Douglas Adams was a science fiction comedy scriptwriter; chummy with several members of Monty Python’s Flying Circus; author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy; and developed radio and TV shows like Dr Who. He died in 2001 aged 49, while working out in a Californian gym. Carwardine is a zoologist and photographer. Last Chance to See was a Radio 4 series broadcast in 1990, with the book released as a tie-in. In it, the redoubtable duo tell of their trips to remote areas seeking out endangered species like the Komodo Dragon monitor lizard of Indonesia, the mountain gorillas of eastern Zaire and the Yangtze River dolphin in China, in an attempt to raise awareness and prevent their extinction.

Carwardine is a straight-laced green, and his written contribution to the book is a formulaic conclusion tacked on at the end: Adams wrote the main bulk of the text. His humour is dryly quizzical more than infectiously funny, his wry deflation of the green standpoint in a supposedly environmental book makes for refreshing reading. Writing nearly two decades ago, Adams’ Pythonesque surrealism chips away at the ecological principles we accept today as good coin.

The Self-Hating Green

Adams and Carwardine have many of the prejudices you would expect of two English middle-class men. As the twosome traipse around the globe by Land Rover, minibus, boat and plane with a baggage of cameras, computers, tape recorders, binoculars, tents, tinned food, beer and cigarettes, medical supplies and other paraphernalia, Adams is aware how closely they resemble the tourists they sniffily disdain.

Their snobbery isn’t dispelled when the crusading couple cut through impenetrable jungle only to bump into gaggles of tourists who have done it the easy way, by air-conditioned coach on a tarmac road or by chartered pleasure cruise. On one occasion Adams and Carwardine stumble over two dozen American tourists on Komodo Island ‘festooned with cameras, polyester leisure suits, gold-rimmed glasses and mid-Western accents’. Adams recalls:

We were severely put out by their arrival and felt that the last vestige of any sense of intrepidness we were still trying to hold on to was finally slipping away.’ (p38)

Since both groups were aiming to photograph the same exotic animals, the only difference between them was stylistic. At least later Adams was honest enough to admit being a bit of a tourist too. In the lair of the mountain gorillas in Zaire, for example, he describes himself being ‘festooned with the apparatus of my intelligence – my Gore-Tex cagoule, my pen and paper, my autofocus matrix-metering Nikon F4’ (p77). In China, in search of the elusive Yangtze River dolphin, he admits to ‘not letting on that I was merely a science fiction comedy novelist on holiday’ (p167).

Perhaps the real reason green types despise mass tourism is because nobody likes encountering their mirror image. Green activists hate encountering crowds of vulgar sightseers because anything reminiscent of home will always look gauche in the backwoods of the undeveloped world. Maybe Adams and Carwardine sensed they were only a cool version of naff holiday-makers. Both are basically doing the same thing: enjoying a break from the rat race out in the boondocks.

Tourism and Global Warming

In reality, green activists and their vacationing adversaries share a more intimate bond than their respective dress sense. The greens need tourists if they want to achieve their environmental goals and Adams is relatively candid about this tourism dilemma for greens. He hated how global tourism had turned beautiful Bali into a monolithic theme park (p21), but he was also aware it could have been worse. Adams belonged to that green tendency which reluctantly welcomes eco-tourism as an alternative preservation strategy. In his view, rare species can only be saved from the threat of development and its pollution by raising public awareness. This public interest needs to be sustained by public access, and that means encouraging green travel. Local support for a budding eco-tourism industry is engendered by providing jobs for guides and auxiliary service trades. The plus side of tourism for greens is that land earmarked for eco-tourism cannot be modernised, so the dragons and gorillas and dolphins can be saved from extinction.

