"You have been warned: green fascism could soon be on the march."
Ronald Bailey | April 22, 2008, 4:12pm
So writes New Scientist reporter Fred Pearce at his Fred's Footprint blog. Pearce is worried that ideological environmentalism might once again embrace coercive population control. Pearce knows whereof he speaks:
... the unpalatable truth is that a lot of environmental thinking over the past half century has been underpinned by an unhealthy preoccupation with the breeding propensity of Asians and Africans.
They were, it was often held, polluting the human gene pool as well as the planet. Such thinking was not fringe: it involved some of the great names of the environment movement.
So the American academic Garrett Hardin said in his classic and still-revered environment text Tragedy of the Commons in 1968, "Freedom to breed will bring ruin to all." It must be "relinquished to preserve and nurture other and more precious freedoms." Lest we have any doubt who should do the relinquishing, he wrote elsewhere about how college students should have more children than those with low IQs.
Or take Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb from the same era. That book said the world could no longer feed itself and called for population control "by compulsion if voluntary methods fail."
Meanwhile the British book Blueprint for Survival, published by the Ecologist magazine, sided with the demagogue-of-the-day Enoch Powell in calling for "an end to immigration". Far from being ostracised as a right-wing tract, its recipe was supported by Friends of the Earth and Peter Scott, the TV wildlife king and founder of the World Wildlife Fund.
One can get a sense of how Ehrlich viewed Asian breeding from this quotation from his The Population Bomb (1968) about when he, his wife and daughter took a taxi through Delhi in India:
The streets seemed alive with people. People eating, people washing, people sleeping. People visiting, arguing, and screaming. People thrusting their hands through the taxi window, begging. People defecating and urinating. People clinging to buses. People herding animals. People, people, people, people.As we moved slowly through the mob, hand horn squawking, the dust, noise, heat and cooking fires gave the scene a hellish aspect. Would we ever get to our hotel? All three of us were, frankly frightened."
I wonder how Ehrlich survives a taxi ride down Broadway in Manhattan where the population density was nearly 70,000 people per square mile in 1970, (New York City, 26,000 per square mile) compared to Delhi's 29,000 per square mile in 2007? Like many another ideological environmentalist, Ehrlich confuses poverty with overpopulation.
In any case, Ehrlich lamely added:
...the problems of Delhi and Calcutta are our problems too. Americans have helped create them; we help to prevent their solution. We must all learn to identify with the plight of our less fortunate fellows on Spaceship Earth if we are to help both them and ourselves to survive.
What how did we Americans cause these problems? We shipped India food and medicines. What did Erhlich think the solution should be?
"We must have population control at home, hopefully through changes in our value system, but by compulsion if voluntary methods fail."
My 2003 column on real environmental racism is here. Pearce's full blog post on "Green Fascism" is here.
James Anderson Merritt | April 22, 2008, 4:48pm | #
Envrionmental pronouncements here in Santa Cruz CA almost invariably at least tip the hat to the ZPG ethic. On local discussion boards, sincere attempts to discuss the jobs shortage, the affordable housing shortage, traffic congestion, the high price of living, our precarious water situation, etc., always attract at least one contributor who says something like, "of course, the root problem here is overbreeding -- people must give up the freedom to breed or these other problems will never be solved." That's my paraphrase, but I think I'm accurately portraying the content and tone.
In such cases, I like to point out that a great many of the problems we declare as symptoms of overbreeding are actually problems caused by the artificial (usually government-mandated) restrictions on settlement and development, especially here in California and other "envrionmentally conscious" States. Sure, the cities are getting crowded and many neighborhoods are scary, but most urban areas here are encircled by development-free, settlement-free greenbelts or other preserves, forcing the cities to "build in" (and "up," if there aren't already laws against highrise development in particular or additional development in general). Sure, water aquifers are threatened, but that's in large part because no-growth or ecologically activist governments have quashed such development projects as dams and other rain collectors, which would have sacrificed a little dry land to create huge reservoirs that could not only serve larger populations, but also mitigate California's frequent drought conditions. And let's not forget that Uncle Sam owns almost 50% of the acreage in the entire state, and has put nearly all of that real-estate off limits to settlement, and most of it off-limits to infrastructure development that might help ease the problems of a growing population that is trying to squeeze itself into a remaining area that is only a small percentage of the overall State.
When all you do is live and work in a crowded urban area, or shuttle back and forth between a bedroom community and a crowded urban center just a few miles away, it is a lot easier to accept the ZPG claims that we are overbreeding and exceeding the carrying capacity of the land, than if you actually get out in the world and view the vast, essentially empty areas of land that someone, somewhere, has made off limits to settlement and development. Why? For the benefit of all? How can asking everyone to surrender so many rights, including their right to reproduce, be of real benefit to all? Is it reasonable to say that people be sterilized (which honest commentators on the issue of overbreeding admit is the endpoint of the ZPG effort) so that the government can maintain, for example, State or national parks that only a few people are ever lucky enough to visit?
