If you were the chief executive of an oil company hoping to defend your business against environmental campaigners, there are several ways you might go about it. The most direct approach, as adopted by ExxonMobil, would be to fund groups that claim climate change isn’t happening and urge the White House to remove the head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

But you wouldn’t do this if you had any sense: Exxon’s tactics, while successful in the short term, have backfired spectacularly, confirming many people’s impressions that the oil industry is a threat to life on Earth. If you were smart, you would follow BP and Shell’s tactics. Rather than denying that climate change is happening, they have repositioned themselves as friends of the environment. Their new advertisements (including ones in this magazine) seek to persuade us that they have left the bad old days behind.

They do this by emphasising their investments in low-carbon energy: wind, solar and hydrogen. BP is now promoting carbon offset schemes, assuring its customers that “it is now possible to drive in neutral”. Other companies have followed suit. Total promotes its investments in wind power and biofuels, while Chevron claims that by exploiting Canada’s tar sands it is saving the world from another problem: the threat that global oil production will soon peak.

Have they left the bad old days behind? Quite the opposite. By repositioning themselves in this way as environmentally responsible, I believe these companies have become far more dangerous than ExxonMobil. They have created the impression that a large and growing oil industry is compatible with preventing runaway climate change. BP in particular now looks more like an environmental pressure group than an oil company.

The whole tenor of these companies’ adverts, like BP’s slogan “Beyond petroleum”, is misleading. It overlooks the fact that an oil company’s share price depends on the current and future value of its assets, and to sustain this value it will aim to replace whatever oil it produces with new discoveries and production. While Shell is struggling to keep up, BP has so far managed to meet this target. In other words, it will continue in the future to pump as much oil as it does today, regardless of what it spends on alternative technologies.

“Oil firms aim to pump as much oil in future as today, however much they spend on alternative technologies”

Indeed, BP’s carbon offset campaign is designed to allow sales of oil products to increase, persuading customers that they can buy them with a clear conscience. But growing oil sales are impossible to reconcile with action on climate change, however many biodigesters and low-energy light bulbs are installed to mop up their effects. The adverts, in other words, all appear to be examples of greenwash: companies attempting to distract attention from the environmental impacts of their activities.

It is not just oil companies that are guilty of this. Car manufacturers have started to join in. Volkswagen has recently been promoting its Golf GT with the slogan “High performance. Low emissions”. Yet read the small print and you’ll find that the GT produces 175 grams of carbon dioxide per kilometre, compared with the national average for new cars in the UK of 170 grams.

Similarly, Toyota’s new adverts are headlined “aim: zero emissions” and claim that the company is seeking to preserve “the delicate balance between man and nature”. This is news to anyone who has bought one of its planet-eating 4×4s. Even its famously efficient hybrid, the Prius, is less impressive than the ads suggest. On the highway it manages, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency, 51 miles per gallon. In 1983, the standard Peugeot 205 made 72.

I have been unable to find any major company whose green claims stand up to scrutiny. The big firm with the best environmental reputation in the UK is the home improvement retailer B&Q. It has recently been promoting solar panels and micro wind turbines, and maintains that “environmental and ethical responsibility
 is an integral part of the way we think about ourselves and our business”. This is hard to reconcile with its promotions this summer. It knocked 15 per cent off the price of patio heaters and 20 per cent off air-conditioning units, helping customers to save money while frying the planet. It sells a huge range of light bulbs, but few are energy-efficient.

There’s nothing wrong with companies advertising their green credentials. If these are exaggerated, however, busy consumers have no means of distinguishing between good firms and bad ones, and are easily led into doing things they believe are helping the environment but in fact are damaging it. The examples I have given suggest that we need stiffer rules about the green claims made in advertisements, as well as mandatory “sustainability” standards. Until then, I would advise you not to believe anything a company tells you about its environmental performance.

In both Britain and the US we accept the exclusive ownership of land as if this were the natural order of things. Yet from time immemorial until the end of the 18th century, all land apart from a few pockets in both countries was open to anyone who wished to cross it. The right to roam, like the air, the water and the weather, was considered a gift from God which no man could usurp.

These gifts began to be monopolised in Britain at about the same time as the Parliamentary Enclosures accelerated the dispossession of commoners from their lands. Until the 18th century, the people of Britain could walk almost anywhere. Although the land was privately owned, over much of it – the commons and the wastes of the manor – rural people maintained rights to farm, graze their animals, catch fish and collect firewood, bracken, gravel or turf. The proponents of enclosure claimed that it promoted social justice as well as agricultural efficiency, but in truth it destituted hundreds of thousands of rural people.

