards that it was more likely the financiers who wouldn't touch nuclear with a bargepole that were responsible for the cheap coal plants.

No mention was made of the fact that we're still dealing with the radioactive contamination from Chernobyl in the UK, with some farmer still unable to legally sell their sheep.

Nuclear energy was presented as an easy solution to climate change which was being stopped by luddites who have never researched the facts.

The second half of the film seemed to be sponsored by Monsanto. GM crops, we were told, were entirely safe for human consumption and we could easily feed the entire planet right now if only we would all get with the program and stop scaremongering.

Photo by art_es_anna

With a backdrop of Indian slums, the green movement was accused of deliberately keeping these people in poverty and only GM food could set them free. As Monbiot pointed out later, there is actually a food surplus in the word - it's just that the West uses a lot of it to feed their animals and make biofuels.

No mention was made either of how third world farmers would be forced to buy the GM seeds and the appropriate pesticides from the same company, and how once bought they would have to go on buying them because the plants are sterile, or how agribusiness locks them into contracts that they find difficult to get out of, or how there's a high incidence of suicide amongst Indian farmers who can't get off the GM merry-go-round and are losing their livelihoods because GM doesn't actually deliver more crops.

There was also an inaccurate account of how Zambia, in the midst of a famine, sent GM food aid back to America. The fact that this was basically big business trying to use a disaster as a business opportunity seemed to pass the filmmakers by.

The final, almost throwaway segment at the end of the film dealt with geoengineering, those mythical promises that science will eventually come up with a solution to save the planet without us having to get off our backsides and actually reduce the pollution we pump into the atmosphere. If only we could blanket the atmosphere with a layer of volcanic ash, everything would be alright with the world and we wouldn't have to worry about anything!

All in all, a fairly unsatisfying documentary although a more-rounded debate afterwards. Unlike some, I'm not against showing in public that there are conflicting opinions in the green 'movement', and I'd rather see green issues debated on TV than be ignored completely. But this is the third time Channel 4 has painted environmentalists as unscientific idiots without giving much recourse to reply. Now if only they would commission a pro-green documentary, in the interests of balance.