http://www.aynrand.org/medialink/speeches/earthdayconf2001.shtml
Environmentalism vs. Human Life
Andrew Bernstein
The environmentalist movement is consistently antagonistic to the
requirements of human life on earth. On issue after issue, the
environmentalists hold viewpoints that oppose man's survival needs. Man's
nature requires him to continuously reshape his environment, e.g., to clear
land for agricultural development, build houses and cities, engage in
medical research to cure diseases, and so forth. But the greens oppose every
productive activity on which human survival depends. The leading current
example of this is their crusade to block development of oil in the Arctic
National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). ANWR is an area so abundant in oil that
Senator Frank Murkowski of Alaska, chairman of the Senate Committee on
Energy and Natural Resources, states that it could produce oil for decades,
adding as much as $325 billion to the U.S. economy and reducing imports by
well over one million barrels per day. Though geologists claim that ANWR
holds over seven billion barrels, enabling it to add significantly to
American energy production, its exploitation is currently blocked by
environmentalist restrictions imposed for the sole purpose of protecting the
wilderness, the caribou, the ice floes. Simply put, the question is, ice or
oil heat - which is more important? The environmentalists are right that
there is a profoundly important moral issue at stake: the requirements of
man's survival vs. the value of nature as an end in itself. Because man's
right to live as man is the highest value on earth it is morally imperative
that the environmentalists be defeated.
Nor is the green opposition to the development of ANWR's oil the only issue
on which their beliefs and actions harm human life. Environmentalist
restrictions are largely responsible for California's current energy crisis.
Environmentalist groups in the state have attacked every form of energy
production. Every attempt to build nuclear power plants has come under years
of prohibitively expensive litigation. The use of coal is attacked because
it is too "dirty," hydroelectric power is criticized because dam
construction threatens the existence of some obscure species, even the
biomass industry, which employs timber chips and forest leftovers as fuel to
produce electricity, has come under litigation. The Honey Lake biomass plant
was shut down last year because a lawsuit against the U.S. Forest Service
originated by the San Francisco-based Earth Island Institute caused the
suspension of the logging operations that provided the company its fuel
source. Prior to the shutdown, the 20 biomass companies in California could
collectively have generated 600 megawatts of electricity per year. The
reason environmentalists seek to deprive Californians of power? To protect
the late-succession/old-growth forests that are home to the California
spotted owl and the Pacific fisher. Because of birds, human homes, work
places and hospitals are deprived of power and exposed to all the attendant
dangers.
"Green activists have worked for decades to stop the construction of major
power plants in California - and have succeeded. As a result, California
generates less power per resident than any other state, and "imports" about
one-quarter of the energy it consumes. Since 1985 only minor power plants
have been built in California, adding only 6,000 megawatts to the state's
supply - hardly enough to meet an increased demand for 10,000 megawatts. If
plants generating an additional 4,000 megawatts had been built in the last
decade, there would be no energy crisis today. By preventing entrepreneurs
from building power plants, environmentalists choked the supply of power and
set the stage for crises like the current one."1
Further, environmentalists today continue their decades-long assault on the
automobile. Yesterday, Earth Day Network coordinated an "Earth Car-Free Day"
in countries around the world, an event whose goal was to keep people from
using their cars and seek alternative means of transportation. "Across the
world, people will be staying out of cars, riding bicycles, walking or
participating in open-air festivals on streets blocked from cars as part of
this event," said Eric Britton, head of The Commons, one of the green groups
organizing the protest. Part of the purpose, say the leaders, is to protest
against air pollution and global warming.
For decades, environmentalists have argued that the car pollutes the air and
causes the depletion of the earth's resources. Today they add the claim that
its widespread use leads to global warming. As far back as 1970, in an essay
entitled, "Warning: The Automobile Is Dangerous to Earth, Air, Fire, Water,
Mind and Body," environmentalist Kenneth Cantor claimed that "the automobile
and the American public are locked in a life and death struggle." He stated
that "sixty percent of all pollutants added to the air in the United States
come from the internal combustion engine. In 1967, 87.4 percent of the
14,000 tons per day added to the air above Los Angeles came from
gasoline-powered motor vehicles." Cantor concluded that "the atmosphere
around us has truly become a garbage dump." He went on to make similar
claims regarding the relationship between automobile use and an alleged
reckless depletion of the earth's non-renewable resources.2
Among other proposals, Cantor recommended that people use bicycles instead
of cars, hitchhike and pick up hitchhikers, support programs aimed at
reducing automobile use to one-tenth of then-current levels, take political
action to defeat such "public abominations" as new freeways and highway
bridges, eliminate the federal highway program and replace it with increased
public transportation, and tax the sale of all new automobiles to fund the
recycling of all old car hulks after the usable parts had been removed.3
These sentiments are echoed wholeheartedly by the environmentalist movement
today. The so-called Earth Liberation Front recently declared war on the
SUV, setting fire to a car dealership in Eugene, Oregon. "We can no longer
allow the rich to parade around in their armored existence, leaving a
wasteland behind in their tracks," they said. "SUVs destroy the earth."
