Greenism vs. Mankind 

Jigs Gardner

Jigs Gardner writes from the “Gardner Farm” in New York.

Conservatives don’t seem to know what to make of environmentalism. Very few are believers, not many more are its declared enemies, and most are in the middle: mildly skeptical, indirectly critical when they argue, as they often do, that Green ends would be more efficiently achieved by the methods of the marketplace than by coercive government regulation. Perhaps, aware of the popularity of the cause, they are only being prudent. Or, and this is a very worrisome thought, they may not consider it important. I think confusion stems from a basic misunderstanding at the moment of the movement's launching on Earth Day in 1970, when Greenism was conflated with environmentalism. Far from being synonymous, the terms are antithetical.

Human beings of necessity have always been environmentalists because life itself is inherently polluting, a fact we cannot evade. If we had not been aware of it, if we had not tried to avoid pollution, the human race would have died in pestilence long ago. An obvious example is the history of garbage disposal. The great treasure troves that tell archeologists so much about our ancestors’ everyday lives are “middens,” waste heaps that inescapably accompany mankind. In the beginning, we simply threw gnawed bones over our shoulders onto the pile at the back of the cave; later, we heaved everything out the kitchen door of our hut; we tried ravines and rivers; a town dump sufficed for a while, succeeded by a supervised landfill, and now we incinerate garbage to generate electricity. As we strive, not merely for subsistence but to improve our lives, to create wealth and greater amenities, we also create dangers, problems, pollution--in common law terms, nuisances. The solution at one stage of development becomes a problem at the next stage, when our growing wealth allows us to indulge newfound sensibilities, to banish or abate what now seems a noisome affliction. This cannot be overstressed. Knowledge, wealth, and improved practices go hand in hand. Measures to protect or develop environmental amenities are due to our growing affluence since the end of World War II. The notion that environmentalism began with Earth Day in 1970 is ludicrous. It had a salutary effect, however, in awakening interest in the environment and arousing myriads of local groups and individuals voluntarily to clean up streams and roadsides, leading to wider efforts to curb pollution on state, regional, and national scales. That some of the legislation was ill-judged, overzealous, and much too costly was the fault, not of environmentalism, but Greenism, which was the real beneficiary of Earth Day.

Environmentalism is an evolutionary process seeking appropriate solutions to tangible problems. Greenism, facing the same problems, exploits them to prevent their rational solution. When a city or region, for example, faces a garbage disposal problem, it is beset by Greens trying, by endless hearings, meetings, petitions, and litigation, to prevent adoption of any sensible solution, especially if it’s high-tech, like the electricity-generating incinerator. They will allow only elaborate recycling and composting schemes, inefficient, impractical, expensive, and retrograde. The Green strategy of induced conflict and cost escalation undermines the basis of environmentalism--wealth creation. The more money and labor wasted, the less environmentalism we can afford. Not that this bothers Greens, who condemn prosperity and technology as evil in themselves:

We’ve already had too much economic growth in the U.S. Economic growth in rich countries like ours is the disease, not the cure. --Paul Ehrlich

The only real good technology is no technology at all. --John Shuttleworth, Friends of the Earth

It is only by reversing the flow of history, it is only by becoming poor that we can live environmentally pure lives:

Capitalism must come to an end. --P. Sarkar, Global Times

The only hope for the planet [is] that the industrialized civilizations collapse. --Maurice Strong

Everything civilized must go. --John Davis, Wild Earth

That’s why Greens devote so much of their energy to the creation of false problems, bizarre “crises” which can be solved (if at all) by draconian, astronomically expensive means. It was Greenism that manufactured both the ozone hole and global warming scares. The propaganda for the latter bugaboo has been so successful that it’s widely accepted as a matter of course, pervading society at all levels. It is very revealing of Green motives.

The Green story is that CO2 discharged into the air by industry prevents heat from radiating out into space, thus global warming. But CO2 is not, contra the Greens, the leading greenhouse gas--water vapor is, and if it did not prevent some heat from radiating out into space, the temperature on earth would be zero degrees Fahrenheit. If there would be too much global warming, there would be more evaporation from the oceans, thus forming clouds to shield earth from the sun’s radiation, dropping the temperature, a good example of nature’s checks and balances. Back to CO2. It is estimated that since 1800 we have contributed 140 billion tons of it to the atmosphere; compare that with 42,000 billion tons in various forms in the ocean. As for temperature, the fossil isotope recorded from the past 2,000 years shows that temperatures today are slightly below average. Temperatures rose about 0.7 degrees F. from 1860-1940, fell slightly thereafter until 1970, and have risen slightly since then, but these observations all fall within the margin of error of such measurements. Temperature trends like the Medieval Climate Optimum 1,000 years ago (when Greenland was green), or the Little Ice Age from 1600-1850, seem to be closely correlated with solar activity, not the puny activities of human beings. But Greenism stampeded governments into signing the Kyoto treaty.

The only way to save ourselves is to lower consumption, dismantle industry, curb the free market, and restrain technology--which turns out to be just what Greens want, obsessed as they are by scorn for the mass of mankind and false compassion for a sentimentalized nature.