As the book’s voice of green orthodoxy, Carwardine claims species extinctions are accelerating because of development. He thinks most extinctions since prehistoric times have occurred in the last 300 years, most extinctions in the last 300 years have occurred in the last 50, and most extinctions in the last 50 years have occurred in the last ten:

‘We are now heaving more than a thousand different species of animals and plants off the planet every year.’(p205)

It is still unknown how many species exist today, never mind how many were around centuries ago, so Carwardine must be clever to suggest extinctions are accelerating now. Though he is less clever when it comes to allocating blame for the extinctions. Note the awkward ‘we’ Carwardine is obliged to use. Does he mean ‘humanity’ or ‘Westerners’ or ‘industrialists and consumers’ or ‘the green movement’ or even ‘Adams and Carwardine’? This ambiguity will come back to bite him in the bum. Nowadays the creed of climate change allows European greens to seem the most morally pure by targeting American and oriental industries for producing greenhouse gases, which are then blamed for every environmental crime including extinction (cue pic of cute polar bear cub stranded on a melting ice floe).

At the time Carwardine was writing, global warming was not yet fashionable: instead greens liked to lambast their fellow humans for driving other species to extinction. Then as now, abusing humanity is considered a duty by greens. Last Chance to See is bursting with this bigotry. Adams and Carwardine abhor polluting developers and sanctimonious missionaries, smug Germans and Latvians, and uppity African bureaucrats. Yet while Carwardine limits his bile to other people, Adams follows green anti-humanism to its logical conclusion and on a number of occasions pours scorn on himself. For example, he interrogates himself at length about why he didn’t physically intervene to prevent the indigenous locals from feeding a live goat to a Komodo dragon so Western visitors could get their snaps. His conclusion is melodramatic: ‘We were a bunch of lily-livered rationalising turds’ (p46). Again, when he met the ‘wise and knowing’ gorillas of eastern Zaire, Adams decided that primate intelligence stood at a far higher level than his ever could:

‘I began to feel how patronising it was of us to presume to judge their intelligence, as if ours was any kind of standard by which to measure.’(p76)

There is just one small problem for greens who think detesting humanity is laudable: they are members of the human race too. This means that, at some level, they must despise themselves. The result of this negative strand in ecological thinking is the annihilation of green ideology or its mutation into novel forms. In the early nineties Adams was creatively striding in the latter direction. In Last Chance to See he champions green principles, but only to set about undermining them almost immediately. Where was Adams headed?

Neo-Greens are Scared of Nature

Adams wasn’t an ordinary green; the oft-caricatured bearded and sandal-wearing romantic who reviles modern technology and loves harmonious Nature. Adams was a neo-green. He loved science and technology and all its weird and wonderful gadgets. His Wikipedia entry claims he was the second person in Britain to buy an Apple Mac when they first came out in 1984. He was an ‘Apple Master’, a celebrity employed by the company to be a spokesman for their products. He was one of the earliest users of emails. Further, in respect to the environment, Adams was open to suggestions that genetic manipulation could bring extinct species back to life. To a conventional green, such high-tech solutions are anathema. In 1990, however, the idea was popularised by the release of Michael Crichton’s blockbusting novel and film Jurassic Park which envisaged the genetic revival of the dinosaurs. If a species which died out 65 million years ago can be reconstructed by science, why worry about the present-day fate of the Komodo dragon and mountain gorilla?

As a techno fan, Adams’ criticism of his travel experiences aren’t what we’ve come to expect from greens. He never worried about his carbon footprint for instance. His irritation focused on obstructive officialdom and dilapidated machinery which was always slowing him down. Adams didn’t believe in chilling, or taking life easy, but wanted to move around the globe saving endangered species at an ever faster pace. His intellectual development was also influenced by his youthful association with the surrealists of Monty Python, who had imbibed the European legacy of nihilistic Bohemianism. This artistic source encouraged him to regard the most cherished convictions with a detached cynicism, including the sacred cows of environmentalism. These strange influences produced a mutant species, a hybrid neo-green Douglas Adams.

