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How a reactionary worldview infuses the environmentalism of the ‘Green King’
What is it with royals and gurus? Russia’s Nicholas II, of course, had his Grigori Rasputin; Catherine de’ Medici of France, her Nostradamus. Recently, Princess Märtha Louise of Norway announced she plans to step down from royal duties in order to marry “Shaman Durek,” formerly Gwyneth Paltrow’s guru. (Though the royal wedding is currently postponed due to Durek’s health, the happy couple still posed for the cover of — I can’t believe this is actually real — Gurus Magazine).
The reigning monarch of the United Kingdom and Commonwealth realms, King Charles III, is no different from his royal colleagues in this respect. Following the death of his mentor, Lord Mountbatten, in 1979, the young Prince of Wales gravitated toward Sir Laurens van der Post, an author, Jungian mystic, and “seer” who had “a particular following among right-wingers,” including Margaret Thatcher. Up until van der Post’s death in 1996, he was “reported to have more influence over Charles than any other person,” The Washington Post writes.
Revered as a “modern-day saint” during his lifetime, van der Post, like many a guru, was posthumously exposed as a fraud and a charlatan. Critics also rightly pointed out his penchant for espousing racialist primitivism, especially regarding the San people, the Indigenous community in southern Africa; it further came to light that van der Post had sexually abused a 14-year-old girl entrusted to his care in 1952, when he was nearly 50, resulting in the birth of a daughter he never publicly acknowledged. But by the time of these revelations in the early 2000s, the damage was already done: Charles had named van der Post as his firstborn son’s godfather; had sought van der Post’s counsel with Princess Diana during the dissolution of their marriage; and wholly absorbed van der Post’s traditionalist worldview — the same one, in fact, that admirers now mistake for Charles’ progressive stance on climate change.
In the lead-up to Coronation Day, many have speculated whether Charles will be as green a king as he was a prince or if assuming the throne will require of him a constitutionally mandated self-muzzling. Liberals have their fingers crossed that he’ll subtly continue campaigning for sustainable living, organic farming, and twice-a-week vegetarianism; conservatives, meanwhile, have hand-wrung about the king’s apparent “woke pandering,” as Petronella Wyatt bemoans in The Telegraph. “It is particularly disturbing that the Earl of Derby has not been asked to provide falcons [for the coronation], as his family have done since the 16th Century,” she went on. “These little things deprive people of their purpose in life.”
Wyatt can rest assured, though, that Charles is far more of a traditionalist than meets the eye. Sure, the king’s Aston Martin might have been modified to run on bioethanol fuel made from surplus wine and leftover whey from cheese-making, but his real creed, The Spectator cannily observes, is that “there is divine wisdom in all human traditions until modernity comes along and rips us away from any semblance of harmony with nature.”
In practice, this driving philosophy of Charles’ has often clashed with the greater climate agenda: He has resisted and blocked onshore wind energy on aesthetic grounds; he refuses to let his model village install energy-efficient windows, insisting they be made of traditional wood; and while he’s a conservationist most of the time, he once pressured the prime minister against enacting a ban on foxhunting, defending it as “completely natural … in that it relies entirely on man’s ancient and, indeed, romantic relationship with dogs and horses.”
The king also hates, hates, modern architecture, which once led him to suggest — in what, it must be acknowledged, was an absolute banger of a galaxy-brain moment — that you’ve sorta gotta hand it to the Luftwaffe. And while his work toward recognizing the colonialist violence of the empire against the First Nations people of Canada has been meaningful (though he’s stopped short of an actual apology), Charles’ interest can at times contain traces of the exotified difference his guru expressed toward the San as “children of nature” and “mystical ecologists”: Recently the king urged working with “indigenous knowledge-keepers” in Canada to “restore harmony with nature.”
Taken into consideration with his obsession with Britain’s “forgotten” farmers and his comments blaming population growth in Africa for overtaxing nature’s “bounty,” Charles begins to seem less like a progressive environmentalist than a traditionalist yearning for an imagined, idyllic, pastoral past.
