BY DANIEL JUPP

I’m old enough to remember the British ecological activist Daniel Marc Hooper, better known as Swampy. Hooper came to national attention in the UK when he, along with many other passionate Green protesters, attempted to stop the building of the 9 mile long Newbury bypass intended to solve a bottleneck problem on the A34 in Berkshire. 10,000 trees needed to be chopped down to make way for the new bypass. Even reciting the plain facts of the case almost sounds like satire, like an event that by definition should NOT have acquired national news coverage. Just saying ‘bypass for the A34 in Berkshire’ can make the eyes glaze over with boredom. But this was not how Swampy and many others felt.

At the time, which was 1996, feelings ran incredibly high. Up to 8,000 protesters regularly and actively opposed the building of the new stretch of road, and hundreds of them felt deeply enough to camp out in the woods for weeks and even months at a time, blocking the work of those hired to remove the trees. 748 people were arrested over the course of the protest, the cost of the policing topped £5 million and the protest ended up adding tens of millions to the overall cost of completing the bypass. Up to 600 private security guards were hired in a long and fruitless attempt to speed the removal of the stubborn protesters. Not just one but 27 separate camps of tree houses and shelters developed, and Swampy, one of the younger and keener participants, became the face and voice of the protest.

It’s fair to say that broader public response was mixed. The Green activists of the day were widely characterised as ‘slightly loony’.

Some people admired their plucky and extended resistance. Others noted the effect that living in makeshift camps in the woods with no real facilities has on personal hygiene. Terms like ‘crusties’, ‘hippies’, and ‘eco-warriors’ registered a fair amount of scorn. But in the same time period multinational food tech giant Monsanto found that British resistance to GM crops was not a Green extreme, but a very widely held opinion. For all that the British people generally held a stereotype of green activists as dirty, smelly and possibly deranged, they also distrusted large companies looking to mess around with Nature and the food chain, and undoubtedly preferred road projects that didn’t disturb or remove ancient woodland.

Swampy was a character almost designed to embody these contradictory feelings. He was a physical cliché of Green activism. He was, indeed, dirty, and probably smelly too. He looked a lot like cartoon depictions of Stig of the Dump. He wore scratchy mud-stained jumpers that looked like they supported their own thriving eco-system, and he had an unruly mop of hair that looked like somebody had started to try dreadlocks but had given up halfway through. But he was also always smiling, seemed like a genuinely nice person, and approached activism not with the kind of dour holier than thou approach or Doomsday pessimism of so many of his fellows (both then and now) but in much the same way that a puppy approaches a man with a bouncy ball or a walk through a carpet of leaves.

Swampy was the opposite of Greta Thunberg. He wasn’t denouncing mankind, he was celebrating Nature (something his older self seems to have forgotten, since he now endorses the ‘humans are a plague on the Earth’ approach of Extinction Rebellion).

Protests like the ‘Battle of Newbury’ and decades of green activism from Swampy and others firmly established at least one thing about the Green movement – these people really, really did like trees. The New Age and Pagan revival spiritual movements were also heavily involved in the portmanteau of what ‘being Green’ meant. It meant ‘tree huggers’. It meant the sort of people who tried to ‘commune with Nature’ or who devoured articles on the way plants scream when cut and thrive when chatted with. There were Greens ‘marrying’ trees and claiming to be in love with a 300 year old oak long before there were words like ‘pansexual’ or even ‘trans’ in common parlance.

And parts of this always appealed far more broadly than the nuttier elements did. Whilst never factoring as a major political force in the UK or US, Greens even at their worst were viewed with amused disdain, rather than hate. At their best they were held in a fair degree of affection, as the gardening habits of (then) Prince Charles were, or as TV Nature show hosts like David Bellamy and David Attenborough were. Many people liked the countryside, and many lived in it. So long as Green meant respecting woods, trees, forests and fields, showing some respect to wildlife and Nature generally, there was always some sympathy there.

It was when Greens started talking about human life as somehow inimical to Nature that people got uneasy with it, when Green strayed into a sort of apocalyptic cult of miserable misanthropes, or when it meant inconveniencing the hell out of ordinary people, that ordinary people switched off, and still do.

What we have seen in the more than twenty years since Swampy came to prominence is a twofold change in the position of Green politics. From being a peripheral thing that was considered anti-establishment, the politics of outliers and outsiders, it has become one of the key assumptions, one of the key policy demands, of the powerful and the rich. From being the concern of jobless hippies, it has become the concern of multinational corporations. And going along with this change we have seen the tone change entirely too.

The affable, enthusiastic, sometimes dippy but generally benign Green of a Swampy has become the hectoring, authoritarian, hysterical Green of a Greta.

In other words, regarding tone, the Green of today has exposed a thread that ran beneath Green politics all along, but which wasn’t generally acknowledged. That is a thread of deep misanthropy, of hatred of mankind. Decades ago this was featuring in activist literature that described humanity as a cancer, but few would ever connect this with the people who opposed a road bypass, and certainly not with an innocent like Swampy.

Those who believe in net zero or climate change will perhaps see this shift in tone as an inevitable one based on the level of threat we face and the lack of urgency, as they see it, in response. These people will, like Greta, say that they want us to be afraid, because that’s the only way we will enact the changes that are needed. More sceptical observers will note that the hectoring and the hatred of mankind (and the willingness to piss off the general public or threaten their way of life) coincides with proposed Green policies opening up enormous opportunities for graft, corruption, and profit in State backed, funded and mandated ‘green’ technologies.