Not that I don't appreciate the parks, myself, when I ever have the free time and disposable income to visit them, but let's get a sense of priorities here. The government exists to secure our liberties, not to trade-off essential human liberties (e.g., procreation) for aesthetic niceties (huge preserves under control of an elite). I definitely smell a rat.
James Anderson Merritt | April 22, 2008, 6:27pm | #
# StupidScript | April 22, 2008, 5:05pm | #
# James Anderson Merritt | April 22, 2008, 4:48pm
# Ouch! How about this, instead:
# Don't move to a high-density area
# if high-density living bothers you.
# Choose, instead, to live in one of the
# more desolate areas of Montana, or
# northern Idaho, or Nebraska, or the
# Yukon Territory or somewhere instead of
# suggesting that the solution to high-density
# problems lies in castrating the rest
# of the state to serve the wants/needs of
# those who choose to occupy those
# condensations of humanity.
# Eviscerating what remaining unpopulated areas
# there are is a solution? For how long? Yeesh!
# Talk about narrow focus.
# I'm not agreeing with Ehrlich ...
# just disagreeing with Merritt.
I'm not sure with what you are disagreeing, though it is clear with WHOM.
I didn't call for the elimination of natural areas, not by a long shot. I didn't call for castration of people (or "the rest of the state") or evisceration of land. Indeed, I am certainly arguing against mandated human castration, at a minimum.
You are aware that the majority of Californians live on a single- or very low double-digit percentage of all acreage in the State, are you not? If we DOUBLED the amount of occupied space, the overwhelming majority of the State -- one of the nation's largest -- would still be essentially unpopulated and mostly undeveloped. There is no imminent danger of the State being overrun with human vermin. So when you use words such as "evisceration" to characterize the substance of the points I'm making here, it shows that you, like the environmental fascists, do not have an accurate sense of proportion. My point is not that I want to pave over the state, but that those who scream ultimately for sterilization based on an overpopulation that "strains the planet's capacity" are either misinformed or liars, at least in the case of my home State.
Finally, since you invite me to move, I would ask first that all of those who came here after I was born in California over a half-century ago, and who entertain fantasies of overpopulation problems that can only be solved by such extreme measures are have been enacted in recent decades -- and even more extreme measures being proposed -- leave ahead of me. Maybe that includes you. I hear that Montana and Idaho are nice...
Oleg | April 23, 2008, 5:00am | #
Guys, just one question:
even if you don't think the planet is overpopulated now, do you think that theoretically it can be overpopulated? If so, how many people do you think Earth can sustain?
Answer these questions keeping the following conditions in mind:
* no population shift to other planets, moon, etc. - it's not possible yet, even if it is, shifting people to moon to make room on Earth should sound a bit of China's policy for you.
* no severe environmental degradation from anthropocentric point of view: clear air, pure water, all that stuff. I mean globally, not only in USA, but in Bangladesh also.
* no biodiversity loss: extinction is halted or reduced to its natural rate. All that orangutans, gorillas, pandas deserve to live too.
* good quality of life: food, health, education, travel, job, etc.
* no cowardly and too quick surrender to technologies in every aspect of life. I mean, food is food, not a powder, enriched with proteins and vitamins; dignity is dignity, no radio-chips implanted into every human to secure against behavior deviations due to stress. The same time, solar panels are ok, fuel cells are ok. I hope you get the point. No time to generalize.
Last item is very important!
Rub your crystal balls and make predictions. Or dig into the depths of your reason, for some of you.
JW | April 23, 2008, 6:10pm | #
So, apparently, this is what you mean (if you feel I'm wrong, correct me): further population growth and good environmental standards are mutually exclusive.
In the developed world, probably not. We have the resources and the luxury of wealth to mitigate environmental impact to a larger degree. Does this mean no environmental impact? I doubt it. Prosperity and externalized negatives are pretty much hand-in-hand. This is not to say that technology won't further mitigate this impact as we progress, but to assume that we can have the pristine world you envision above, while maintaining our standard of living, (or for a developing nation to leapfrog to 1st world status without "environmental degradation") is folly.
In the developing world, probably. They don't have the resources, in general, and I suspect that given the choice between feeding their family or saving an orang, I think you'll know what the answer is.
While it's true that richer means fewer children, there are exceptions. Take nearly any oil-rich country in midwest. Religion plays its card there.
I'm guessing you meant the mid
east. Iowa would be surprised to say the least that they're oil-rich. Corn-rich, yes. Oil, not so much.