It is clear that the development of ANWR's oil, the widespread use of the
automobile and the construction of California power plants are in the best
interest of human beings. ANWR will supply the United States with a vast new
source of oil; additional power plants in California will provide
electricity for millions of human beings currently suffering from shortages
and rolling brownouts; and hundreds of millions of people around the world
will continue to get to work, play or family gatherings most conveniently by
means of their cars. Why do the greens oppose these human advances? Why do
they combat similar innovations that improve man's life? Why, for example,
were they against use of the Pacific yew tree, even though its bark is a
source of taxol, which was considered an outstanding new drug in man's war
against cancer? Why did the EPA ban DDT, even though its own hearings
established that the pesticide is harmless to man and animals, but deadly to
malaria-carrying mosquitoes? Why do they oppose medical testing on
laboratory mice, even though such methods were instrumental in winning the
battles against polio and diabetes, and are similarly necessary for research
seeking cures for heart disease, AIDS and other diseases fatal to man? The
answer is that they are not lovers of man. They value every other life form
on earth as being above him, no matter if insignificant or even lethal.
David Graeber, a biologist with the National Parks Service, made clear in a
Los Angeles Times Book Review essay both his contempt for man and his
reverence for the natural environment as an end in itself. He states that he
and his colleagues in the green movement "value wilderness for its own sake,
not for what value it confers upon mankind. . . . We are not interested in
the utility of a particular species, or free-flowing river, or eco-system to
mankind. They have intrinsic value, more value - to me - than another human
body, or a billion of them. Human happiness, and certainly human fecundity,
are not as important as a wild and healthy planet. . . . It is cosmically
unlikely that the developed world will choose to end its orgy of
fossil-energy consumption, and the Third World its suicidal consumption of
landscape. Until such time as homo sapiens should decide to rejoin nature,
some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along."4
And speaking of viruses, it seems that they have rights, too. According to
Rutgers ecologist, David Ehrenfeld the world's remaining supply of the
smallpox virus should not be exterminated, since it preys only on human
beings.5
Graeber's claim that nature has "intrinsic value," that it is worthy of our
esteem, even veneration, quite apart from any utilitarian purpose it might
satisfy for us, is the key to understanding the environmentalist movement.
Man, on this view, is an intruder, an eco-nuisance who inflicts harm on the
sacred natural environment he inhabits. Observe the many attempts to turn
environmentalism into a quasi-religion. Former New Left leader Tom Hayden
taught a course at Santa Monica College entitled "Environment and
Spirituality," in which he stressed that "we need to see nature as having a
sacred quality, so that we revere it and are in awe of it." The Ecoforestry
Institute, in a full-page ad opposing the logging of trees, claimed that
trees have intrinsic value and argued that the protection of forests "is
more than an economic or ecological issue. It is a spiritual one as well."
