Lileks nails down the thesis underlying modern "environmentalism" that is really concerned more with hurting humanity than with promoting good stewardship of the earth.
Note: this is not to say people don’t spend too much money on things they don’t need. It’s just not my place to request the state to keep them from doing so. In any case, I suspect that the impulse to bring all these untidy unhelpful examples of flagrant individualism under the steady hand of the Ministry of Rational Allocation has something to do with that fretful busybody insistence that people are simply not living right. If we had Star Trek replicators in every house that would conjure goods and meals out of boundless energy produced by antimatter teased from a three-micron fissure that opened into a universe populated entirely by unicorns who crapped antimatter in such abundance they were happy we used it up, and used their shiny pointy horns to poke more of it through the aperture into our dimension, columnists would bemoan the disconnect between labor and goods, and the soul-corrupting influence of endless ersatz vegetables. You can’t win. Because you shouldn’t.
If they really cared about the environment, "environmentalists" would get married and stay married. Hopefully these envirofascists won't get enough traction to win any more political power.
Equally worrying as the environmentalism to me is the idea that we can continue to consume more, the population can continue to grow and that we won't need to think about energy usage because some "new technology" will emerge to replace dwindling fuel supplies.
I'm not that optimistic. IMO, if the population grows too dense, nature will provide some catastrophe to rectify it, just as it does for rampant populations of deer or locusts. We can choose between self-imposed control or nature's way, which do you think is preferable?
Jez, so your view is basically:
"The power of population is so superior to the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race. The vices of mankind are active and able ministers of depopulation. They are the precursors in the great army of destruction, and often finish the dreadful work themselves. But should they fail in this war of extermination, sickly seasons, epidemics, pestilence, and plague advance in terrific array, and sweep off their thousands and tens of thousands. Should success be still incomplete, gigantic inevitable famine stalks in the rear, and with one mighty blow levels the population with the food of the world."
---Thomas Malthus, An Essay Concerning Human Population, first published in 1798
Maybe some day we will face famine and catastrophe. But our energies are better spent facing the perils of the present, which include a plague of outrageous self-loathing that infects those people who are in the best position to improve life for all humanity and ameliorate the effects of future crises.
BB yes, pretty much. I'd add war and general social unrest as a danger as well.
Do you honestly believe that population growth and consumption can continue to grow uninterrupted?
I'm surprised that you take the choice not to reproduce as evidence of self loathing. St Paul's advice on marriage shows that he clearly thought it better to remain celibate. (1 Cor 7)
Is Pauline doctrine a plague of outrageous self-loathing?
Jez, looking at 1 Cor 7, I think that Paul's advice is a little more complicated than telling people not to marry. Bible.com offers an alternate translation of that like in terms of sex rather than marriage. And the chapter refers several times to a present crisis in morality. Remember: Paul didn't know that he was writing a book of the Bible, so he didn't necessarily mean for every sentence to apply to every person for all time. He was advising the Corinthians on dealing with their specific situation, though I don't know exactly what that situation was. I would expect that marriage and sex in the Roman Empire were very different from what we have today.
"Do you honestly believe that population growth and consumption can continue to grow uninterrupted?"
I think it's possible. But even if it weren't possible, I think that people try to manage humanity's growth will do more harm than good. In the 200 years since Malthus there have been many times of mass death, but few if any involved problems of scarcity.
If your real goal is to avoid mass death, then you should focus on the actual historical causes of it, which are: disease, war, and government. Not necessarily in that order. Before the early 1900s we lost many people to disease, but not any more. So we're left with war and government, which are linked. The driving force behind both is ideology.
Nothing has killed more people than Communism, which left 100 million civilians dead in the 20th century. Note that those are civilians, not soldiers and not wartime casualties.
If the enviro-cultists really cared about humanity, then they would oppose totalitarian governments such as those in North Korea, Cuba, and Zimbabwe. They would try to ensure that Communism will not rise again. Instead they're pushing the other way, demanding totalitarian government to save us from a scary story that's over 200 years old.