But Charles did not arrive here all on his own. Van der Post was a primitivist who styled himself, misleadingly, as an experienced anthropologist — “a believer in the higher wisdom of tribal culture ... and in the need for civilized people to re-connect with this wisdom,” The Spectator writes. It was van der Post, further, who “fired Charles’ interest in multiculturalism and gave him a philosophical framework for his ideas, ranging from organic farming to the need for modern Britain to embrace religions other than Christianity,” The Washington Post says (at his coronation, Charles will be declared the defender of Faiths, rather than the Faith).
Charles’ interest in homeopathy and natural medicine, including what Gawker once described as a “decades-long failed quest to get the NHS to consider implementing Gerson therapy for cancer patients, a diet in which a sick person drinks 13 glasses of juice a day and takes regular self-administered coffee enemas,” can also be traced back to van der Post. Most significantly, it was also the guru who reportedly urged the young prince to use his platform to “restore the human being to a lost natural aspect of his own spirit; to restore his relevance for life and his love of nature, and to draw closer to the original blueprint and plan of life.”
Charles has been a good disciple. In 2010, he published Harmony: A New Way of Looking at Our World, a book that echos van der Post’s theory of oneness (itself a derivative of the Jungian concept of “collective unconscious”). Harmony continues to be heralded as an environmentalist manifesto with its calls for a “Sustainability Revolution,” although its chief target is the rise of modernism since the Enlightenment. This nostalgia for the pre-industrial past is a common reactionary response that can be traced through the global right; pesky modernism, of course, also brought about the political agency of the working class, greater living standards, and liberation movements. “[King Charles] is fond of saying that we have an obsession with economic growth, which he says is bad,” Charles Moore, the former editor of the Daily Telegraph and The Spectator, added to The American Conservative. “I would say another way of putting it is that you would like people to be poorer.”
Or, put another way: The “harmony” King Charles raves about is just another word for “order,” as Jonathan Healey, the author of “The Blazing World: A New History of Revolutionary England, 1603-1689,” proposed to The New Yorker’s Rebecca Mead. “It hinges on everyone knowing their place,” he elaborated. “The peasants don’t question who is in charge, and they are happy.”
It’s understandable why a king of a dwindling empire might have his focus on the halcyon days. This also makes him especially inclined toward existing right-wing schools of thought. When pouting over the Foreign Office denying his trip to the Kalahari with van der Post in the mid-1970s, for example, Charles reportedly recognized in a letter to a friend that Britain’s government was “still operating, and thinking, as if we were a major world power ... That is palpably not the case at the moment.” Here, though, he ends up sounding like a Little Englander, a member of a nationalist movement that has embraced Britain’s diminished imperial standing by pivoting to “sentimental ideas about preservation of the English rural establishment and English nature” (in addition to anti-immigrant stances, natch). Sure enough, a recent op-ed in Unherd applauded King Charles while making the case for a modern “Little England” movement.
Or how about Charles as an adherent of “reactionary radicalism,” what author Paul Kingsnorth defines as “a defense of a pre-industrial, human-scale system, built around community bonds, empowered people, local economics”? Others have certainly made the connection: “The affinity between Charles and [the writer Wendell Berry] is instructive,” The American Conservative writes, calling the pair “traditionalists, though not exactly conservatives … what my friend Bill Kauffman would call ‘reactionary radicals.’” What unites them is a criticism of “industrialism, consumer capitalism, and scientism,” and their belief that “family farms [...] are the only basis for a stable and happy society.”
Charles’ defenders might make the case that surely a green king is better than a king of a different color, however woo-woo the origins of his interest might be. But as Mead notes, the sum of his philosophy, while perhaps not quite “feudalism-curious,” ultimately “does appear to incorporate an implicit defense of his monarchical position.” Writer Sam Circle, in a review of Mead’s piece, reaches for a sharper characterization: “He’s Ecofascism-curious,” Circle writes. “There are some obvious things which go along with the return to an earlier, unsullied time that Charles wishes for, and you don’t have to look much further than his reaction to his son’s interracial marriage to see them reflected in Charles.”
Whatever progressivism does creep through Charles’ otherwise traditionalist brand of environmentalism is rickety and undermined by his nostalgia. It’s too simple, though, to dismiss him as just wanting the good ol’ days when being king really meant something. Charles’ crisis is an existential one: an irrelevant king clinging desperately to the ideas of the person who once gave him meaning. “The battle for our renewal can be most naturally led by what is still one of the few great living symbols accessible to us – the symbol of the crown,” van der Post had written long ago to Charles.