Neo-environmentalism is not at all romantic. It doesn’t love nature; it fears it. Contemporary greens generate a constant stream of irrational panics about nature. Neo-greens like Adams are guilt-ridden. They worry our relatively easy and peaceful lives are unwarranted. To them, our affluence is not the result of our hard work but of the drudgery endured by our parents’ generation, of the exploitation of third world people, of super-efficient technologies which work automatically without any apparent input by us. In the West, we consume and waste more than ever without producing anything tangible in the first place.

Western unease at this stark contrast was formerly obscured by the campaigns against fascism and communism during the twentieth century. Now those battles are over, the underlying Western disorientation with its rationale is resurfacing. It is reflected in the popular reckoning that our consumer lifestyles abuse nature’s laws. Our reliance on modern gadgetry somehow provokes meteorological wrath, extreme weather being punishment for our sinful decadence. Our lives may be getting better than ever, but we still feel the end is nigh. Apocalyptic visions of global catastrophe may frighten us but, in the absence of any alternative clarification, help make sense of our inexplicable opulence. The extinction of rare species has come to form a harbinger of our own demise. In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Adams achieves his comic effect by treating humanity as an endangered species compared to more advanced cosmic civilisations. The series commences with the total destruction of Earth by aliens intent on making a space highway. 

The ‘deep connection’ between humans and human-looking animals

Neo-greens like Adams are green only in a limited sense. They are nature pacifiers rather than nature lovers. They want to placate nature’s fury. Neo-greens like Adams can relate to ordinary greens because, for all his sophisticated nihilism, Adams was firmly convinced the modern world must stay in mystical harmony with nature. His technophilia didn’t contradict traditional green technophobia either. Both are equally anti-human, albeit in different ways. Traditional greens regard machinery as the high tide mark of human filth. Techie-nerds like Adams, on the other hand, tend to shrug off the human origins of tools, and use their revered appliances to keep a distance between themselves and society. They despise other people for not sharing their enthusiasm for bizarre contraptions and obscure software programmes. But Adams’ wasn’t like that: he poured his frustrations into saving rare breeds instead.

But not every creature has a place in Adams’ ark, so which critters does he save?  Surprisingly, being ‘endangered’ is not enough: he didn’t empathise with lizards and Komodo Dragons gave him a feeling of ‘cold horror’. Yet, on reflection, Adams reckoned he had unfairly imposed a human morality on them and felt he should refrain from anthropomorphising reptiles in this way (p32/3). Though tellingly, he didn’t find this self-restraint so easy when he met the awesome silverback mountain gorillas of eastern Zaire. Sitting amongst a group, he exclaims ‘It’s so bloody hard not to anthropomorphise. But these impressions keep on crowding in on you because they spark so much instant recognition, however illusory that recognition may be’ (p76). This confession is a prelude to his rapturous celebration of the communality between humanity and the great apes:

‘Somewhere in the genetic history that we each carry with us in every cell of our body was a deep connection with this creature, as inaccessible to us now as last year’s dreams, but, like last year’s dreams, always invisibly and unfathomably present.’(p76)

There could be no such ‘deep connection’ with lizards: they look utterly inhuman, and that’s why nonchalance towards their killing was excused by Adams. Perhaps his discrimination between cold-blooded and hot-blooded animals accounts for the casual manner in which he says the Komodo dragon is not so endangered after all. At the end of the 1980s there were 5000 and ‘as far as anyone can tell that’s roughly about how many there have always been’ (p34). Later on, after travelling half way across the world to view an at-risk parrot on an island off New Zealand, Adams also confesses ‘I am actually not tremendously excited by birds’ (p119). Shortly after, he begins debunking the sacred phrase itself:

‘I thought to myself that the words “endangered species” had become a phase which had lost any vivid meaning. We hear it too often to be able to react to it afresh.’(p165)

Typically, no sooner has he embarked on a campaign to save endangered species than he launches counter-attacks against them.

