The misanthropy of the environmentalist movement

AMS302

What is Environmentalism?

- Today – concern about global warming, species decline, overpopulation

- I want to challenge the main contention behind the idea that inspires environmentalism today: the idea that resources are finite.

- Second, I want to show how concerns about all sorts of environmentalism are cultural at base rather than scientific

- Third, I want to indicate how it is used to police behaviour and to boost the authority of the elites

Malthusian origins of Greenness• Malthus rejected ideas of endless progress towards a utopian society because of

what he felt were the dangers of population growth: • "The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce

subsistence for man". • As an Anglican clergyman, Malthus saw this situation as divinely imposed to teach

virtuous behaviour. Believing that one could not change human nature, and that egalitarian societies were prone to over-population, Malthus wrote in dramatic terms: "epidemics, pestilence and plague advance in terrific array, and sweep off their thousands and ten thousands. Should success be still incomplete, gigantic famine stalks in the rear, and with one mighty blow, levels the population with the food of the world"

Finitude

• The idea that we live on a finite planet and therefore we can only have a certain number of people, living in a certain number of homes, eating a certain amount of food is wrong.

• Resources are not fixed in any meaningful sense.

Modern day Malthusians are really social-pessimists

• the main problem with resource-pessimists such as Malthusians is that they continually misinterpret social limits as physical limits. They naturalise social limits, reinterpreting and re-presenting problems of social development as problems of nature’s shrinking bounty.

• This is why they are wrong about everything!• Tertullian: In 200AD, Tertullian said: ‘We are

burdensome to the world, the resources are scarcely adequate for us… already nature does not sustain us.’ Population of 180m on the planet.

Undervaluing human life

• Optimum Population Trust launched a website called PopOffsets, which involved encouraging well-off Westerners to offset their carbon emissions by paying for people in the Third World to stop procreating.

• the site tells you how much carbon you have used and therefore how much you should donate to a Third World reproductive charity. That charity makes up for your carbon-use by cutting back on the pitter-patter of tiny carbon footprints in countries like Kenya. So if you took a round-trip from London to Sydney, that adds up to 10 tonnes of carbon, in which case you are asked to donate £40 to help prevent the birth of one child in Africa.

• 1 human life = 10 tonnes of carbon

The Origins of Greenness

• Not because of specific scientific evidence becoming clearer

• The origins are social and cultural rather than scientific

• Took off in the 1970s

The Social Movements of the 1970s

• Decline in the authority of political and other institutions

• A new sense of limits, of lower horizons• Destruction of relations with others,

fragmenting sense of self• Creeping sense of misanthropy – • animal rights, population concern, assisted

suicide, changing attitudes to capital punishment, to gun controls, new attitude to technology

False Alarms

• Limits to Growth: Club of Rome’s explosive 1971 publication was wrong in its predictions:

• The Economist magazine in 1997:• “So, according to the Club of Rome, [petroleum] reserves should

have been overdrawn by 50 billion barrels by 1990. In fact, by 1990 unexploited reserves amounted to 900 billion barrels — not accounting the tar shales, of which a single deposit in Alberta contains more than 550 billion barrels. The Club of Rome made similarly wrong predictions about natural gas, silver, tin, uranium, aluminium, copper, lead and zinc.

Panics about threats that did not materialise

• The ozone layer is no longer such a large concern for scientists after cfc’s were banned.

• Many medical concerns that provoked hysterical reactions have not come true – CJD, Aids…

But what of climate change?

• Even if we admit the social origins, does not climate change constitute a real problem?

• Bjorn Lomborg: “Global warming is real - it is man-made and it is an important problem. But it is not the end of the world.”

• Lomborg: “When thinking about the future, it is fashionable to be pessimistic. Yet the evidence unequivocally belies such pessimism. Over the past centuries, humanity's lot has improved dramatically - in the developed world, where it is rather obvious, but also in the developing world, where life expectancy has more than doubled in the past 100 years.”

The Moralization of the Environment?

• Replacement for religion?• Policing of everyday behaviour• Source of authority for the elite. They tell

us what to do. • Schools propagandize green behaviour as

if it will really make a difference.

Green warriors

10:10 No pressure!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WjVW6roRs-w

Conclusions

• 1) The idea that resources are finite does not reflect the genius of humankind at solving problems

• 2) The new attitude of finiteness reflects the failure of 1960s Western society to resolve social problems, not real new technology-related issues

• 3) “Green” thinking is becoming a way of establishing authority for a worn-out elite