Rather than a champion of the planet, Great Britain is gaining a champion of a very specific vision of the U.K., one where mending your tartan tweed and supporting your local farmers is of equal importance to uniformly painted homes and an absence of visible satellite dishes. How attainable, much less desirable, a return to Britain’s pastoral roots actually is might be beside the point. The power of a monarch, much like the power of a guru, comes from convincing others to believe in him. Once formally anointed Sovereign by the coronation spoon on Saturday, it will then become Charles’ turn to whisper into the ear of the nation, to instill grandeur into his vision of how things could be.
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The nonprofit laid off 36 employees, or 28% of its headcount.
The Trump administration’s funding freeze has hit the leading electrification nonprofit Rewiring America, which announced Thursday that it will be cutting its workforce by 28%, or 36 employees. In a letter to the team, the organization’s cofounder and CEO Ari Matusiak placed the blame squarely on the Trump administration’s attempts to claw back billions in funding allocated through the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund.
“The volatility we face is not something we created: it is being directed at us,” Matusiak wrote in his public letter to employees. Along with a group of four other housing, climate, and community organizations, collectively known as Power Forward Communities, Rewiring America was the recipient of a $2 billion GGRF grant last April to help decarbonize American homes.
Now, the future of that funding is being held up in court. GGRF funds have been frozen since mid-February as Lee Zeldin’s Environmental Protection Agency has tried to rescind $20 billion of the program’s $27 billion total funding, an effort that a federal judge blocked in March. While that judge, Tanya S. Chutkan, called the EPA’s actions “arbitrary and capricious,” for now the money remains locked up in a Citibank account. This has wreaked havoc on organizations such as Rewiring America, which structured projects and staffing decisions around the grants.
“Since February, we have been unable to access our competitively and lawfully awarded grant dollars,” Matusiak wrote in a LinkedIn post on Thursday. “We have been the subject of baseless and defamatory attacks. We are facing purposeful volatility designed to prevent us from fulfilling our obligations and from delivering lower energy costs and cheaper electricity to millions of American households across the country.”
Matusiak wrote that while “Rewiring America is not going anywhere,” the organization is planning to address said volatility by tightening its focus on working with states to lower electricity costs, building a digital marketplace for households to access electric upgrades, and courting investment from third parties such as hyperscale cloud service providers, utilities, and manufacturers. Matusiak also said Rewiring America will be restructured “into a tighter formation,” such that it can continue to operate even if the GGRF funding never comes through.
Power Forward Communities is also continuing to fight for its money in court. Right there with it are the Climate United Fund and the Coalition for Green Capital, which were awarded nearly $7 billion and $5 billion, respectively, through the GGRF.
What specific teams within Rewiring America are being hit by these layoffs isn’t yet clear, though presumably everyone let go has already been notified. As the announcement went live Thursday afternoon, it stated that employees “will receive an email within the next few minutes informing you of whether your role has been impacted.”
“These are volatile and challenging times,” Matusiak wrote on LinkedIn. “It remains on all of us to create a better world we can all share. More so than ever.”
A battle ostensibly over endangered shrimp in Kentucky
A national park is fighting a large-scale solar farm over potential impacts to an endangered shrimp – what appears to be the first real instance of a federal entity fighting a solar project under the Trump administration.
At issue is Geenex Solar’s 100-megawatt Wood Duck solar project in Barren County, Kentucky, which would be sited in the watershed of Mammoth Cave National Park. In a letter sent to Kentucky power regulators in April, park superintendent Barclay Trimble claimed the National Park Service is opposing the project because Geenex did not sufficiently answer questions about “irreversible harm” it could potentially pose to an endangered shrimp that lives in “cave streams fed by surface water from this solar project.”
Trimble wrote these frustrations boiled after “multiple attempts to have a dialogue” with Geenex “over the past several months” about whether battery storage would exist at the site, what sorts of batteries would be used, and to what extent leak prevention would be considered in development of the Wood Duck project.