Paul Ehrlich, notorious for his ceaselessly erroneous predictions of
catastrophic death tolls from massive worldwide famines, predictably bases
his claims in faith rather than science and reason. "It is probably in vain
that so many look to science and technology to solve our present ecological
crisis," he states. "Much more basic changes are needed, perhaps of the type
exemplified by the . . . hippie movement - a movement that adopts most of
its religious ideas from the non-Christian East. It is a movement wrapped up
in Zen Buddhism, physical love and a disdain for material wealth." Carl
Sagan issued a call for a religious crusade on behalf of environmentalist
values. "We are close to committing - many would say we are already
committing - what in religious language is sometimes called Crimes against
Creation," he said. Environmentalism "must be recognized as having a
religious as well as a scientific dimension."6
The future of human civilization depends on understanding that the
environmentalists are wrong - that they are mistaken systematically, on
every point and issue. They are wrong scientifically, they are wrong
logically and, above all, they are wrong morally. Take the scientific point
first. Just as they were dead wrong regarding the alleged danger of DDT,
they are similarly mistaken about both hazards they attribute to the
automobile - the dual claims of increased air pollution and the waste of
non-renewable resources. At the time that the Clean Air Act was passed in
1970, our air was becoming progressively cleaner, not dirtier, and had been
doing so for a long time precisely because of industrial progress. According
to Professor Matthew Crenson of Johns Hopkins University, sulfur dioxide
pollution had been declining for decades. In 1971 he wrote, "In some cities
the sulfur dioxide content of the air today is only one-third or one-fourth
of what it was before World War Two." Measurements in 14 U.S. cities in
1931-32 showed an average particulate concentration of 510 micrograms per
cubic meter. By 1957 it was down to 120 micrograms per cubic meter, and in
1969 the measurement stood at 92 micrograms per cubic meter. The major
reason for this positive trend was the conversion to cleaner burning fuels,
such as oil and gas, from coal or wood. Improvements in technology on a free
market caused this trend, not environmentalist propaganda or governmental
legislation.7
In keeping with this pre-environmentalist trend, auto emissions had also
become cleaner. The auto industry had been working on the problem for years,
and by 1968 cars with significantly improved emission characteristics were
already being produced, and newer anti-pollution equipment was being tested.
"By 1970, when the Clean Air Act was passed, auto emissions had already been
reduced 70 to 80 percent from the level of two decades earlier." Indeed,
environmentalist legislation worsened air quality in this country. It
introduced the catalytic converter, which produces sulfuric acid. An EPA
report in 1977 presented the results of a two-year study: a 25 percent drop
in carbon monoxide emissions due to catalytic converters was accompanied by
an increase of 50 percent in emissions of the oxides of nitrogen. A similar
environmentalist travesty played out in the 1990s when the Clean Air Act of
1990 required many Americans to use gasoline oxygenated with MBTE and
ethanol. MBTE produced so many complaints of headache and nausea from users
that the governor of Alaska banned it after four weeks of use. The other
additive, ethanol, produces ozone, which at low levels is a pollutant. "Even
the EPA admits that ethanol produces more nitrogen oxides and hydrocarbons
than regular gas."8
The environmentalist attack on the automobile has centered on carbon
monoxide emissions. The myth they have created and spread is that the air
was significantly purer before there were any automobiles or factories. This
is false. An important point is that 90 percent of the world's automobiles
are in the northern hemisphere, but there is no hemispheric difference in
carbon monoxide levels. Nor are carbon monoxide levels increasing on a
worldwide basis. In 1978 the EPA suppressed a scientific study showing that
up to 80 percent of air pollution was caused by natural, not man-made
phenomena. It took a lawsuit filed under the Freedom of Information Act to
pry the report out of them. One of the leading sources of air pollution
widely ignored by the greens is volcanoes. According to Dr. William Pecora,
former director of the United States Geological Survey, just three volcanic
eruptions in the last 120 years (Krakatoa, Indonesia, 1883; Katmai, Alaska,
1912; and Hekla, Iceland, 1947) produced more particulate and gaseous
pollution of the atmosphere than the combined activities of all the men who
ever lived. There are many such examples. Swamps are by far the greatest
source of methane pollution, and Public Works, the official publication of
Oregon's Environmental Protection Agency, states that burping cows rank as
the number one source of air pollution in America, disgorging 50 million
tons of hydrocarbons into the atmosphere each year. It must be made clear
that Mother Nature, not man's automobiles or factories, is by far the
greatest source of air pollution.9
The scientific facts regarding the alleged depletion of "non-renewable"
resources also contradicts the environmentalists' accusations. Starting in
the 1970s and continuing today, environmentalist doomsayers have advocated a
"limits to growth" doctrine which claimed that the world supply of such
resources as aluminum, iron, petroleum and others would be exhausted in a
matter of decades. A brief study of the facts resoundingly refutes such
nonsense. First, a minor point: the amounts of most of these natural
resources existing in the earth's crust, as estimated by the United States
Geological Survey, are sufficient to last for thousands of years, even at
increased rates of consumption. But the most important point is that by far
the greatest natural resource is man's reasoning mind that enables him to
identify the properties and potential functions of raw materials. In
medieval Europe, for example, charcoal from wood was the main source of
energy. When wood began to grow scarce and consequently more expensive,
people sought other means of fuel. They eventually found it in chunks of
black rock previously thought useless - coal. Centuries later, in the
mid-1800s, some people feared that man was running out of coal. When the
price rose, innovators were encouraged to seek other energy sources. For
years, farmers in western Pennsylvania had been troubled by the presence of
a viscous black liquid that damaged their crops and pastures. Nobody saw any
uses for it, but finally some entrepreneurs saw possibilities in it and, in
1859, formed the Pennsylvania Rock Oil Company of Titusville, Pennsylvania.