Maybe someday we will run out of some precious resource and humanity will suffer, but that's a very uncertain event possibly way out in the future. But a totalitarian eco-government would cause certain suffering in the very near future. And if history is any guide, such a government would cause more and more suffering as it gained power.
You can submit to the eco-priests if you want, but I'll take my chances with liberty.
I've listened to more than one sermon which accepts that chapter in Corinthians as relevant contemporary advice. Anyway, celibacy (therefore childlessness) is not considered a bad thing, right?
We do lose a lot of people to disease, just not in our countries.
I'm not aware of "eco-culturalists" (whom I don't particularly embrace by the way) cozying up to korea or zimbabwe. I'm obviously a fan of liberty; I just disagree with the idea heard increasingly frequently from republicans that a declining or stable population is an indication of a moribund culture.
Celibacy is considered holy in most religions, but only among the monastic types AFAIK. If a religion is to survive, then most of its adherents need to procreate.
The elite liberals were once big supporters of Robert Mugabe, who now rules Zimbabwe with an iron fist. Now they support Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, even though he will take that country down the same path. And many of them still love Castro, despite his well-documented atrocities.
But aside from that, the point is that if you're concerned about human suffering, then your efforts are much better spent opposing dictators and promoting political stability, rather than demanding economy-destroying eco-taxes.
Even if we assume that everything Al Gore says is true, then the eco-apocalypse will occur sometime off in the future, and might not occur at all. But the people in Zimbabwe and North Korea are suffering right now. There's nothing speculative or hypothetical about it. We know exactly why they're suffering, and we know what needs to happen to stop their suffering. If you really want to help people, rather than Mother Gaia, then that's where you should focus.
In fact, I seem to remember this country where another murderous dictator ruled with an iron fist for years. He would murder whole towns at a time, put people through industrial shredders, throw them off buildings, feed them to his dogs. All kinds of stuff like that. He even had a professional rapist on staff. But he doesn't do those things any more, because the USA and some allies invaded his country. And the Left is still very, very angry about him being removed from power.
childlessness does not imply self-hatred? Your usage of "need" seems rather Darwinian.
Are you treating all liberals and all ecologists as a single category? I'm not aware of particular ecological activists supporting eg. Mugabe, but I wouldn't necessarily have noticed.
I would say that I can focus on more than one thing at once; I would also say that being more efficient and consuming less are practical things that I personally can do, whereas overthrowing Mugabe from his democratically elected position as president is something which I have less power over; furthermore I would say that the possibility of a climate disaster is in a separate category since it is the entire globe which is at peril, whereas Zimbabwe is just one country and it is possible to escape from him. I don't intend to flippantly dismiss him; of course there are political problems which I would love to solve (although it's really tough to figure out what we could possibly do about eg Darfur or Israel); but I am answering your points which do intend to flippantly dismiss the problem of climate change, so I come across as flippant, that is why.
jez: I want a nice clean environment too, but I get caught up on the fact that many policies advocated by environmentalists are actually bad for the environment, and many policies that help the environment are actually counterintuitive.
I can't find an article I read a few months ago about packaging, but it claimed that the increased amount of packaging that modern products use is actually good for the environment because the packaging increases shelf-life, improves freshness, reduces damage in shipping, reduces the threat of tampering, etc. Here's an essay in the same vein, but the article had actual statistics in it.
Anyway, the point is that increased packaging creates more waste, so environmentalists oppose it , but the increased visible waste actually reduces the amount of total waste in the whole system. Similar with environmentalist objections to pesticides, logging, all sorts of land use issues, etc.
I think I drifted from the point of your conversation with BB, but I didn't have much to add to the points he already made.
If you like environmentalism in theory, but wish it would be applied with more intelligence and nuance, then we are in total agreement.
It is quite perplexing that the more militant the advocate, the less complete his understanding tends to be, but that observation is hardly restricted to environmentalism.