There are are least 5-10 regular readers of this site (many of them my longtime friends who, sadly, are wrong about nearly everything) who get inflamed whenever I post stories or commentary critical of the environmental movement. Or, as they’d have, whenever I post “right-wing, corporate-bought, crony-influenced industrialist propoganda disguised as ‘science’ and couched in words.” Against which they invariably cite figures and facts from things like the United Nations Global Environmental Outlook report — the most recent of which predicts an end to the world in 2032.
Writing in The National Post, Mark Steyn (corporate stooge! stockowner!) considers this latest environmental warning, placing it into its proper historical context:
Since 1970, when the great northern forest was being felled to print Paul Ehrlich best-sellers [famine will kill millions in the 1970s, etc., Ehrlich predicted], the U.S. economy has swollen by 150%; automobile traffic has increased by 143%; and energy consumption has grown 45%.
During this same period, air pollutants have declined by 29%, toxic emissions by 48.5%, sulphur dioxide levels by 65.3%, and airborne lead by 97.3%. For anywhere other than Antarctica and a few sparsely inhabited islands, the first condition for a healthy environment is a strong economy. President Carter and the other apocalyptic prognosticators of the Seventies made a simple mistake: In their predictions about natural resources, they failed to take into account the natural resourcefulness of the market. The government regulates problems, but the market solves them. So if, as Kyoto does, you seek to punish capitalism in the West and restrict it in the developing world, you’ll pretty much guarantee a poorer, dirtier, unhealthier planet.
I’d like to be an ‘environmentalist,’ really I would. I spend quite a bit of my time in the environment and I’m rather fond of it. But these days ‘environmentalism’ is mostly unrelated to the environment: It’s a cult, and, like most cults, heavy on ostentatious displays of self-denial, perfectly encapsulated by the time-consuming rituals of ‘recycling,’ an activity of no discernible benefit other than as a communal profession of faith.
Think globally, act locally, they say. But, in fact, environmentalists, like most cultists, are crippled by tunnel vision. ‘As long as we believe that our biggest threat is terrorism, we will never be truly prepared,’ wrote Carl Russell of Bethel, Vermont, to The Valley News after September 11th. ‘Humans are behaving like all living organisms whose habitat becomes depleted of necessary resources. Global warming, pollution, soil depletion, plant and animal extinction etc., are all signs of environmental degradation, too complex for most of us to agree on, let alone find solutions to. Our subconscious reflex to this lack of control is anxiety. Anger, intolerance and violence, however inappropriate, are common expressions of anxiety.’ Osama bin Laden might have thought he was ordering his boys into action because he hates America, but subconsciously he was merely acting out, however inappropriately, his anxieties about plant extinction.
[…] Well, here’s my prediction for 2032: Jean Chr
7 Replies to “Soil-and-Green is People”
This will invite flaming: No one doubts that the Palestinian suicide bombers are passionate about their cause. Does anyone really think they’re helping it?
I’ve recently dug up some information to the effect that Greenpeace has been complicit in suppressing information about who to protect babies from the single most deadly environmental toxin affecting their development, dioxin.
Greenpeace has been in possession of research on the transmission of dioxin from in mothers’ milk since the early 90s, and has chose to suppress it because it conflicts with another article of faith for envirocultists, breast feeding.
On this particular issue, the Capitalist overlords in the baby formula business have treated the information much more responsibly than the enviros have.
The evidence is pretty clear.
“During this same period, air pollutants have declined by 29%, toxic emissions by 48.5%, sulphur dioxide levels by 65.3%, and airborne lead by 97.3%.”
Do you attribute this to private enterprise, or big government regulation?
If you get lost back in here, send up a flare, we will send someone after you.
“I’d like to be an ‘environmentalist,’ really I would. I spend quite a bit of my time in the environment and I’m rather fond of it. But these days ‘environmentalism’ is mostly unrelated to the environment: It’s a cult…”
i agree, i enjoy nature and being out in it, something most environmentalists in their bohemian/urban cocoons have never done, environmentalism isn’t a love of nature, it’s a supreme fear and dislike of it that seeks to control and shape it, control and shape others to appreciate it for their reasons, and so on, granted i’d control nature too, but i wish to use it to further my life, possibly even the lives of others if they wish it as well, that’s what industry is about, when i see a mine that extracts some important mineral or drive through a hill blasted away to make room for an interstate running through it (with beautifully sheer and jagged basalt walls on each side created via dynamiting) i don’t think nature has been destroyed, no, i feel happy and full of life, it is possible i think to enjoy being in a forest by oneself even though there might be clear cutting going on 10 miles away, don’t feel that every bit of the environment will be used up, there will always be those beautiful patches that no one else wants to go to, that no one finds any use in, or that no one can be inconvenienced with the trouble of appreciating, and that’s what environmentalist want to dictate regulations over, the places they’ll never actually visit on their own
Hahaha. I must say that, though your words came out rather frightfully honest and extremely blunt, it is refreshing to hear these things. Yes, recycling doesn’t do much, and most of society tries to avoid he subject. I’d like to call myself an enviormentalist too, but I know it’s porbably much too late for anything now, and no one will stop having babies just because I want to see us thrive in the FUTURE. Honestly I’m waiting for everything to be claimed by the earth or burned to the ground. I love humanity, but I love the earth more. I’m about ready for us to become extinct (then again, I was a wiccan). I don’t like babies, or the cure for cancer, or any other disease. My father is on dialysis, we all die, it’s wrong to self perserve. I do respect your words though. But, I do think Bryce is just another shitmouth ignoranus.
As a truck driver, I have learned what is recycling. It is a process in which large corporations get raw materials donated to them by foolish people who do not know what they possess. The most comical part of the whole this is that in order to get the recycled material into it’s prefinished industrial state, you have to process it with many toxic solvents and bleaches. Much like originally in order to run an automobile with unleaded gas, you had to use much greater toxic mixtures to make up for the properties of lead.