Shortly thereafter, the firm was successful in digging for oil. Today we use
fiber optic cables instead of copper wire for phone lines. Such glass fibers
are derived from ordinary sand. Further, we know of the enormous resources
contained in sea water, and of additional supplies buried beneath the ocean
floor. We know of the huge supplies of fuel available from shale and tar
sands Ocean thermal power, geo-thermal energy and bio conversion - methods
of generating power from the sun-warmed surface waters of the ocean, from
the enormous heat contained within the earth, and by converting organic
materials, especially wastes - are all feasible and represent the virtually
unlimited power sources of the future.10
Environmentalists scoff that such claims are mere science fiction. These are
the same mentalities who, centuries ago, could conceive of no possible uses
for either coal or oil; who snickered at the thought that man might fly; who
couldn't dream of space travel or nuclear power plants; and who would have
regarded the idea that everyday sand could be employed to make fiber optic
cables as the sheerest lunacy. The rational mind is man's greatest resource.
When it has the freedom to innovate, it finds productive uses for every
substance on earth, including waste by-products. Automobiles currently
require gasoline, it is true, just as sailing ships required wood and
canvas, and horses required hay and oats. What will be the transportation
vehicles of the future - and what energy source will power them? Today,
nobody could predict it, just as in 1700 nobody could predict automobiles,
jet travel, nuclear-powered ships or manned missions to the moon. One
prediction, however, is a certainty: if men possess the political/economic
freedom provided by capitalism, then the innovations of the future will
dwarf such recent advances as electrical power, television, rocketry and
computer technology.
The environmentalists are mistaken logically, as well as scientifically.
Their use of the term "environment" involves a deadly equivocation, an
unwarranted switch in the term's meaning. "Logically, there can be no
concept of an 'environment' that is not the environment of someone (or
something). . . 'Environment' is a relational concept. It properly refers to
the surroundings of some entity as they relate to that entity." But the
theory of intrinsic value holds that the environment is to be valued, even
worshiped, independent of its worth to man, indeed in contradiction to his
interest. The environmentalist takes in the unwary with fallacious logic.
"He initially counts on its correct meaning, so that people accept a need to
care about the fate of the 'environment' - which they assume in some way is
their environment and is linked to their fate. This is why the movement's
focus is pointedly on the 'environment,' rather than on the non-relational
concept 'nature.' But once a confused public has been taken in,
environmentalists re-package 'environment' to denote something upheld as
existing separately from human beings."11
Rationally, the environment is man's surroundings or milieu, to be used in
accordance with his best interests. This leads to the moral error in
environmentalism's argument, by far the most important issue of all. The
intrinsic theory of nature's value holds that the environment is an end in
itself, and that man's needs are to be sacrificed to it. So swamps, jungles,
yew trees, spotted owls, snail darters, laboratory mice, chinook salmon,
mosquitoes, even viruses are sacred, not to be disturbed; but human dams,
houses, power plants are not to be built, and man's health and life
expectancy are not to be protected. Environmentalism is the most virulent
form of the self-sacrifice ethics ever spawned. Communists and Nazis claim
that an individual must sacrifice himself to the people or the race, but at
least they argue that it is other human beings who are to benefit from an
individual's self-immolation. But the environmentalists argue that human
life as such must be sacrificed to the interest of the non-human - to the
bugs, dirt and bacteria.
To fight the insanities of environmentalism it is necessary to recognize and
uphold the right of an individual human being to his own life. Human life is
the only moral absolute on earth. Anything else acquires worth only insofar
as it benefits man. Trees are a value only because they provide man with
shade, timber, fruit, beautiful vistas, and so on. Clean air is a value only
because it promotes human health and longevity. Automobiles are a value
because they greatly increase the personal range and comfort of a man's
transportation. The extraction of oil from ANWR and the development of other
natural resources are a value because they provide the raw materials with
which to create modern industrial civilization. Science, technology and
industry are valuable for one reason: they greatly raise man's standard of
living and increase his life expectancy. The moral principle is that man's
life is the yardstick by reference to which the worth of any object, person
or event is judged.
