This is an interesting claim but it is not self-evidently true.
And so (bearing in mind that I have no sympathy with this style of protest) it is worth looking at in a bit more depth.
Morgan Trowland, of the protestors at Dartford Bridge has been quite explicit about his motivations:
'Your children are facing annihilation within a decade or two, who knows exactly when? People in other parts of the world are facing it now.
'Inexorably, extreme weather and ecological collapse will alternately scorch, flood and plague our crops leading to food shortages, leading to mob violence, murder and rape as your desperate neighbours turn ugly.
'We are outta time for incremental changes and we need to organise an emergency response an order of magnitude greater than for COVID. for that we need to take over the state as it's the only institution through which this could happen. The mechanism proposed for that is a citizens assembly to set legally binding strategy.
'That may sound impossible but it's equally impossible to sit back and watch the annihilation lap at our door steps.'
According to the Daily Mail a selfie, in a video taken on top of the structure, Trowland said: 'I'm not willing to sit back and watch everything I love burn for the rest of my life'.
The emotional protester railed against 'the current fraudulent, charlatan excuse for a Government', saying it was 'accelerating that process granting more licences for oil and gas'.
'It's an absolute act of treason, it's selling ourselves and our children into an uninhabitable earth and I believe it's my duty to do anything in my power to stop it,' he added.
Now let's compare this to what other respected commentators, like the late James Lovelock (the formulator of the Gaia hypothesis) have been saying. This is from a 2008 interview:
'Lovelock believes global warming is now irreversible, and that nothing can prevent large parts of the planet becoming too hot to inhabit, or sinking underwater, resulting in mass migration, famine and epidemics. Britain is going to become a lifeboat for refugees from mainland Europe, so instead of wasting our time on wind turbines we need to start planning how to survive.'
More recently, an ex-marine turned philosopher called Roy Scranton has been carving out a niche for himself in the field of environmental ethics. He is no eco-warrior but his prognosis is pessimistic. This is from his,
We're Doomed. Now What?:
'We all see what's happening, we read it in the headlines every day but seeing isn't believing, and believing isn't accepting. We respond according to our prejudices, acting out of instinct, reflex and training. Right-wing denialists insist that climate change isn't happening, or that it's not caused by humans, or that the real problem is terrorism or refugees, while left-wing denialists insist that the problems are fixable, under our control, merely a matter of political will. Accelerationists argue that more technology is the answer. Incrementalists tell us to keep trusting the same institutions and leaders that have been failing us for decades. Activists say we have to fight, even if we're sure to lose.
Meanwhile, as the gap between the future we're entering and the future we once imagined grows ever wider, nihilism takes root in the shadow of our fear: if all is already lost, nothing matters anyway.
You can feel this nihilism in TV shows like The Walking Dead and Game of Thrones, and you can see it in the pull to nationalism, sectarianism, war and racial hatred. We saw it in the election of Donald Trump. Nihilism defines our current moment, though in truth it's nothing new. The Western world has been grappling with radical nihilism since at least the seventeenth century, when scientific insights into human behaviour began to undermine religious belief. Philosophers have struggled since then to fill the gap between fact and meaning. Kant tried to reconcile empiricist determinism with God and Reason; Bergson and Peirce worked to merge Darwinian evolution and human creativity; more recent thinkers glean the stripped furrows neuroscience has left to logic and language.
Scientific materialism taken to its extreme, threatens us with meaningless; if consciousness is reducible to the brain and our actions are determined not by will but by causes. then our values and beliefs are merely rationalizations for the things we were going to do anyway...'
If I am reading Scranton correctly, we are all in denial about our impending fate. So maybe it is we who are the mentally ill ones. Perhaps, as capitalists (and I would admit to being one), the insistence that this system can exist in perpetuity without eventually consuming the planet is a collective delusion on our part.
Interestingly, Erich Fromm argued that whole societies can become collectively insane.
On the other hand, a psychologist who makes use of CBT in their therapeutic practice might see all this as catastrophising, Here's a description of this type of distorted thinking (half-time on the match day threads when things aren't going well is a classic example):
'Catastrophising means that when we are experiencing something we don't like, we can develop a tendency to exaggerate the badness of the situation into something far worse than it really is. Have you ever caught yourself describing a situation as 'terrible', 'awful', 'disastrous', 'end of the world'? If so, there you have a type of catastrophising in action. As emotional beings, we all tend to throw words around like this. It becomes a real problem, though, when you come up against difficulties in life.
Such an unhelpful thinking style is closely linked to anxiety, depression and other unhealthy negative emotions as these types of thoughts feed the badness of a situation which might already be causing you problems. And watch out - we can use this style of thinking to describe current, past or future events, fuelling any emotional storm we may be experiencing.''
The DM article described Trowland as both 'emotional' and 'tearful'. So there may possibly be an element of catastrophisation at work there.
Contrastingly, Lovelock is more optimistic. Here he is again in 2020:
'Do you believe humanity can invent something to stabilise the climate?
Well, we better had or we are doomed, but we are doing the opposite by burning fossil fuels. I always advocated nuclear as a good and cheap and sensible way of getting energy especially now that thorium is available as a fuel. But too many people hate it. I like Edward Teller’s suggestion of a sunshade in a heliocentric orbit that would diffuse a few percent of sunlight from the Earth. You would hardly notice it was there. If it could be done, and I think a big Nasa programme could almost certainly do it, it could save our bacon. It seems a more outrageous and difficult proposition than other geoengineering projects like putting sulphur into the stratosphere, but I prefer it. You could make it so that if anything went wrong it would automatically collapse. But overall, I don’t think we should start messing about with the Gaia system until we know a hell of a lot more about it. It is beginning to look as if renewable energy – wind and solar – if properly used, may be the answer to the energy problems of humanity.'
But anyway, mentally ill or not, I'm with this guy for now:
www.independent.co.uk
