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COMMENTARY
February 10, 2007
Those who pay
In an excellent article in the Wall Street Journal, Alvara Vargas Llosa notes how once again, one of those first-world fashion statements is being carried on the backs of the third-world poor:“For half a century, Western guilt made the lives of the poor even worse by propping up despots and corrupt bureaucracies through foreign aid. A new form of Western guilt, environmental fundamentalism, is making the lives of the poor even worse in Mexico after triggering a huge rise in the price of corn -- the chief component of the tortilla -- thanks to a government-induced increase in the demand for ethanol in the United States.” Ethanol was, and is likely to remain, one of those cosmetic products, that masks our abject dependency on hydrocarbons, by creating an illusory association with lush fields. But whereas we can easily afford to pay more for corn, or even to put more expensive “designer fuels” in the gas tanks of our SUVs, the issue for poor Mexicans is tortillas. The history of our environmental lunacies is becoming a deep one. Thanks to the vogue enjoyed, in 1962, by Rachel Carson’s pioneering environmental tract, Silent Spring, there was huge public pressure to ban DDT. Not just in America, where more expensive and less efficient substitutes were available, but all over the world. Foreign aid agencies stipulated that DDT was never to be used near aid-assisted projects. The claims made in Carson’s book proved laughably false -- though few people today realize this, and Carson herself remains a canonized saint of the environmental movement. The fallout from DDT getting into groundwater and streams was not significant; was utterly insignificant in comparison to the good it was achieving in eliminating insect pests. But emotional rather than rational decisions were made, thanks largely to the impact of one book. Much of that book may even have been knowingly false. Not that Carson herself would have intended any evil: for she was sincerely convinced DDT was the secular equivalent of “the work of the devil”. Her faith in that idea could therefore justify any “pious fraud”. Her love of nature, so articulately communicated, was perfectly sincere. Yet in a sense one could say that, “Rachel Carson killed millions.” Over the years after, quite literally, tens of millions of people died, all over the underdeveloped world, from epidemics that could easily have been prevented by DDT spraying. It is a shocking fact that to this day, the environmental movement has not acknowledged that reality, let alone accepted responsibility for it. It is a faith-based movement, a kind of religion, and much of its power comes from its ability not merely to deny, but to ignore, the rational consequences of the actions it advocates. I say, “a kind of religion”, because genuine religions are much more responsible, and more inclined to learn from their own mistakes over time. In Christianity, especially, reason has always been granted an exalted place -- and on theological, not empirical grounds. The environmentalist credo is a crass parody of the Christian cosmological scheme. It postulates a primitive Eden that never existed (our tribal ancestors were in fact violent and immensely destructive of ecology), the sinful works of industrial man, and a return to grace through environmental action. It demonizes its apostates. The parody is more elaborate than that, but I sketch these chief points to make clear that we are dealing with an outlook on life that is based on faith, and excludes reason. I am hardly the first writer to notice it. We are in the earlier stages today of a worldwide population crash, that was largely triggered by environmentalist fears about “overpopulation”. By mastering the arts of propaganda, and using the leveraged power of United Nations agencies, incalculable damage was done not only to the planet’s demographic order, but to the moral structure of family life in country after country. All on the basis of the Malthusian faith encapsulated in Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 tract, The Population Bomb. A book that predicted inevitable planetary famine in the 1970s and ’80s, thanks to rising population and falling food supplies. A crackpot book, but nevertheless, another of the founding scriptural texts of today’s environmentalist religion. I have limited space: we could go on and on. But in light of environmentalist demands that we take precipitate, gargantuan steps to “solve” the “problem” of “climate change”, it is important to remember just how much carnage the movement has already wreaked. Far more than the most fanatical Muslim ever dreamed. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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