On the Adam Smith Institute blog where, incidentally, there is now a link to this site, Alex Singleton quotes from a speech in which Michael Chrichton compares environmentalists to religious fundamentalists.
For example, environmentalists have a back to basics, back to nature, Garden of Eden myth, in which if only we could learn to work with nature instead of against it, like ancient peoples did, there would be paradise on Earth. Chrichton debunks this myth:
There is no Eden. There never was. What was that Eden of the wonderful mythic past? Is it the time when infant mortality was 80%, when four children in five died of disease before the age of five? When one woman in six died in childbirth? When the average lifespan was 40, as it was in America a century ago. When plagues swept across the planet, killing millions in a stroke. Was it when millions starved to death? Is that when it was Eden?
But even if we could have paradise on Earth, just how natural would it be?
And if you, even now, put yourself in nature even for a matter of days, you will quickly be disabused of all your romantic fantasies. Take a trek through the jungles of Borneo, and in short order you will have festering sores on your skin, you’ll have bugs all over your body, biting in your hair, crawling up your nose and into your ears, you’ll have infections and sickness and if you’re not with somebody who knows what they’re doing, you’ll quickly starve to death. But chances are that even in the jungles of Borneo you won’t experience nature so directly, because you will have covered your entire body with DEET and you will be doing everything you can to keep those bugs off you.
The truth is, almost nobody wants to experience real nature. What people want is to spend a week or two in a cabin in the woods, with screens on the windows. They want a simplified life for a while, without all their stuff. Or a nice river rafting trip for a few days, with somebody else doing the cooking. Nobody wants to go back to nature in any real way, and nobody does. It’s all talk-and as the years go on, and the world population grows increasingly urban, it’s uninformed talk.
The Garden of Eden myth is what leads many environmentalists to assume by default that technology is bad because it is unnatural. This can be dangerous. It can lead to poor people dying of malaria in their millions because somebody decided that DDT must be bad because it’s an evil, artificial chemical.
While scientific papers hidden in obscure journals reveal that DDT is innocuous, these reports don’t make it into newspapers, so don’t influence the politicians. Chrichton concludes:
…it’s time to abandon the religion of environmentalism, and return to the science of environmentalism, and base our public policy decisions firmly on that.
This might happen the day people start to think critically about issues like the environment instead of jumping on the latest feel good, save-the-planet bandwagon and demanding that the governent Do Something About It. I don’t see that day coming very soon, but we can try.
Amen amen. Let’s make it so.
I always did like Crichton. I couldnt agree more. Most enviromentalists I know have never been in the wilderness for more than a short fulow. Even the hardcore guys that live off-grid and live on what they produce form their land fail to admit the technological path that was required to come up with solar panels, storage batteries, and even things so simple as the steel in the tools they use for their gardnening. I am all about preserving nature, if for no other reason, just to remind us where we came from, and what great power lies withing the human mind.
We would expect to find a difference between the means on many dimensions that would compare “environmentalists” with “industrialists” (or other term you might apply). However, picking a point on the tail of a distribution is not the way to characterize a whole population. Most people who would label themselves as environmentalists simply try to cause less harm to the environment than they might otherwise cause. Not many would assert that the answer is to throw the baby (modern health practices) out with the bathwater (unnecessary industrial pollution).
We would expect to find a difference between the means on many dimensions that would compare “environmentalists” with “industrialists” (or other term you might apply). However, picking a point on the tail of a distribution is not the way to characterize a whole population. Most people who would label themselves as environmentalists simply try to cause less harm to the environment than they might otherwise cause. Not many would assert that the answer is to throw the baby (modern health practices) out with the bathwater (unnecessary industrial pollution).
MC addressed a group in San Francisco a week or so ago, and I think I read a part of it here. Is there any place I can get the whole thing and print it out? I have had thoughts very like these I hear now for years. I insist the sky was not blue all day yesterday. We had a lot of rain. Today it is blue