perfidy

In response to Johno's recent post:

I worked for several years for Citizen Action, an enviromental lobby group. Concern for the environment has always been something important for me, going back to the days when I was in the Boy Scouts and spent a considerable amount of time in actual nature as opposed to volvo station wagons with "Think globally act locally" bumperstickers.

CA and similar groups are the "sane" side of the environmental movement. While they eschew the violent or property damaging methods of Earth First and other wackos, their politics and beliefs are scarcely different.

My time at CA was a constant struggle - while I wanted to do something positive for the environment, do my part so to speak, the ideological fanaticism of the leadership and most of the other people working there was hard to deal with. At the time, I was significantly less conservative than I am today - and that experience was a major part of why I moved rightward.

At base, I cannot agree with people who think that technology is inherently evil, and that the world would be a better place if all but maybe a million environmentally conscious people were to depart it. Taken to its logical conclusions, the "sustainable development" ideology is a recipe for the death by starvation of billions.

Most environmentalists would of course stop short of advocating this path. But they are strangely tolerant of those who don't. The prejudices of the environmentalist and the antiglobalization crowd amount to a kind of condescension, where primitive peoples and nature are to be kept pristine, so that they may be properly appreciated by enlightened, blue-goretex-wearing ecotourists. Those primitive people are rarely consulted as to what their wishes actually are. (Usually, TV and a new wardrobe from a lot of the documentaries I've seen. Most people do not like poverty, even if it is a traditional lifestyle - that's why so many move to the cities.)

Technology could make things much better for the rest of the world, as could the economic liberty that makes advanced technology possible. A classic example is the golden rice, enriched with vitamin A that could prevent blindness in millions of children a year (it's all about the children, of course) even though it is an eevilll frankenfood. Kneejerk opposition to technological solutions, mystical environmental marxism, and constant doommongering are not a recipe for saving the whales, or anything else.

If we are going to preserve our natural wonders, and not go careening into self created disaster (at various times one or more of the following: new ice age, malthusian population collapse, utter depletion of natural resources, global warming, systemic collapse of the ecosystem, or just choking to death on pollution) we don't need more of the "woolly-headed crypto-Marxist claptrap that totally ignores reality in favor of impossible solutions."

Real solutions rely on an enlightened regard for self interest. If we refrain from screaming that the sky is falling, and point out that it is in everyone's best interest to avoid drowning in PCBs, we begin to make progress. (And using market based mechanisms for pollution control is a good start.) We are ever so much cleaner than we were even thirty years ago, and most new factories and what not are designed with environmental protection in mind. (The Cuyahoga River hasn't caught fire since before I was born! Go Cleveland!) In time, we'll have hydrogen cars, and maybe even clean fusion power (Cold Fusion Now!) or solar power satellites. The world will be cleaner, at least where sensible democratic people live.

But the worst polluters and environment rapers are totalitarian governments and poor nations. There is a clear connection between wealth and environmental awareness. People who have the luxury to think about a clean environment (rather than the next meal or whether they will be tortured by the local gestapo) will take steps to clean things up.

The trend is clear in the industrialized world - ever stricter standards and an increasingly park-like world outside the cities. We don't really need to worry much there. I don't think we are approaching ecological holocaust. We just need to calm down and stop firebombing apartment complexes and shouting "Free the Mink!"