Opinion: Should green thinking be getting a red light?
By Colin McInnesWhen the climate took a turn for the worse during the so-called Younger Dryas period some 12,000 years ago, our ancestors didn’t don hair shirts and hope for the best. They innovated. A sharp return to ice age-like conditions helped precipitate the development of agriculture in the Levant, a hugely successful innovation that soon diffused to other settled regions.
So if contemporary climate change is to be taken as seriously as many Greens urge, our response should also be innovation-driven. Why then does much of our current Green thinking focus on environmentally and socially regressive ideas?
While the development of agriculture during the Neolithic revolution was to change the world for the better, the real awakening from millennia of Malthusian stagnation was the industrial revolution. Whether through the far-reaching ideas of the Scottish enlightenment or the innovations of James Watt, it was realised that the future could be radically different from the past.