By this standard, the value of science, technology and industry is enormous
and indisputable. Developments in agricultural science and the creation of
modern farming equipment has led to an abundance of food in the Western
world and to the Green Revolution, which produced more rice and grain in
many Asian countries. There has never been a famine in the history of the
United States. When was the last time a famine occurred in any
industrialized nation? Even raising such a question causes historians to
scratch their heads, trying to remember. Yet a brief study of history
reveals that famine was and remains a widespread occurrence in the
non-industrialized countries. The great 20th century historian, Fernand
Braudel, writes that France is believed to have suffered 10 general famines
during the 10th century, 26 in the 11th, 2 in the 12th, 4 in the 14th, 7 in
the 15th, 13 in the 16th, 11 in the 17th and 16 in the 18th. "Dearth and
penury were continual. . . Famine recurred so insistently for centuries that
it became incorporated into man's biological regime and built into his daily
life." It was not wiped out in Western Europe until the close of the 18th
century, i.e., during the period of the Industrial Revolution. In the
non-industrialized nations of the Third World today the same heartbreaking
conditions exist. According to various charitable organizations for
children, though it takes but 72 cents a day to provide a child with
adequate nutrition and medical care, 30,000 children die daily from
malnutrition and preventable diseases related to it.12
Similarly, advances in medicine have steadily raised the human life
expectancy. A female child born in the United States today has a life
expectancy approaching 80 years; and a male child's is mid-to-high
seventies. The human life expectancy in the industrialized nations is
rising, the exact opposite of what would occur if any of the
environmentalist scare stories regarding the harmful effects of
industrialization were true. The life expectancy is significantly lower in
the countries that are not industrialized.
Further, the inventions and innovations made possible only by technological
progress have vastly enriched the men of the entire Western world. The
electric light, the telephone, the automobile, the airplane, the radio,
television, refrigerator, air conditioner, personal computer and Internet
are merely some of the advances that have made us wealthy. The
anti-technology, anti-industry nature of the environmentalist movement is
what marks it as a phenomenon virulently anti-human life.
Since the good is that which benefits human life, the converse also holds
true: whatever harms or destroys human life is evil. On this score,
environmentalism is the most destructive doctrine ever devised. When put
into actual practice, it causes harm, even death, to incalculable numbers of
human beings. By conservative estimate, the ban on DDT and other pesticides
has caused the death by malaria of tens of millions of human beings. The
greens' war against taxol retards man's struggle to triumph over cancer,
causing untold human deaths. The same will be true if they succeed in
banning medical testing on laboratory rats and mice. Their restrictions on
building power plants in California resulted in diminished electricity for
hospitals, police stations, firehouses and other emergency facilities,
threatening human life. Their fight against oil development in ANWR will
result in diminished heating fuel, gasoline and other petroleum products
upon which modern industrialized civilization and our living standard
depends. As the most anti-human theory in history, environmentalism is
necessarily the most inhuman. Its virulently anti-man essence leaves us with
a stark choice: human life or environmentalism. There is no middle ground.
References
David Holcberg, "Why Greens Are to Blame for Blackouts,"
www.aynrand.org.
The Environmental Handbook, ed. by Garrett De Bell (New York: Ballantine
Books, 1970), pp. 197-207.
Ibid., pp. 210-12.
David Graeber, "Mother Nature as a Hothouse Flower," Los Angeles Times Book
Review, Oct. 22, 1989, pp. 1, 9.
Peter Schwartz, "The Philosophy of Privation," in Ayn Rand, Return of the
Primitive (New York: Penguin, 1998), p. 221.
Ibid., pp. 230-31.
Edmund Contoski, Makers and Takers (Minneapolis: American Liberty
Publishers, 1997), pp. 193-94.
Ibid., pp. 195-97.
Ibid., pp. 201-04.
Michael Sanera and Jane Shaw, Facts, Not Fear (Washington, D.C.: Regnery
Publishing, 1996), pp. 76-7, 79-81; Julian Simon, The Ultimate Resource
(Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1981), p. 93; Herman
Kahn, et. al., The Next 200 Years (New York: William Morrow and Co., 1976),
pp. 68-76, 103-05.
Return of the Primitive, op. cit., p. 228.
Fernand Braudel, Capitalism and Material Life, 1400-1800 (New York: Harper &
Row, 1967), pp. 38-40; literature from Childreach,
www.childreach.org.
--
Atheism teaches that there is no God, hence no God-given rights. That
ideology coupled with a system that believed in the superiority of the state
at the expense of the individual was murderously synergistic.
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