It was then, Theodore Steinberg points out, that property began to be understood less as the right to use something – which could well be shared – and more as the thing itself, whose ownership tended to be exclusive. The cost of absolute ownership soon began to be paid not only by the dispossessed but also by the environment. Steinberg is a legal historian who treads the fascinating borderlands of law and philosophy. Slide Mountain or The Folly of Owning Nature is the chronicle of how property law has confused and impoverished our relationship with the natural world.

As property became first a thing of importance in itself, and then an abstraction of powers, privileges and immunities, so the likelihood of developing more equitable and sustainable means to harness nature diminished. Social relations were left out when the modern laws of property were drafted. The control afforded to landowners is one of the reasons why environmental regulations have been so successfully resisted when drafted, and have proved so ineffective when applied.

Property law’s absurdities flourish in proportion to its range. As the law parcels up ever remoter and more metaphysical components of the natural world, Steinberg suggests, it becomes more contradictory, divisive and destructive. Control over nature leads to control over human beings. When the law extends to clouds, to water in underground rocks and to airspace, our attempts to free ourselves from natural constraints become the means by which we are enslaved to each other.

The problem with Slide Mountain is that Steinberg’s arguments are put forward clearly and concisely in the introduction and thereafter are scarcely advanced by the anecdotes that fill the rest of the book. Even so, the implausible but well-attested stories he has chosen are undeniably intriguing.

For example, in 1965 a group of farmers in Pennsylvannia went to court to complain that someone was stealing their weather. Fruit growers in the Blue Ridge Mountains of neighbouring Virginia had hired a rainmaker to avert destructive hailstorms by seeding threatening clouds. The farmers downwind of the fruit growers complained that promising thunderclouds coming their way dispersed when the rainmaker’s plane flew through them. This, they claimed, was the reason for the disastrous drought they were suffering.

In court the farmers were repeatedly cross-examined about whether they would approve of rainmaking if it worked for them, rather than against them, and they insisted that they would not. Rain, they maintained, was a social leveller, falling on the rich and poor alike. For one group of people to take possession of it, to buy and sell the clouds, was an abomination.

The verdict was equivocal. Every land-owner, the judge ruled, had property rights over clouds and the water they contained passing over their land; and, while men should not play God, if the government decided that cloud seeding was in the public’s interest, it should proceed.

In the Bayou country of Louisiana, the ownership of the rich oil-producing lands on either side of the Atchafalaya waterway hinged upon whether sections of it were in legal terms, streams or lakes. If they were streams, then the silty lands emerging as they dried up belonged to the surrounding landowners. If they were lakes, the new land belonged to the government, as it had once constituted the bottom of a navigable water. The dispute was important, because a ruling in favour of private ownership would mean not only that the state was deprived of oil revenues, but also that the marshy wilderness left by the receding water could not be conserved by the authorities. During ten years of appallingly costly litigation, Six Mile Lake was transformed first into a “stream” and then after two failed appeals and a hearing in the state’s Supreme Court back into a “lake”.

But perhaps the best of Steinberg’s stories concerns the sale by the Interplanetary Development Corporation of 4000 plots of prime bottomland for a dollar an acre. It seemed like a good deal, except that the location was a little inaccessible: Copernicus Crater on the northeastern quadrant of the moon. The corporation promised purchasers rights not only to the land and minerals but also to fishing and clam digging in the Sea of Nectar.

One report suggested that 90 per cent of the buyers knew the sale was a joke, which leads to the depressing conclusion that 400 people believed they had exclusive title to a patch of lunar real estate. But perhaps we should not be over-hasty in mocking them. Five hundred years ago, the notion that a harmless rambler could be marched off an empty field in southern England would have been equally inconceivable.

The struggle could scarcely have been more painful for Richard Wilson, the unlikely hero of The River Stops Here. A wealthy Republican cattle rancher whose forebears were among the pioneers who broke the seal of the western wilderness, Wilson found himself opposing one of the world’s most sophisticated and powerful coalitions of vested interests: the Californian water lobby.

Wilson had moved with his model American family into Round Valley, a bowl of rich grasslands and forest in the midst of arid scrub, one of the natural wonders of the northern mountains. Surrounded by pastures studded with valley oaks, and crossed by wild rivers stocked with steelhead and salmon, Round Valley was for Wilson both a suitable site for his experiments with cattle-raising and a refuge from the crude bustle of Los Angeles.