Which is where we come to the role of people like Bill Gates. Today, enormously powerful corporations want to profit. As it has ever been. But unlike the Monsanto of the 1990’s, who faced a giant backlash for trying to develop GM crops in the UK, and unlike the Green movement of the 1990’s who universally opposed the kind of scientific manipulation with Nature for profit that GM crops represent, today the most ardent Green advocates are aligned with the most exploitative, reckless and experimental corporations.

Green once meant ‘leave Nature alone’, especially when it comes to things like genetic modification. It once meant place Nature above commercial interest and selfish profit. But now it means support commercial interest and selfish profit, all those new companies with new technologies (support them regardless of whether or not they work and regardless of things like playing with Nature or causing pollution). There are countless ‘green’ technologies that in fact have obvious harmful effects on the immediate environment or nature generally. But these harms are completely ignored so long as some bizarre climate change justification can be supplied.

Back in 2011 ‘Green’ had been adopted by governments and big business together with the climate change narrative. But Green still meant, at that stage, loving trees. The United Nations declared 2011 ‘The International Year of the Forest’. ‘Sustainable development’ was already a buzz phrase, but net zero had not yet joined it. But the importance of trees to climate and environment was obvious to the point of being a sacred tenet. An article titled ‘Forests-Our Green Lungs’ explained this in a manner that everyone from Swampy on would see as pretty clear:

“Forests contribute significantly to oxygen generation and carbon storage. The temperature-regulation effect a forest has on its surrounding environment is a reason why city parks or green areas are especially popular on hot summer days. Forests and forest soils act as filters, oxygen producers and water storage areas.”

What this means, of course, is that trees aren’t just pleasant to look at and enjoyable to be around. They remove carbon from the atmosphere and they regulate and lower temperature. So trees are carbon capture machines, elegantly designed by Nature. They do exactly the things you want done, if you really do think the climate is in trouble and you want to try and balance that out. And not too long ago even the corporate Green advocates were acknowledging that. The Amazon is the ‘lungs of the world’, they told us. Cutting down too many trees is an ecological and environmental disaster. Remember Sting and the Amazonian tribesmen? But again it’s not just because of the extraordinary species diversity woodlands, forests and jungles provide. It’s because trees do everything net zero is supposed to do. Here’s another explanation of that from the same 2011 article:

“A tree produces its biomass, like all green plants, practically out of ‘nothing’:, i.e. carbon dioxide, water and solar energy. In India, the forests contain 2,800 million metric tonnes of carbon in living forest biomass….A 100 year old oak tree with 130,000 leaves, their biological cells, binds about 5,000 pounds of carbon dioxide to organic substances such as wood, leaves and bark each years and gives off up to 4.500 kilograms of oxygen, which is the annual requirement of eleven people. At the same time, the tree works as an air conditioner. The roots of that oak absorb about 40,000 litres of water from the soil every year, then ‘sweats out’ via the leaves again. The generated evaporative cooling ensures that the forest even on hot summer days remains pleasantly cool. In addition, it filters about one tonne of dust and pollutants from the air, thus acting like a giant vacuum cleaner.”

Binds carbon dioxide, produces oxygen, regulates temperature, filters and removes pollution. Wow, that’s great! So anyone who wants net zero should want more trees, and see reforestation as a good idea, right?

Well, apparently, no.

Because today being Green has become ‘let’s chop down all the trees that do the things we claim we want to stop climate change. Chop them all down and bury them.’

What?

Chop down the trees. Chop them all down and save the planet!

Today, this is the argument that people like Bill Gates are not only making, but making with supposedly Green intentions. Remember when 10,000 trees on a 9 mile stretch caused mass protests? Remember when trees were Nature’s solution to climate change, when trees were our friends, when loving trees was pretty much the definition of being Green? Forget all that.

Today, Bill Gates wants 70 MILLION ACRES of trees to be chopped down, mainly in Northern California. As a start. The Gates ecological-energy company Breakthrough Energy has pumped 6.6 (why not 6.66?) million dollars into a project led by Kodama Systems which intends to see 70 million acres of trees torn down and then buried. Scientists involved in the project, working for the companies or funded by Gates investment money claim that cutting down trees and burying them “can reduce global warming.”

So now, apparently, getting rid of the best carbon capture method there is, one provided by Nature itself with no negative environmental impacts and a whole host of associated benefits, is a good idea.

Saving Nature, by ripping it all up and burying it beneath the ground. What a strange place for Greens to be in, but this is what has happened when the ludicrous anti-logic of ‘net zero’ is invoked to justify anything that, via subsidies and State investment, turns a buck.

Whatever the justifications provided (and thus far there’s been zero explanation of how chopping down trees is a good thing) it’s a remarkable transformation in the Green agenda and in what ‘being Green’ means.

Back in 1996 when jobless Swampy was living in the trees to save them from the chop, none of us would have thought that nearly 30 years later being a Green eco-warrior would mean you’re one of the world’s richest men and you’re telling people that we need to rip up 70 million acres of natural forest.

Daniel Jupp is the author of A Gift for Treason: The Cultural Marxist Assault on Western Civilisation, which was published in 2019. He has had previous articles published by Spiked, The Spectator and Politicalite, and is a married father of two from Essex. Daniel’s SubStack is available here.