I regard Middle Eastern oil nations as Beverly Hillbillies. They went from nomadic tribesmen to modern oil barons virtually overnight. Their societal practices and mores are still catching up to their wealth and there's that pesky, crushing religion thing too. That said, the Middle East is hardly an overpopulation hotbed.
How would Bangladesh cope with these numbers, if it can't feed today's 150 mil.?
I don't know. I don't pretend to be able to foretell the future. None of us truly know what the population will be nor do we know what political or technological changes will take place that could have an impact, positive or negative, on the final outcome.
These population numbers are all projections, straight line extrapolations, not reality. They change from year to year. What role does the Bangledeshi govt play in its poverty? Do they have high tarrifs on imports? Do develeoped nations ag subsidies play a role in their crop siutation?
Is it similiar to the Indian situation? Socialist economic policies were largely abandoned in the mid-90's and so began their economic boom. The Indians have a long way to go, no doubt, but they have great potential to become a super-power. A billion people is a huge resource for a growing and technologically savvy economy.
Oleg | April 23, 2008, 8:52pm | #
...we can have pristine world you envision above, while maintaining our standard of living, is folly...
Again, it boils down to whether overpopulation is dealt with.
Two questions should be set apart - acknowledging overpopulation and finding ways to deal with it.
By logic, you shouldn't answer the second question, unless you have a positive answer for the first one - it's stupid to find ways to alleviate overpopulation, if there is none.
But that's how our conversation has been developing so far. A lot has been done to persuade there is no overpopulation, then all of a sudden we're discussing how to deal with it, given environmental (if you don't like environment, think about these conditions simply as conditions on finite set of natural resources, to make it more economic and less environmental) conditions!
Even without that, talking about how free markets make fertility rates go down should be, by logic, preceded by acknowledging that high fertility rates are a concern. Otherwise, why would you want them to go down with free markets?
This is my last message here, so that's how I would like to finish the discussion.
Apparently, even if you don't express it freely, overpopulation is a word from your vocabulary! May be you afraid to come out of boundaries, where libertarian ideology put you, may be you think we are not there yet, but 'high fertility rates' are somehow a concern.
That's for the first question: high fertility rates are a concern.
Now, how to deal with it? I think everything should be put on table. If free markets work, then let them do the job. So, your holy cow is spared. But that shouldn't be the only tool. Family planning - too! Not physically forcing them to have less babies, but educating. In the end, they will say thank you.
As a final part, back to coupling good living standards and pristine nature.
There is a number of countries living within their means, given by nature - they don't consume more than they have, which is actually a great estimation for population levels, not population density - while combining great living standards.
Norway, Sweden, Finland, Canada...
Now, I'm not falling into a reverie here - no nation either from Africa or from Southeast Asia would catch up with these countries soon (if ever), even if the population growth were subsided immediately, but not dealing with overpopulation and even being afraid to think freely about it not only isn't helpful, but making things even direr.
TokyoTom | April 25, 2008, 6:13am | #
Ron, I'm surprised that you would go to the effort of spreading rather thin hype about "Green fascism" without bothering to explore from a libertarian perspective whether the Green fascists have grounds for concern, what the institutional underpinnings of environmental and "overpopulation" problems might be, or what our own connections to those problems are.
It's rather simple, really: we see both cleaner environments and the demographic shift in relatively wealthy nations that protect property rights, as families and other economic actors are largely forced to bear their own costs, which provide incentives to keep both pollution and families under control.
Where populations are still growing rapidly - and environmental degradation continues apace - are societies that do not protect property rights, so that there economic actors do not internalize all costs, and families to a significant degree face a free-for-all over resources that are not effectively owned or protected.
"Development" thus presents many aspects of a "tragedy of the commons", a tragedy that we feed with our own consumer, commercial and industrial demand, which is sourced from assets that are not clearly owned, but are simply up for grabs - whether we are talking about the stripmining of the oceans, the replacement of the Amazon and SE Asian tropical forests with soybeans and palm oil/biofuel plantations, or industrial and commerical enterprises that don't bear the costs of their pollution (or of the power plants supplying their electricity).
The "Green fascists" see the destruction at the end of the chains of demand that we in the West pull and the destruction resulting from population growth that is unchecked by the pricing signals from effective ownership, and they are rightly concerned. That they fail to understand the institutional underpinnings is of course to be regretted, by it is a failure that can be remedied by a little education.
That you chose not to use your knowledge of the dynamics of "tragedy of the commons" to educate but instead to decry "Green fascists" is a similar failure, and one that I hope you will regret and try to remedy.
As it is, it seems as if you enjoy the emotional rewards of partisan struggle more than really exercising your noggin or making a contribution to directing attention to where solutions to where real problems might lie - in improved property tights protection and governance in the developing world.
Care to contribute, or just to raise an alarum about the evil greenies?
Regards,
Tom
