I've written about environmentalists of the future before, but now they're at it again, advocating and praising poverty rather than science and technology.
Humans are stripping nature at an unprecedented rate and will need two planets' worth of natural resources every year by 2050 on current trends, the WWF conservation group said on Tuesday. ..."For more than 20 years we have exceeded the earth's ability to support a consumptive lifestyle that is unsustainable and we cannot afford to continue down this path," WWF Director-General James Leape said, launching the WWF's 2006 Living Planet Report.
"If everyone around the world lived as those in America, we would need five planets to support us," Leape, an American, said in Beijing.
Of course General Leape leaves out inconvenient facts that undermine his already-dubious calculation of how many earths we need. Since I'm in a list-making mood today:
1. As societies get richer, families have fewer kids. Rural Chinese and Indians aren't going to consume as much as we do until their birthrate goes down.
2. American science and technology is the cleanest in the world. We get the most bang for our pollution buck, largely no-thanks to environmentalist organizations like the WWF. Pollution is waste, and waste costs money. Why doesn't General Leape spend a little time praising American ingenuity, the wealth it creates, and the care we can thereby aford to give our environment?
3. No one who has a choice wants to live in extreme poverty like the vast majority of the third world does. Manual labor, no recreation, no health care, chronic diseases, early death. Sounds sucky.
Instead of longing for more poverty, why doesn't the WWF advocate for greater scientific advancements and more wealth? Those would lead to fewer kids, less pollution, and more happiness for everyone. Plus, maybe we'll be able to get a few more earths at some point, and then we can go wild.
Mark Steyn has a great column on this at Jewish World Review. He points out that if we want to talk about unsustainability, then we should ponder Europe's current birth rate of around 1.3.
Maybe with the successors of work pioneered on NASA's Prometheus 1, we'll be able to reach another Earth-like planet.
Settling another planet would be great, Mark, but it won't matter if our young women still refuse to have more than one or two babies apiece, and if our young men still have little interest in supporting them in doing so. Colonizing a new planet would require a massive change in our culture. No secular society has ever had that kind of fecundity.
BB: No, belief in God is not required for colonization of space.. or even the survival of our society here on Earth, as your post seems to indirectly suggest. While I agree that colonizing a new planet.. or any true vision of space as being more than a curiosity for astronomers and scientists.. would require significant cultural and societal change, it is not at all an absolute that this cultural and social shift must be toward the religious and spiritual.
Moving into space takes us out of our comfort zone. On Earth, we don't have to worry about having enough air to breathe, enough food and water, or enough power to generate heat and cooling. We also don't have to worry about generating gravity to keep many of our biological systems working properly or about protecting ourselves from solar and spacial radiation. In space, on this journey to another planet, we have to bring all of those things with us.. not just for the journey, but also to get things started on this distant world (except for gravity, I suppose). In other words, our survival becomes far less guaranteed and when survival is questioned, we naturally place more value on our offspring. This isn't a function born of our world's religions, but of our biology.
Mark, I didn't say that belief in God was required for colonization of space. I just observed an historical fact about reproduction rates in secular societies.
You're probably right that more difficult times lead to higher reproduction. But if space colonization will be so arduous, then won't it be difficult to find colonists?
The change in culture that I'm thinking of isn't necessarily religious, but it does require that people think of their lives as having some purpose higher than their own pleasure. They need to believe that they are working to further their family, religion, country, culture, or similar large social group. They need some belief in a higher purpose. Without that belief, few people will bother with the cost and effort required to produce and raise children.
This will seem like a strange leap to you, but I see it as directly tied to gay marriage. At the heart of that issue is a choice between pleasure and procreation: Is non-procreative coupling just as good in every way as procreative coupling? People who think with their genitals see orgasm as the meaning of life, and consider babies a nuisance. People who identify closely with their culture, country, family, or religion see that those social institutions cannot survive without babies, and consider them vitally important.
Maybe some day a human culture will colonize another planet. But it won't be anything like today's western culture. In fact, the people who colonize that planet will probably look back to today's western culture, and consider it to be decadent and useless. Colonists need a specific set of beliefs and values, and those beliefs and values are very unpopular today.
BB: Certainly, colonists (space or otherwise) are a unique group of people.. but given the opportunity, I'm sure there'd be plenty of people to fit the role.
The greater purpose of which you speak is also something I agree with. One of the things I think could go a long way toward inspiring a new purpose would be the discovery of life on another world. It need not be intelligent life, but the discovery alone that life can and does exist on another planet/moon would lead to many more compelling and awe-inspiring questions, the ultimate realization of which would be the exploration and colonization of space.
As for the relation to gay marriage, I disagree with what you characterize as the heart of the issue. To me, the heart of the issue is the question of why the government recognizes marriage in the first place.. and you can read a recent thread on it to see what I've said regarding it. The pleasure-vs-procreation aspect has nothing to do with why marriages are recognized by the government.
"Certainly, colonists (space or otherwise) are a unique group of people.. but given the opportunity, I'm sure there'd be plenty of people to fit the role."
Yes, but most of them are already serving in our armed forces. If we send them into space, who will defend us?
More seriously, the casual assumption that there will always be plenty of tough, daring, fecund people is what has put Europe in its terrible situation. Until recently, it was assumed that there will always be plenty of babies, and the noble cause was to kill as many as possible, or prevent them from being conceived in the first place. Now some of us know otherwise. As in most areas, liberals assume that they can tinker with our society all they want without actually harming its foundations.
Feminists, for example, have sought for decades to feminize the school system and criminalize masculinity, yet when a military crisis looms they just assume that plenty of virile soldiers will be on hand to deal with it.
Or take fertility: When liberals start dishing out abuse, no amount is too much for midwestern Christian evangelicals. Ask about demographics, and most liberals will still smugly assert that there will always be plenty of babies. Yet most of the babies on whom the liberals rely come from the hated evangelicals. Those are the people who are reproducing at a rate sufficient to keep our country out of the demographic death spiral in which Europe is firmly caught.
So yes, Mark, for the foreseeable future there will be plenty of people in America to serve as pioneers. But that's only because those people are working to thwart the liberalism that would otherwise strangle them. If liberalism had its way, then we wouldn't have many people like that. We would be like Britain.
BB: Oh, come on.. you (a conservative) and I (considered "liberal" by many here) both know that conservatism and liberalism will have changed dramatically (along with the rest of society and the culture of our country and/or our world) by the time we're ready to colonize space. Applying the rhetoric and demagoguery of either in the present to the situations and circumstances of the future is dubious at best.
It has nothing to do with labels, Mark. A society either values its children, or it doesn't. A society either takes seriously its own perpetuation, or it doesn't. The words involved are irrelevant. The basic choice doesn't change. Either we work hard to put our society in a condition where it is likely to continue, or we can lay back and relax as it decays around us. It doesn't matter whether we describe it in English or Urdu, the life or decay is the same.
That's right.. which is why it was totally irrelevant for you to turn this into a liberal and conservative thing as you did in your previous post.