At a drinks reception I got talking to a man of around sixty who had had one too many and had something to say. He had trained as a physicist but had never worked as one. What he actually did for a living remained unclear to me. I nodded empathetically and mentioned that I hadn’t studied physics but did write about nature.
That struck a nerve. The man raised his voice and jabbed his index finger. He ‘twavelled all over the Netherlands’, he said, ‘and evewywhere the countryside looked gween.’ Did I spend a lot of time in nature? It was looking rather lovely and green, wasn’t it? Surely I didn’t believe in the nitrogen lie? Nitrogen was actually good for plants and therefore good for nature.
Good grief, not this again. It did give me a chance to work out what drives people to dismiss the common good – in this case a liveable world – as nonsense, and to applaud polluting and destructive behaviour.
The idea that nitrogen acidifies the living environment of plants and, with it, that of animals, fundamentally altering it as a handful of rampant species crowd out the rest, is an oversimplification – but it already seemed too nuanced for a tipsy physicist. So I said: nothing wrong with nitrogen, we can’t do without it, until we have too much of it. Just like water. You can’t do without it, but if you have too much of it… ask Noah.
He drew himself up and was now speaking so loudly that people looked round. No, the idea that nitrogen was a problem had been invented by the nature lobby. They wanted to use it to recruit members and gain power. Recruit members with nitrogen? I had to grin. No, come on, I countered, you recruit members with baby seals, not with nitrogen. Nitrogen drives them away. He was no longer listening, muttered something angrily about Gutmenschen and ordered yet another glass too many.
Lately I have been seeing more highly educated people laying into nature and environmental campaigners
Lately I have been seeing more highly educated people laying into nature and environmental campaigners, as though they were criminals robbing honest, upstanding polluters of their livelihoods. Climate change, PFAS, nitrogen – all fabrications of…
The nature lobby. If nature conservation organisations together have a million members, generating twenty-five million a year from which everything must be paid, that is the same amount of money that the pesticide industry spends on influencing European agricultural policy. Add to that the billions in subsidies to intensive agriculture, the lobbying by the chemical and heavy industries, by the construction sector (including road building) and fisheries, and anyone can see that the nature lobby amounts to nothing. On top of that, nature organisations advocate for nature, whilst the lobbies that destroy nature and the environment advocate for their own wallets.
The man with one too many was meanwhile holding forth and gesticulating furiously at someone. Why was he so angry? I watched him and suspected he was frustrated because he had never managed to find work as a physicist. Why else would he have mentioned, forty years on, that he had studied physics within moments of meeting me?
No argument can prevail against the rancour of an unrecognised genius.
Koos Dijksterhuis writes daily nature observations in Trouw, and writes books and formal verse in rhyme.