Exploring the environmental context of population control
Reviewed by David Morrison
Those who are confronted with an obvious and great evil have a tendency to adopt too narrow a focus and to forget ancillary factors. Anyone struggling to promote the idea that human life is sacred before birth, for example, must occasionally pause to reflect upon abortions wider connections with population control. Likewise, those who oppose population control need to bear in mind that this movement did not arise on its own but is intertwined with a broader environmental agenda. The course of the environmental debate has a direct impact on how the population control movement funds itself, picks its targets, and sets its agenda.
The Ethics and Public Policy Center has done those interested in the human ramifications of the environmental debate a great service by publishing Creation At Risk? Religion, Science and Environmentalism (Michael Cromarte, Editor, 1995, Wm B. Eerdmans Publishing, ISBN: 0- 8208-4104-X, 166 pages, $14.00). Like the Nine Lives of Population Control before it, Creation at Risk? is the fruit of the Center’s commitment to free and open debate on contentious issues. The results are both enlightening and provocative.
The creation of “Greenenstein”
Charles T. Rubin, who teaches political science at Duquesne University, kicks off the debate with an essay called “Managing the planet.” “Environmentalism” and “the environment” have become catch phrases in the contemporary political debate, he argues, even though there is no uniform agreement on just what the terms mean. To the environmentalists, of course, “everything is the environment,” which means that their brand of environmentalism must, by necessity, take on a utopian and totalitarian cast. Rubin notes: “[C]onceptualizing situations under the rubric of ‘the environment’ promotes a tendency to find a single or global cause.” This tendency introduces a subtle totalitarianism into even the most ‘mainstream’ of environmentalists:
If those who eschew totalitarianism accept the ‘environmental problem’ mindset, then the means they are going to suggest to solve or ameliorate those problems are almost certainly going to appear inadequate or half-hearted, thus casting doubt on their environmental credentials.
Rubin makes it clear that these misanthropic attitudes have consequences, such as the ‘planet-healthy’ plan to disinhabit large parts of the earth:
Red totalitarianism ‘solved’ the problem of human nature with the Gulag. Some greens have thought up a different use for barbed wire. So mainstream a foundation as the Pew Charitable Trusts is conducting research info how vast settled tracts of the United States could be returned to wilderness. Communities, traditions, history are not just subordinated to the whole-earth perspective, they are invisible to it.
Greenenstein denied
Andrew Kimbrell, who directs the Institute for Technology Assessment in Washington, D.C., responding to Rubin’s concerns, pooh-poohs the notion that environmentalists are creating some sort of totalitarian “Greenenstein” monster. Although Rubin has read all the right books. Kimbrell says, he has missed their “real” meaning. Environmentalism it not totalitarian, but rather is a reaction against capitalism’s “success” in turning both land and labor into commodities. Kimbrell asserts that technology is the driving totalitarian force in modern life, so much of it requiring centralization of resources and government management. His example is nuclear power, which requires a heavy investment in centralized political and economic power to function. Not that all technology is bad. Kimbrell likes solar power, which he calls more “democratic” because it is cheaper and available to all. Unfortunately for his arguments Kimbrell admits that he sees “goal oriented” environmental legislation as inherently “inefficient,” adding, “what you need to do is actually say [in law] how something is going to be done, not just that it is going to be done.” If this is not socialist central planning, what is?
Poor research, funding hit
Patrick J. Michaels addresses the flawed science and even more deeply flawed procedure by which research is funded in “The climate change debacle.” Michaels, the climatologist for the Commonwealth of Virginia, makes short work of the General Circulation Models (GCMs) which are used to project what will happen if ‘global warming’ occurs. These models, Michaels says, contain hidden “fudge factors.” “[W]e cannot simulate the current climate from known scientific principles,” Michaels writes, “[t]herefore the question ‘how much can we expect the climate to change’ becomes impossible to answer with confidence? Such bad science has been perpetuated by politicized funding mechanisms, according to Michaels:
The climate-change debacle — where politicized science created impossible policy — should serve as a model of what is wrong with government monopolies in the information business. Besides leading the United States to sign a treaty it cannot uphold without seriously disrupting its own energy economy, it is also likely to result in a great deal of mistrust in science in general.
Worldwatch objects
Christopher Flavin, vice president of the World Watch Institute, responded with what was perhaps the most inane comment made during the entire proceeding. He began by urging that Michael’s “misguided” observations about flaws in both the GCM’s and their funding be “ignored.” If there is uncertainty about climactic change, Flavin asserted, that very uncertainty demands that we do something. Society should invoke the “precautionary principle” and act in every instance as if something might happen. That this would result in an endless series of false alarms did not disconcert him in the least, perhaps because this is the principle enterprise of his Institute.
Here comes the sun
It is left to Greg Easterbrook, author of the book A Moment on the Earth; the Coming Age of Environmental Optimism, to nail shut the coffin of environmental alarmism.
His essay, “Here comes the Sun,” lays out a simple thesis: that the market economy can successfully attack environmental problems when it is encouraged to by the government. “Western market economies excel at producing what they are asked to produce, and increasingly they are being asked to produce conservation,” Easterbrook writes. As a result, things are much better than they were even a short 25 years ago.
Consider some of these eye-opening statistics: smog has declined by one-third, despite a doubling of both numbers of vehicles and miles driven, while in Los Angeles it has dropped by one half. In 1972 one-third of the bodies of water in the United States were safe for fishing and swimming while today, two-thirds are. The last load of municipal sludge was dumped into a body of water in 1992. Hazardous chemicals are being produced in ever lessening amounts and the percentage of trash heading for landfills is decreasing. The amount of forest in the United States is increasing, even as the U.S. population continues to grow. Easterbrook’s point, of course, is that these environmental improvements are no accident. They are the product of a country where free markets encourage a free exchange of ideas on how to make things better.
As Easterbrook points out, the world is not without its problems. Large scale environmental degradation haunts the developing world and great tracts of what used to be called the socialist world. But the solution to these problems lies not in mandating a (further) reduction in the number of people but rather in paying more attention to how we organize ourselves and what we ask our economies to produce.
The central message in Creation at Risk is that human beings, by employing their God-given talent, energy and freedom, and by ordering themselves to seek the good, may successfully overcome the challenges that managing the environment presents. Economic development and resource management should be the ally, not the enemy, of fertility and freedom.