The valley represented something quite different to the engineers of the State Water Project and the Army. The development of southern California was made possible by piped water, imported from the north not only to quench the unnatural thirst of Los Angeles, but also to satisfy the increasingly clamorous agro-industrial lobby.

Since the first piped water scheme in 1910, land speculators had used the perceived future needs of urban areas to urge the state to run gigantic aqueducts southwards. Having bought the desert land the pipes crossed for a song, the speculators then used the surplus water as it travelled southwards to raise the value of their land hundreds of times over. The process was attended by influence-peddling, corruption and murder. It generated the devastating growth and scandalous concentration of wealth that became the model for much of the resource economy in the US.

The flooding of Round Valley was the State Water Project’s most ambitious plan, taking the waters of the Eel River southwards. It was the start of the programme that would divert the remainder of the state’s wild rivers. The north of California, poor in dollars but rich in resources, had as little chance of resisting the south – which was rich in dollars but poor in resources – as a similarly bequeathed Peru had of resisting the rapacity of Spain.

Had Wilson been wholly aware of the odds against him when, in 1968, he first faced up to the water lobby, he might well have been tempted to do as his ancestors did and flee to the next frontier when the first became too hazardous. But his naivety buoyed him up. To him the project was simply wrong. It was an abdomination and, therefore, had to be opposed.

When Wilson first made his stand, he found himself isolated. To many of the people of the valley the flooding would be a blessing: they could sell their failing farms to the state and buy into lakeside condominiums. To the water engineers and the politicians united behind them, he was just a misguided backwoodsman of the sort they always encountered while promoting the greater good.

Slowly, as the dam boosters cranked up their great PR machine, Wilson started scraping together an extraordinary alliance of ranchers, Native Americans, lawyers, lobbyists, trade unionists and Republican politicians. As they confronted the duplicity, the dirty tricks, the bogus cost-benefit analyses and the sheer steamroller power of the water industry, they unwittingly became the Western world’s first broadbased, well-coordinated environinental lobby.

The reserved upper-class rancher from Round Valley got streetwise. The campaigning on both sides became fiercer and dirtier until the issue reached the desk of the most inscrutable of decision makers, Governor Ronald Reagan.

Books sell not because they are important but because they are entertaining. As a breed, environmentalists are among the world’s worst writers, and their bitter medicine will not reach the unconverted unless it is dissolved in something rather sweeter. Ted Simon shows how it can be done. His account of Wilson’s battle is gentle in its persuasion and modest in its aims. Yet his narrative skills and his insight into human motivation make The River Stops Here as gripping as any political thriller.

In Simon’s eyes there are no unalloyed heroes and no uncomplicated villains. The engineers are not devils but driven men, hardened against the ineffable by their own steely logic. The politicians are shown trapped in their ambitious machinations, forced to conspire against each other to secure their survival. Reading Simon’s account, I felt I understood Reagan for the first time, and even felt a twinge of sympathy for the old bamboozler.

Against astonishing odds, Wilson and his friends won the battle for Round Valley. Their victory brought the state’s existing water policy to an end: since 1970 no high dams have been seriously contemplated in northern California. The campaigners’ success helped to fashion the world’s budding environmental movement.

But in politics there are no endings, least of all wholly happy ones. Wilson’s victory was a victory less for democracy than for an enlightened elite: he could not have achieved his ends without recourse to the means used by his opponents. The administration which saved Round Valley generated one of the most environmentally destructive presidencies America has ever known.

Wilson went on to become director of the California Department of Forestry, where he found himself beleaguered both by lumbermen and by a new generation of radical environmentalists, for whom his pale and politicised attempts at forest conservation were inadequate.

Like every campaigner, Wilson discovered that his victories were bittersweet. When the world changes as a result of your efforts, nothing changes as much as yourself.

Ecotopia by Ernest Callenbach, Bantam, New York, pp 168, ÂŁ7.95
pbk

City-Death by Stephen Booth, Green Anarchist, Oxford, pp 206, ÂŁ5.45
pbk

Elephants’ Graveyard by Karin McQuillan, Macmillan, London, pp 272,
ÂŁ14.99

This Other Eden by Ben Elton, Pocketbooks, London, pp 474, ÂŁ5.99

Body of Glass by Marge Piercy, Penguin, pp 592, ÂŁ5.99

Campaign by Des Wilson, Sphere, pp 386, ÂŁ5.99 pbk

‘While Doc stood watch above them, his three comrades entertained themselves
cutting up the wiring, fuel lines, control link rods and hydraulic hoses
of the machine, a beautiful new 27-ton tandem-drummed yellow Hyster C-450A
. . .’

