The Environmentalist Menace
GrassTopsUSA Exclusive Commentary
By Gennady Stolyarov II
04-17-07
Western
civilization today is under attack on many fronts, yet some of the
threats to it are more dire than others. Figuring out which threat
is the most significant one is crucial if we are to save the
accomplishments and promises of Western civilization from being
extinguished. I contend that the primary threat to our lives today
is not external, even though we are faced with numerous external
menaces. The worst and most urgent danger is internal and pervasive;
it is an ideology and movement that has rallied governments,
businesses, the media, and public opinion to join its cause. The
greatest threat to Western civilization and quality of life
throughout the world today is the “environmentalism” of those who
would seek to limit and halt technological progress.
Even such a
problem as Islamofascist terrorism pales in comparison to this
threat. Most sane, reasonable people in the West recognize that the
terrorists are committing undesirable acts, and Western governments
and militaries have offered substantial—if still
insufficient—resistance to the Islamists’ desire to subdue the
developed world. Not even this semblance of unity exists in
opposition to the environmentalist threat. Quite the contrary, most
of today’s social institutions, influential figures, and even the
general public in the West claim to support the environmentalist
agenda.
For the past
thirty-five years, the environmentalists have wielded considerable
clout in both business and government—restricting innovation,
technological progress, and freedom via EPA bans on harmless
chemicals like DDT, regulations such as the draconian Clean Air Act,
and the deliberate prevention of residential, commercial, and
industrial development on a large fraction of America’s territory.
The United Nations, via its Agenda 21, seeks to actually reduce
the amount of land in use by man through the seizure of private
property by means of eminent domain and the deliberate cultivation
of “wilderness corridors” where homes and businesses had once been.
Despite these extensive interventions, however, technological
progress and improvements in the general standard of living have
hitherto continued because of the creative spirit, productive drive,
and remaining economic and personal liberties of millions of
hard-working private individuals in the West.
Now the
environmentalists are on the offensive again—and this time, they
threaten to halt and even reverse technological and economic
progress instead of merely delaying it. Global warming alarmism is
their principal justification for attempting to impose further
draconian regulations—and governments are beginning to fall in line
with both the Green rhetoric and its policy implications. Now the
Bush Administration—hitherto skeptical of the verity of “global
warming” claims—officially acknowledges that global warming is a
“problem.” Now the United States Supreme Court has defined carbon
dioxide—a substance released by all animals and used by all plants
of Earth for energy—as a “pollutant” and virtually forced the
U. S. government to impose regulations regarding emissions of it.
Increasingly many businesses are paying lip service to the global
warming agenda—because senators like Jay Rockefeller and Olympia
Snowe threaten coercive action against any remaining “heretics” like
the ExxonMobil corporation and the honest climate researchers and
scholars it sponsors.
If the Green
opponents of progress have their way, the West will be set back
technologically and economically. The global warming
alarmists—via the economically crippling Kyoto Protocol—want to
cut back carbon dioxide emissions to ten percent below 1990
levels. Imagine: any of our industries that emit CO2 as a
byproduct of their activities will only be allowed to produce 90% as
many goods and services as they could seventeen years ago! If this
plan succeeds, it will set back the efficiency and output of
affected industries by about two decades—not to mention the huge
cost to taxpayers of implementing such an agenda. All of this the
environmentalists justify by “scientific” arguments that are
specious at best and outright dishonest at worst. They do not
condone criticism of their theories, because they do not seek
genuine scientific debate; they desire a certain kind of social and
economic change, and woe to those who stand in their way! Any
“global warming deniers” will be blacklisted, denied funding,
ostracized from the scientific community, and even threatened with
legal punishment.
The
consequences of environmentalist success will be disastrous. Man’s
life in the state of nature is a dismal life—powerfully
characterized by the 17th-century English philosopher
Thomas Hobbes in The Leviathan. It is a life that has "no
culture of the earth;… no commodious building; no instruments of
moving and removing such things as require much force; no knowledge
of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters;
no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of
violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish,
and short.” Man without technology is little more than a weak animal
with an average life expectancy of twenty—constantly exposed to the
perils of disease, famine, homelessness, intertribal warfare, and
conflicts over extremely scarce basic goods.
For most of
human history, man’s emergence from this dreadful and savage state
has been painstakingly slow; even less than a century ago, in the
United States, life expectancy from birth was as low as 47
years, and massive pandemics of tuberculosis, malaria, and influenza
wiped out more people than the two World Wars combined. Most people
still labored just to grow enough food for everyone to eat, and
radios and automobiles were considered luxuries for the well-to-do.
Only recently—through tremendous growth in technology, made possible
by the ingenious and tireless efforts of free men—has the
average person in the West been able to have a material standard of
living that can at all be called decent: enough food to eat and
clothing to wear; enough opportunity to nourish the soul through
music and the arts; enough space to comfortably live in; enough
opportunity to travel and to receive effective, scientific medical
care for one’s ailments. This development has been unique to the
Western world and to countries that adopted Western institutions of
free markets, political liberty, and the scientific method.
This emergence
from the darkness of primitive life is what the environmentalists
are trying to halt. They admit it. Paul Ehrlich, the darling
of those who think that the Earth is reaching unsustainably high
levels of population, openly proclaimed: “We've already had too much
economic growth in the US. Economic growth in rich countries like
ours is the disease, not the cure.” Thomas Lovejoy, assistant
secretary to the Smithsonian Institution, said in 1989 that “[t]he
planet is about to break out with fever, indeed it may already have,
and we [human beings] are the disease. We should be at war with
ourselves and our lifestyles.” Russell Train, former EPA
Administrator, stated as early as 1974 that “[w]e can and should
seize upon the energy crisis as a good excuse and great opportunity
for making some very fundamental changes that we should be making
anyhow for other reasons.”
The
environmentalists’ “other reasons” are a deep, violent, and
irrational hatred of technology, freedom, and rising standards of
living. Their true intentions are to act on this hatred; any and
every pseudo-scientific doomsday scenario they conjure up is simply
a front for their desire to return mankind back to the primeval age.
In the 1970s, many of the environmentalists used the specter of
“global cooling” to argue for the same restrictions on technological
progress that they advocate today in the name of stopping “global
warming.”
The
environmentalist menace to our prosperity and freedom—to our basic
human dignity—is overt and blatant. They have been clear about their
intentions for decades, but the people of the West have largely
ignored the threat. Only a massive social backlash against the
advocates of the primitive can save human lives from becoming nasty,
brutish, and short once again.
Gennady Stolyarov II is
Editor-in-Chief of
The Rational Argumentator, a magazine championing the principles
or Reason, Rights, and Progress. His works have been published by
Le Quebecois Libre,
Enter Stage Right Magazine, the
Ludwig von Mises Institute,
Rebirth of Reason, and other organizations. Mr. Stolyarov can be
contacted at
gennadystolyarovii@yahoo.com.
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GrasstopsUSA.com 2007
