When an environmentalist says he or she wants to “save the planet” be sure to ask: “For whom?” Because often it seems like they’re not doing it for people at all.
The anti-people nature of environmentalism is sometimes just a matter of minor inconvenience, as when environmentalist policies force upon us flickering light bulbs, weak showers and toilets, and front-loading washing machines.
Sometimes the imposition is greater, resulting in higher energy costs, the destruction of industries, and the degradation of human health.
For instance, the Economist recently lamented, “More poor people are eating meat around the world. That means they will live longer, healthier lives, but it is bad news for the environment.”
Greater meat consumption in the developing world is a result of wealth, and, the Economist admits, a cause of health. Yet, if more Africans eat meat, this “will raise Africans’ collective contribution to global climate change.” So “the environment” now matters for reasons outside of human health?
Bernie Sanders, the socialist senator running for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, took anti-human environmentalism a step further on Wednesday night. A schoolteacher rose at CNN’s climate town hall and brought up population control. Would Sanders have the “courage,” the teacher asked, to “make it a key feature of a plan to address climate catastrophe.”
Sanders said yes, and then he went straight to abortion — “especially in poor countries around the world.” He cursed America’s Mexico City policy, which prohibits international family planning funds from funding abortions. Again, all in the name of saving the planet.
Here, Sanders is dancing dangerously close to federally funded eugenics. To say that overpopulation is a problem, and then to immediately call for more funding of abortion in, say, Africa, is a rather startling position to take — maybe even “courageous,” in the sense that it is risky to appear so callous an cruel.
Sanders may have meant something else. He seemed to believe the Mexico City policy curtailed access to contraceptives. (It does not.) He spoke the language of autonomy. So maybe Sanders sees himself as just wanting to empower poor women to control their fertility. Even so, Western enthusiasm for reducing the number of African babies has always had racist and colonialist undertones.
Even if we give Sanders this benefit of the doubt, the shadow of green misanthropy hangs over the exchange. Go back to the schoolteacher whose premises Sanders so enthusiastically embraced.
“Human population growth has more than doubled in the past 50 years,” the teacher, Martha, began. That’s imprecise enough to be misleading. The rate of growth is actually declining, while the population has continued to grow, only more slowly. “The planet cannot sustain this growth,” she continued.
This is the same hogwash we’ve been fed for over a century. “The battle to feed all of humanity is over,” Paul Ehrlich wrote just one generation ago. “In the 1970’s and 1980’s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.”
Ehrlich was dead wrong. Just as Martha and Bernie, Ehrlich saw humans as only hungry mouths and stomachs, not as useful, innovative hands and brains.
Human life is better today than it was 100 years ago, by far, and it had improved from 1000 years before that, and so on. What has improved mankind’s state? It wasn’t climate change. It wasn’t aliens. It was human ingenuity.
In other words, humans are a net positive. At least, that is so, if what you care about is human health and happiness. Too many environmentalists think people are a net drain. Or at least they think some people are.
