OPINION & EDITORIAL
Giving up beer, pizza not a prerequisite for environmentalism
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Also by Courtney Ehlers:
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by Courtney Ehlers
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
From my precarious seat on top of this soap box, I find myself well-poised to take up the fair, tasteful and dignified sport of arguing with a corpse. Internationally beloved novelist and film-director Michael Crichton died two weeks ago yesterday. A medical doctor who held a doctorate in anthropology, he exercised one of the more prominent and articulate voices of skepticism within the scientific community on subjects such as pesticides, second-hand smoke and (what else?) climate change.
More broadly, Crichton created an image of modern environmentalism as a naive, synthetic and fundamentally Judeo-Christian religion in which the pre-industrial Earth was a sort of Garden of Eden, with the Industrial Revolution as the forbidden apple that booted the whole human race into a more dangerous and imperfect world. Practitioners of this religion — so his argument goes — are mainly paranoid city-dwellers, indifferent to scientific fact, guided only by their faith that the moral salvation of mankind depends on eating organic food and renouncing SUVs and air conditioning before it’s too late.
Ah, well. Cat’s out of the bag, isn’t it? It’s broad, sweeping, ignorant and derogatory, but more importantly, it’s not totally untrue.
Like a lot of activist movements, the United States environmental movement has its share of people who are thoroughly removed from and one-sided about the issues on the table. We’ve all seen them — people with a severe underappreciation of vaccines, plastics and the FDA. They have an unrealistic squeamishness about death and seriously regard “Eat or be eaten?” as an impossible question.
They treat extinction as something invented by man’s diabolical imagination, and they treat every species as though it has an unalienable right to exist indefinitely. They regard “nature” as a monolithic entity of perfect, static equilibrium, and man as a hyperactive child with an AK-47 (except the Native Americans; they were all forest-dwelling teddy bears — like ewoks). Roadlessness is next to godliness, and economic concerns take a backseat to the importance of coercing two pandas in captivity to screw.
That said, I wish to register my confidence that real environmentalism is ultimately dominated by other, better, smarter and more earnest faces than this one. Among them are botanists, zoologists, ecologists, microbiologists, physicists, chemists, meteorologists, climatologists, doctors and lawyers.
It is vitally important that we do not confuse the two camps when determining policy, for the latter comes from a position of legitimate professional authority. Its vocabulary include terms like “compromise,” “budget,” “economy” and “poverty.” It understands that without the aid of modern medicine and engineering, a good majority of us would very likely be dead, and those who make it to adulthood would find very high mortality rates in their children. It reveres with gratitude the ingenuity behind these innovations. It reads “Nature” and “Science” and other legitimate academic periodicals. And it eats pizza and drinks beer as frequently as its apolitical counterparts.
And yes, it must break with the apolitical. As long as procedures for material input and output remain questions of policy, environmentalism will have to be political. The reason for environmentalism’s attachment to our nation’s left hip is not any inherent bleeding-heart liberalism, but rather the crucial mechanism that environmentalism and leftist causes share: government regulation. The free market simply will not do it by itself, which is unfortunate because that alienates basically anybody with reservations about a liberal stance on anything. The specter of environmentalism, in this way, becomes a threat to your level-headedness, to your impartiality, to your red-blooded capitalism, to your right to not speak French, to your escape from the cold clammy hand of Uncle Sam, to your rugged individualism, to your sexuality and to the salvation of your immortal soul.
Now, that’s an awful lot of pressure, especially for a broad blanket label for thousands of separate issues that don’t necessarily even have that much in common. There is no such thing as “the environment.” It’s a completely imaginary system for understanding the sum total of material realities on this planet, like “the economy” or “culture.” Nobody in the world actively cares about all or even most of the issues which fall under that umbrella.
Conversely, nobody can possibly be apathetic to all of them, even if they fail to identify their concerns as such. Somewhere along the way, we’re all a little concerned with public health, agriculture, the availability of food and clean water, bio-diversity, the economy and natural disasters. You could never, for example, assert your all-American rugged individualism by shrugging off synthetic hormones in the tap water that lower your sperm count and make you grow breasts.