“The NPS is choosing to speak out in opposition of this project and requesting the board to consider environmental protection of these endangered species when debating the merits of this project,” stated the letter. “We look forward to working with the Board to ensure clean water in our national park for the safety of protection of endangered species.”
On first blush, this letter looks like normal government environmental stewardship. It’s true the cave shrimp’s population decline is likely the result of pollution into these streams, according to NPS data. And it was written by career officials at the National Park Service, not political personnel.
But there’s a few things that are odd about this situation and there’s reason to believe this may be the start of a shift in federal policy direction towards a more critical view of solar energy’s environmental impacts.
First off, Geenex has told local media that batteries are not part of the project and that “several voicemails have been exchanged” between the company and representatives of the national park, a sign that the company and the park have not directly spoken on this matter. That’s nothing like the sort of communication breakdown described in the letter. Then there’s a few things about this letter that ring strange, including the fact Fish and Wildlife Service – not the Park Service – ordinarily weighs in on endangered species impacts, and there’s a contradiction in referencing the Endangered Species Act at a time when the Trump administration is trying to significantly pare back application of the statute in the name of a faster permitting process. All of this reminds me of the Trump administration’s attempts to supposedly protect endangered whales by stopping offshore wind projects.
I don’t know whether this solar farm’s construction will indeed impact wildlife in the surrounding area. Perhaps it may. But the letter strikes me as fascinating regardless, given the myriad other ways federal agencies – including the Park Service – are standing down from stringent environmental protection enforcement under Trump 2.0.
Notably, I reviewed the other public comments filed against the project and they cite a litany of other reasons – but also state that because the county itself has no local zoning ordinance, there’s no way for local residents or municipalities opposed to the project to really stop it. Heatmap Pro predicts that local residents would be particularly sensitive to projects taking up farmland and — you guessed it — harming wildlife.
Barren County is in the process of developing a restrictive ordinance in the wake of this project, but it won’t apply to Wood Duck. So opponents’ best shot at stopping this project – which will otherwise be online as soon as next year – might be relying on the Park Service to intervene.
And more on the week’s most important conflicts around renewable energy.
1. Dukes County, Massachusetts – The Supreme Court for the second time declined to take up a legal challenge to the Vineyard Wind offshore project, indicating that anti-wind activists' efforts to go directly to the high court have run aground.
2. Brooklyn/Staten Island, New York – The battery backlash in the NYC boroughs is getting louder – and stranger – by the day.
3. Baltimore County, Maryland – It’s Ben Carson vs. the farmer near Baltimore, as a solar project proposed on the former Housing and Urban Development secretary’s land is coming under fire from his neighbors.
4. Mecklenburg County, Virginia – Landowners in this part of Virginia have reportedly received fake “good neighbor agreement” letters claiming to be from solar developer Longroad Energy, offering large sums of cash to people neighboring the potential project.
5. York County, South Carolina – Silfab Solar is now in a bitter public brawl with researchers at the University of South Carolina after they released a report claiming that a proposed solar manufacturing plant poses a significant public risk in the event of a chemical emissions release.
6. Jefferson Davis County, Mississippi – Apex Clean Energy’s Bluestone Solar project was just approved by the Mississippi Public Service Commission with no objections against the project.
7. Plaquemine Parish, Louisiana – NextEra’s Coastal Prairie solar project got an earful from locals in this parish that sits within the Baton Rouge metro area, indicating little has changed since the project was first proposed two years ago.
8. Huntington County, Indiana – Well it turns out Heatmap’s Most At-Risk Projects of the Energy Transition has been right again: the Paddlefish solar project has now been indefinitely blocked by this county under a new moratorium on the project area in tandem with a new restrictive land use ordinance on solar development overall.
9. Albany County, Wyoming – The Rail Tie wind farm is back in the news again, as county regulators say landowners feel misled by Repsol, the project’s developer.
10. Klickitat County, Washington – Cypress Creek Renewables is on a lucky streak with a solar project near Goldendale, Washington, getting to bypass local opposition from the nearby Yakama Nation.
11. Pinal County, Arizona – A large utility-scale NextEra solar farm has been rejected by this county’s Board of Supervisors.