Adams loved treading on the toes of the haughty, even when that pomposity was environmental in origin. After targeting the Americans and Germans, you expect the Chinese to be next in the authors’ firing line. Adams, however, is fulsome in praising Chinese attempts to save the Yangtze River dolphin. The Chinese achievement compares favourably to Western ecological efforts, he writes: ‘It is hard to imagine anywhere in the Western world that would be capable of responding with such prodigious speed, imagination and communal determination to such a problem’:

‘We had our first and only real glimpse of the Chinese mind. They took it as their natural duty to protect this animal, both for its own sake and for that of the future world.’(p169)

Adams punctured other green icons too. There is a spurious distinction in ecological theory between ‘endemic’ and ‘exotic’ animals: the former are said to be ‘native’ to a place and the latter aliens, and obviously, native good and alien bad. As a result, environmentalists regularly instigate holocausts of exotic animals to preserve endemic animals from extinction. Take rabbits and mice, for example. On a trip to find the Rodrigues’ fruitbat on an Indian Ocean island near Mauritius, Adams learned the ‘exotic’ rabbit population had only been saved from extermination by ecologists because someone suggested they might be a rare French breed now extinct in Europe ‘and it should be transferred to mainland Mauritius and preserved in some way’(p179). Then someone else said they were not that rare breed at all, so a team of experts had to be set up to determine whether or not the coneys were in fact phoneys. If the decision went against them, they would be declared a pest and consigned to the pot. Being a rabbit is a dog’s life on Rodrigues Island.

Saving endangered species as a method of eco-sin redemption

As for mice, the situation is even worse. Lovable ecologists have designated them victuals for the rare Mauritius kestrel. Ouch! The irony here is that in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Adams makes mice the dominant species on Earth. In it, two mice have been studying humanity and conducting experiments on us for generations. You have to be aware of this spoof to get the joke when one local ecological expert on Rodrigues Island bluntly informs Adams:

‘Conservation is not for the squeamish. We have to kill a lot of animals, partly to protect the species that are endangered,
            and partly to feed them.’ (p180)

Carwadine’s contention that ‘we’ are heaving species off the planet turns out to be true; but who would have guessed an ecologist would justifying the heaving? Are the rabbit and the mouse destined for the same fate as the passenger pigeon and bison, and at the hands of the ever-so-concerned greens too?

As we follow Adams through these increasingly ludicrous narratives, you can sense his concern that the green notion of a divide between endemic and exotic animals is farcical. Why demean migratory species beneath the more inert ones? Classifying anything natural as ‘endemic’ must be a con job. After millennia of drifting continental plates, animal and plant migrations and cross-fertilisations, plus human transfers of flora and fauna around the globe, nothing on Earth can be feasibly described as aboriginal. Moreover, the spectacle of dedicated bands of conservationists straining to micro-manage rare species isolated on remote islands makes proclamations of their endemic credentials truly absurd. Decades of this green instrumentalism should be re-categorised as drastic human intervention, not a symbol of nature’s independence from all mankind’s works. There is no so-called ‘endemic’ species which possesses a realistic title indubitably proving their claim to indigenous longevity. It is far more likely that they have been artificially selected for priority preservation in pursuit of one or another ecological agenda, if not a personal whim. Ironically, this hierarchical system allows unfashionable species like mice and rabbits to be bumped off by greens more or less remorselessly.

Why, really, are some species selected by greens for preservation and others dispensed without a care? In my opinion, the only answer is aesthetic. Adams and friends like looking at pictures of cute gorillas and dolphins and bears. Neo-greens write amusing skits about the hypocrisies of traditional nature-loving greens. But they are engaged in a sham of their own when they seize on treasured environmental symbols and recycle them for their own purposes. Hoping to offset their colossal consumption of material resources, they go through the motions of paying homage to a handful of trendy species conveniently branded ‘endangered’. By wrapping themselves in a green flag in this way, Adams and his successors sanitise their ecological sins. Neo-greens do not want to save nature. They want to save themselves, and especially to prolong lifestyles committed wallowing in the flesh-pots of modernity. If the cost of this amounts to a few snaps of an ape or a glorified budgie, it’s all been worthwhile. If Last Chance to See is really about nature, I’ll siphon my python.