If I could unmake one word that has entered popular lexicon in the past half-century it would be “environmentalism,” for in that single word is a unified, moving target with which thousands of disparate causes can be dismissed with a wave of the hand and a roll of the eyes.
Dr. Crichton and I will have to respectfully agree to kind-of-disagree. In pace requiescat.
Courtney Ehlers (ehlers@wisc.edu) is a sophomore majoring in environmental studies and history.
Jim Allard (November 20, 2008 @ 5:28pm):
It's important to distinguish between exploiting nature for man's benefit and preserving nature for nature's sake. This is the essential difference between environmentalism and capitalism.
The zoologists, physicists, capitalists, individualists are not the "real environmentalists," they are the opposite of environmentalists. They are the scientists and industrialists that discover how to create clean water systems, nuclear power and medical cures.
While capitalists figure out how to treat water to kill bacteria and turn sewage into fresh water, environmentalists campaign to leave water untouched in it "pure" state and champion using LESS water.
While capitalists favor nuclear power because it is good for humans and unequivocally safe. Environmentalists are consistently against nuclear power because it is "against nature." Their alleged safety concerns are a front and have nothing to do with sound science.
Another example is DDT.
Environmentalists consistently (and I mean CONSISTENTLY) distort and misrepresent science. For example, Al Gore and the entire global warming movement simply declares the "debate is over" and settled by "consensus." Not only is this patently false, it's an overt attack on science. Scientific truth has nothing to do with consensus.
Capitalism: Freedom, science, production, industry.
Environmentalism: Controls, anti-science, conservation, anti-industry.
Anonymous (November 20, 2008 @ 5:57pm):
Ever been to Butte, Montana, Jim? How do you get that water clean? How do you remove nitrates from sewage in a cost-effective manner? How do you stop the water rights war that going to define much of the next century?
You don't know, because nobody does. Using less water seems pretty damn reasonable.
Anonymous (November 20, 2008 @ 6:09pm):
First off, well said Jim. Secondly, Courtney, thanks for taking my advice (at least thats where I think you got it, the last article on global warming in the Herald and my comment on it, or if you just knew about Crichton yourself, good for you) and reading up about Michael Crichton.
The thing is, environmental problems would be best solved by the free market. We just haven't reached the point where demand for "green" cars has reached the point that merits producing them. Look at the big three auto companies. While they are begging for a bailout from the government, they are forced to make and develop expensive, greener cars that no one will buy because they are so expensive, especially with the economy in recession. The auto companies would not go begging to Washington for money if they could let the free market work and produce cars that will sell.
Anonymous (November 20, 2008 @ 9:08pm):
Jim Allard makes a lot of good points.
What's often missing from an environmentalist argument is WHY should the environment be left in a "natural state." I think that the hidden proposition in an environmentalist argument is "A natural state of the environment is better than any unnatural state."
I'd argue that this proposition isn't as true as it may sound at first. Humans modify their environment all the time to make it more fit for habitability. From the early days of humankind, man has used "natural resources" to modify the environment to make a more fit habitat for himself.
Instead of making arguments that rely on this proposition, one should really make an argument that relies on improving the lives of humans.
Courtney Ehlers (November 21, 2008 @ 10:51am):
I guess where Allard and I disagree is primarily in the semantics and secondarily in the way we view the market. Allard uses the word "environmentalist" only to describe the people who don't know what they're talking about, whereas I use it to describe those people and those who happen to share some of their goals. There are times when it's difficult to tell them apart by end-product alone, because sometimes ecosystem services are very subtle mechanisms, and it often looks a lot like "nature for nature's sake" to leave them intact so that things like soil quality and pollination will not require an additional investment of capital and labor.
And then I'm afraid I'm too cynical to share Allard's faith in the purity of capitalism. In an economy this size, I think there are just too many factors complicating what should be a simple interaction between the producer and consumer of the highest quality product. But then, neither of us are economists, and I never even finished reading Atlas Shrugged, so, who knows?
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