An Interview With Mayer Hillman
Mayer Hillman, a radical social scientist, was nominated one of the most important environmentalists of all time by the Guardian newspaper. George Monbiot’s book, Turn Up The Heat, is dedicated to Hillman, whom he describes as ‘the mirror in which we all see our own hypocrisy’. In theory he has retired but he continues to work all waking hours on the biggest problem mankind has ever had to face: climate change. Interview by Peter Wiggins.
I sit in the upstairs study of Hillman’s Hampstead home. Above us - on his roof - lies a huge array of unwanted refuse that he has collected from skips over many years. “You have stolen it?” I ask. “I haven’t stolen it” he replies. “I have stopped it from being wasted, from ending up in some landfill site. It’s all stuff that people can find a use for.” His own rubbish doesn’t end up in landfill sites either. Through the window, I see smoke rising from his garden. A bonfire is burning. Occasionally he gazes outside to check its progress. At one point he nips out to re-kindle it.
Hillman is now devoted solely to the environmental cause. Yet during his thirty-six years at the Institute for Policy Studies he researched a wide range of issues. He is a tireless advocate of the bicycle. Concerning child welfare, he has studied the way in which roads restrict children’s freedom to walk to school or play. He has campaigned against the demolition of homes to make way for motorways. He has studied the social effects of railway closure. He has vied to protect small shops from the great power of supermarkets.
I ask him what the connection is. Where is the synergy?
He starts out talking about ‘waste’ which he describes as ‘fundamentally evil’. I am thinking about his roof until he turns to his campaign to put the clocks forward all year round. “I still can’t abide the waste of daylight hours” he declares. During the 1980s his proposal for this came very close to getting onto the statute books before being pulled at the last minute.
Next comes the notion of ‘equity’ which he says has always been his guiding principle and the foundation for his concern for the future. He describes himself as a ‘devout humanist’ and ‘militant atheist’, yet he has enormous respect for people of faith. “If I understand religious people correctly they think that God is watching their every action”. Hillman does not believe this is true, but he leads his life in this spirit. That is why he can’t give up on the issue of climate change, “far and away the most important issue humanity has ever faced”.
I note that his outlook has become more and more global. I suggest that this is by necessity not choice. I am right, he tells me. His latest book, How to Save the Planet, comes to bold conclusions about what must happen globally if millions of people aren’t to be displaced.
Hillman is an advocate of the ‘Contraction and Convergence’ principle. This is the brainchild of Aubrey Meyer of the Global Commons Institute. Carbon emissions must be reduced 90% by 2050. This will happen through a system of personal carbon allowances. Each of us will be allocated a carbon allowance. A kind of coupon system will keep track of how much we use. Over the course of time emissions will contract and eventually the emissions from poor countries and rich countries will converge.
It is not something you hear governments talk about. But there is a new interest in the environment from all the major parties. Recent reports commissioned by the government do talk about reducing carbon emissions. Does Hillman take solace from such reports? He doesn’t. Indeed, quite the opposite. He isn’t interested in the implications of the reports. The methodology is crucially flawed. The Stern Report concluded that climate change will cost 1% proportion of GDP. Hillman asks: “Does that 1% include the re-settlement of tens of hundreds of millions of ecological refugees. Where are they going to go?” he asks.
It is wrong, he says, to think of this enforced migration as happening at some arbitrary moment in the future. Climate change is already in progress. It has its victims already. Contrary to what one hears in the news, many of the refugees in Darfur are ecological not political.
According to Hillman, economic growth can’t be decoupled from carbon emissions sufficiently for it to continue as a legitimate aim. Stern and Eddington are worse than useless. They have nothing to say about our lifestyles. They are in denial of the problem, shielding the public from the extent of the changes that must be made now.
Does the use of renewable energies offer us anything in way of solution? He agrees that they may play a part in a sustainable future - a sufficiently sustainable future, he hastens to add - but they do nothing to lower the level of consumer demand or save the environment from further pollution. Indeed he foresees that by lowering the cost of our consumption you are in effect promoting it, encouraging us to consume more. In the first instance, the demand for carbon-producing activity must be lowered.
I wanted to find out if Hillman has a natural adversary. It occurs to me that it must be the market economists of this world with their rigid aims. He replies: “I have been joking about this stuff for forty years.” He points out that car crashes are good for the economy. “They create employment, inspire investment et cetera. But it’s just not a good way of talking about anything. It’s so obviously ridiculous.” At this point I suggest that he sees the economists’ aims are not only false but actually sinister. “I am sure they have the best of intentions” he responds.
I first encountered Hillman at a Green Alliance talk given by Patricia Hewitt, then Secretary of State for Trade and Industry. At the end of the talk, audience questions provided a forum for Hillman to attack the speaker furiously. She had highlighted the importance of the issue but Hillman revealed she was also complicit in a plan to build the new runway at Heathrow. I sensed a real antagonism.
When I ask about the new-fangled interest in the Conservative party, I am expecting a similar outburst. But I am quite wrong to do so. Hillman is no more cynical of politicians than of economists. “For the most part, politicians go into the business trying genuinely to make the world a better place … They are just misguided.” Even the Green Party, he tells, aren’t green enough. “But I am willing to keep an open mind about Cameron”.
I suggest that sometimes the most interesting things in politics don’t happen in Parliament or Westminster but outside. He agrees. “What we need to do is to get to the jugular of the political process.” Hillman believes that the inherent moral logic of what he is saying will eventually override the mass consumerism and greed in which we live. That’s why he always makes reference to rationing. He wants people to draw the parallel with World War II. When we were at war against fascism there was a consensus that the poor must sill be able to eat. Just about everyone saw rationing as a fair solution to a limited food supply. There is a parallel justification for rationing our carbon emissions. This is the only way to enable future generations to live on the planet.
What if the model of western liberal democracy is unable to incorporate the interests of future generations? I wonder if his mind veers in the direct of social revolution. “Yes it does. Sometimes I think that the idea of a benign dictator is the best we can hope for.”
I have now stayed longer than I said I would. I have a last question. I have just read James Lovelock’s prophecy that in one hundred years time the best part of the world will be uninhabitable. What does he think? “Yes I am afraid I agree. We are already beyond the point on no return.” “Oh dear” I reply. I don’t know what to say. He has read my mind. “I know. I know. You don’t know what to say, do you? You look out of the window and everything just appears to carry on as normal.”