Fact or fiction? Well, both. In 1973 this was Edward Abbey’s fantasy,
as the team of ecosaboteurs portrayed in his novel The Monkey Wrench Gang
dismantled the mach-inery building roads and dams, installing power lines
and clearing forests. The real saboteurs of Earth First!, a group in the
US that believes in direct action to save the environment, use the same
tools, the same techniques, even the same words as Abbey’s avenging angels.
And their logo is a monkey wrench crossed with a stone axe.

Curiously, of the scores of novels that have followed The Monkey Wrench
Gang and chosen green action or environmental catastrophe as their theme,
few have been written by people who are not themselves committed environmentalists.
There are few situations that generously provide such a dramatic combination
of impending catastrophe, real heroes and villains as ecolo-gical disaster.
So it is a shame non-partisan writers have not yet weighed in, for most
of the dramas published so far are hampered by a documentary trying to get
out.

Throughout the genre, casting light on the human condition takes second
place to casting light on the condition of the planet. Ernest Callenbach’s
Ecotopia, published only two years after The Monkey Wrench Gang, is little
more than a handbook for sustainable living, loosely threaded together
by an uncertain plot. William Weston, a foreign correspondent for an American
newspaper, is the first journalist from the US to visit the state of Ecotopia:
the old lands of northern California, Oregon and Washington, which seceded
from the Union when their inhabitants decided they could no longer tolerate
the destruction of their land by industry and agribusiness.

Ecotopia has no pollution, no telephones, no sugar and no manners. It
is a sharing, caring, matrifocal society, where people give themselves Native
American names and expend their natural aggression in ritualised tribal
wars, where marijuana is not only legal but distributed by the government
and where no one works for more than 20 hours a week. It is, in short, a
wholly New Age state, though strangely without the perpetual arguments and
tiresome cycle of divorce and remarriage afflicting real cooperative communities.
Unremarkably, Weston falls in love first with one of the strong, self-knowing
women of Ecotopia, then with the place itself. It is a stirring vision,
but a deeply unsatisfying novel.

The wishful thinking that pervades both Callenbach’s work and, more
productively, Abbey’s, touches almost every econovel published so far, even
those that dwell on catastrophe. City-Death, Stephen Booth’s furious novel
published by Green Anarchist, is a fantasy of mortal justice for a negligent
and greedy world. A megacity run by megacorporations falls into decay because
‘Trade was the only thing of importance, and savage exploitation the most
efficient method of advancing in this.’ A failure to invest, to redistribute
wealth or to uphold any values that cannot be measured in currency sets
the unsustainable state reeling, and it is pushed into final collapse by
the rebellious hordes of the dispossessed.

In Booth’s imploding world, holocaust and regeneration are one and the
same. Here the apocalyptic banners proclaim ‘The Beginning of the World
is Nigh’, for the ecoanarchist fantasy of overthrow and destruction will
lead inexorably to a rebuilding of the world on ecosensitive lines. It
is a splendid rant but an ill-disciplined novel, and the echo of Voltaire
in the final line – ‘Right then . . . Let’s go and fix this footbridge’
– simply underlines its moral simplicity. While Candide, in tending his
garden, found accommodation with the least-worst state, the protagonist
in City-Death, like the hero of Ecotopia, finds an improbably stable nation
state founded on escape.

Part of the problem is the apparent assumption that, as the backdrop
is so striking, the characters need not be. In Karin McQuillan’s Elephants’
Graveyard, the combatants are little more than opposing forces of conservation
and destruction, who are likely to win your sympathy or hatred only because
of their kindness or cruelty to elephants. Jazz Jasper, an insipid ecofriendly
safari guide, finds the body of a murdered elephant conservationist, being
buried by his wrinkly friends. It takes her 250 pages to discover what we
must have guessed: that the yellow-toothed, lecherous ogre she suspects
turns out to be not only the murderer but also an ivory trader. I fear it
does not spoil much if I reveal that when the baddy tries to kill the goody,
he is brought to justice by an angry elephant.