. . . at least l/2 of the land area of the 48 coterminous states should be encompassed in core reserves and inner corridor zones. . . . Eventually a wilderness network would dominate a region and this would itself constitute the matrix, with human habitation being the islands. --Reed Noss, "The Wildland Projects," Wild Earth, 1992

We must reclaim the roads and the plowed land, halt dam construction, tear down existing dams, free shackled rivers, and return to the wilderness tens of millions of acres of presently settled land. --David Brower

. . . life in a hunter-gatherer society was on the whole healthier, happier, and more secure than our lives as peasants, industrial workers, or business executives. --Dave Foreman

Another example of the anti-human motive of Greenism is the endangered Species Act, which was used, openly and deliberately, to kill the logging industry in the northwest, and is being used everywhere to stop development. The approach of nearly everyone, no matter how anti-Green, has been to say they’re in favor of saving endangered species but they want the act reformed. But it is typical Green folly, comprehensively stupid, and it should be repealed. In the first place, no one knows anything about species extinction. When you read that “14 species go extinct every day [or hour or minute] because of habitat destruction in the Amazon rain forest,” you are imbibing complete and utter balderdash. No one knows anything about it. We have no idea how many species there are, and the difficulties inherent in trying to decide the existential situation of a species are so formidable as to be insurmountable. Second, it is probable that species are being created and destroyed all the time due to the natural processes of change and adaptation of which mankind is a part. Third, if you cut humans out of the equation by removing them from the scene, creations and extinctions would continue--we exaggerate our power. Fourth, we can improve habitats for a few species fairly effectively (e.g., Ducks Unlimited), but trying to decide, on a general basis, which species need protection and then trying to save them is a mug’s game. Specifically and pointedly: Whether or not the fairy shrimp disappears from California ditches, whether we can ever even know that definitively, is of no importance. Instead we hear that every loss endangers the mythical ecosystem; that species still unknown may provide cancer cures, and so on. Well, so they may, and so may have the countless species that have gone defunct over the ages. But if we are going to live free lives unburdened by specious guilt, we must get out of the business, for which only gods are qualified, of imagining that we can or should save species in any significant way.

It’s hard to decide what’s more astounding: that educated people passionately work for this cause, or that intelligent, responsible people take them seriously. Greens appear to know nothing about their situation in this material world where all of us are wholly dependent on an unfathomably complex structure composed of things and thoughts, matter and spirit, called Civilization, as old as the first tool-using man, as new as space travel. As individuals we choose or reject bits and pieces of the structure (most of it becomes part of our lives without our conscious knowledge), but in the history of the species such choices are meaninglessly trivial. We create, maintain, and add to the structure, and it sustains and carries forward the life of the group. The idea that we can dismantle it (or even a significant portion) is absurd. Such ignorance can be explained, partly, by education. Most Greens belong to a group, greatly expanded in the increasingly affluent times since the war, middle class and upper middle class, that has spent more and more of its time in school, usually studying the humanities or social sciences. At one time, a liberal arts education was a discipline of mind; a training in mental rigor and clarity, but it has deteriorated steadily over the last 40 years until it is now little more than prolonged exposure to fashionable attitudes. At the same time, knowledge in practical subjects has burgeoned; to understand the work of forestry (for example) today requires a mastery of technical detail unimaginable 40 years ago. As liberal arts education has become ever more nebulous, forestry studies (or agriculture or mining, etc.) have become more technical, complex, and rigorous. It is not surprising then that Greens should have such fanciful notions about the material world, nor is it remarkable that middle class people in general, those who do not do the technical work of the world, should be taken in by their crazy claims.

The issue of knowledge is important, because civilization is ultimately based on our control of nature. The story of our ascent from the cave can be told in terms of that growing mastery. It is a truth just as obvious that nature is so overwhelmingly vast and complex that whatever control we achieve is always partial, feeble, tenuous. It grows out of knowledge, most broadly conceived (not confined to knowledge, scientific or technical, that bears directly on the physical world). Wishing always to improve our lives, i.e., making them longer and healthier and freer, less burdened by labor, even wiser, we must ever work for the knowledge that will extend our control over nature. “Control,” however, is not quite the right word. The more we study crops and pests, for instance, the more refined our methods become for promoting the crops and diminishing the pests: we breed stronger, resistant crops; we learn how to take advantage of weather, of the enemies of pests, of the biology of the pests themselves; our intervention becomes more selective and effective. We may call that control, but it would be more precisely defined as increased knowledge enabling us to work more intelligently with nature. Perhaps the best way to put it is to say that in struggling against entropy, against the natural tendency to let things slide, in struggling for a more orderly, more productive world, we strive against nature, but in the tactics, the details of how we go about it, we can only work with nature.

Ignorance alone does not explain the devotion of Greens to such a destructive cause, if only because it is so obviously willed; these are people possessed by utopian demons, contemptuous of the mass of mankind (population control is a favorite cause), indifferent to their fate in the primitive state of nature the Greens desire, “where every prospect pleases and only man is vile.” The theme of mankind’s corruption contrasted to the purity of nature is an old idea, but it was never, until our own day, a widely popular one. It began gaining followers among artists and intellectuals in Europe in the 19th century, appearing in America around the time of World War I, spreading widely in the fertile ground of the 60s, when cynical antinomianism became fashionable. It shares that attitude with the anti-American left, permeating the yuppie elite, which accounts for the way Greenism, so obviously crazy, so plainly the enemy of environmentalism, has nevertheless been so widely accepted. Paranoiac stories of dark plots and insidious poisons seem believable to an audience which already shares, whether consciously or not, skepticism about mankind and all its works. (How many times have we heard the human race called a cancer?) Greenism is a very dangerous movement that should be exposed not only as factually false, as anti-environmentalist, but also as a set of ideas embodying malevolent contempt for the human race (excepting themselves), a vision false, vicious, and heartless.     *

“Contemplate the mangled bodies of your countrymen, and then say, ‘What should be the reward of such sacrifices?’ Bid us and our posterity bow the knee, supplicate the friendship, and plough, and sow, and reap, to glut the avarice of the men who have let loose on us the dogs of war to riot in our blood and hunt us from the face of the earth? If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude than the animating contest of freedom, go from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains sit lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen!” --Samuel Adams