A few writers have managed to break out of this trap, and to let the
situation take second place to the story. Ben Elton’s This Other Eden –
like Marge Piercy’s Body of Glass an enclosure nightmare, in which human
beings have to live inside ecodomes to escape the Earth’s now deadly atmosphere
– is funny enough to compensate for an occasional lack of consistency and
power. Here villains turn out to be heroes and heroes villains, yet Elton
cannot wholly resist allowing Mother Nature (if not ‘Mother Earth’, the
corrupt campaigning organisation he creates) the last laugh.

Campaign, by Des Wilson is rooted much nearer to reality – even writing
real people into the plot – and also manages to bring out some of the conflicts
within people as opposed to just the conflicts between them. At times, it
is quite as thrilling as some of the better Cold War spy novels. Yet neither
This Other Eden nor Campaign – and in fairness neither attempts to be –
could be described as a classic.

Perhaps the subject is still too young. Perhaps it must sink further
into our consciousness before it can be turned into a universal tale of
the calibre of 1984 or Riddley Walker. In the meantime, however, while it
has not produced good literature, it might, as The Monkey Wrench Gang has
done, at least get us out of armchairs and into the woods.

George Monbiot is a visiting fellow at Green College, Oxford. His book
No Man’s Land is published by MacMillan in June.

There were four charges that led to Richard Leakey’s offer of resignation
as director of the Kenya Wildlife Service, but only one of them stuck. His
critics accused him of arrogance, of irregular management decisions and
of racism. The last charge, that he angered local people, is the only one
that should be of real concern to Kenyan conservationists.

Behind the cynical attempts of some of Leakey’s critics to grab the
wildlife service for themselves are some genuine grievances. Throughout
Masailand and in several other regions of Kenya, people whose lands border
national parks and reserves complain that few of the promised benefits
from conservation and tourism have materialised.

They point out that, while people are punished swiftly and severely
for killing wild animals, when wild animals kill human beings a derisory
amount of compensation takes years to arrive. They fear that the regions
from which conservationists wish to exclude them will expand.

These issues, ruthlessly exploited as they have been by Kenyan politicians,
lie at the heart of protected area conservation. The publication of Indigenous
Peoples and Protected Areas is timely and important. Clear-sightedly, neither
condemning nor romanticising the people whose lives interact with the management
of protected land, it describes the conflicts modern conservationists must
address if parks and reserves are to have the faintest chances of survival.

Conservation used to be a simple business. A century ago, all that seemed
necessary for protecting an area valued for its wildlife or natural beauty
was to seal it off from all human beings except those who could pay to visit.
Thus, in 1872, the territory of the Crow, Blackfoot and Shoshone Indians
was annexed to create the Yellowstone National Park. The wilderness the
authorities claimed to be protecting was an artefact of this annexation.

With the exception of Antarctica, there is no such thing as wilderness:
everywhere on Earth is or has been inhabited or used by human beings. Yet
the Yellowstone precedent has been followed throughout this century. In
1951, for example, the Serengeti was taken, without adequate consultation
or compensation, from the Masai. In 1977 they lost their cattle grazing
lands in the Amboseli National Park.

More recently, the Pakistani government tried to exclude the Shimshali
people from the proposed Khunjerab National Park, promising them compensation
they knew they would never receive. The Shimshalis responded with the simple
proposal, ‘First they kill us, then they can come and make it a national
±èČč°ù°ì.’

Insensitivity to the needs of indigenous people is disastrous for wildlife.
In several parts of the world, angry local people have responded by killing
the animals or harbouring poachers. By excluding people from essential resources,
the creation of some parks has placed insupportable burdens on surrounding
habitats.

This book draws on 30 examples from around the world to show how, in
some places, local people have remained the best managers of the environment;
how, elsewhere, conflicts have emerged as a result of development pressures
or misconceived conservation plans; and how these conflicts might best be
resolved. In seeking means of accommodating both people and wildlife, it
puts together a new philosophy of protected area conservation.

Through sharing with them the benefits of conservation, recognising
their land rights and listening to their concerns, indigenous people can
be turned from a perceived conservation problem into a conservation solution.
Sensitive and intelligent conservation measures can become so popular that
people will request their lands be included within the conservation area.
Yet the book does not hesitate to describe the new problems introduced by
this approach.

Indigenous Peoples and Protected Areas is accessible, well-edited and
beautifully illustrated. No one with an interest in the survival of parks
and reserves can afford to ignore it.

George Monbiot is a visiting fellow of Green College, University of
Oxford. His latest book, No Man’s Land: An Investigative Journey through
Kenya and Tanzania, will be published in June.