The environazis dispense this myth about peasant farmers being at one with nature. Sometimes the myth is so idyllic that I think they want us all to become peasant farmers. Anyway, the idea is that while big, grasping corporations are ruining the planet, if we just thought smaller and more rustic we could turn things round.
Wrong, says Matthew Parris in this week's Spectator. A former Conservative MP, he is now a journalist who derives much of his output from his long travels to developing countries all over the world. He is just back from Ethiopia, and says the idea that peasant farmers manage the land well is just risible. That is why he want to rid the planet of goats.
Goats? Yes, indeed. A herd of goats is a great asset for a family. They provide milk and meat, and more goats, which you can sell. The trouble is they eat anything that grows, and, wandering for miles in search of it, they don't care much whose land it's on. So if your neighbours are trying to raise crops, their best course would be to forget it before every last seedling has gone, down hoes, and get some goats of their own.
This, says Parris, has contributed to the desertification of many of the poorer countries he has visited. It utterly destroys the ecological balance across tens of millions of square miles. In his words:
The degradation of our planet owes as much to the poor as to the rich... A million small-scale farming operations satisfying individually modest needs can wreck a landscape and extinguish every competing variety of bird, animal, insect and plant life. Hunger is no steward of river, land and forest, and the poor may ravage their environment more cruelly than those of us who enjoy the luxury of treating outdoors as a kind of garden. Thus have the poor and their goats teemed beneath the radar of our environmental surveillance systems, and daily destroy more land than rising sea-levels will ever do.
Worth the urban romantics reflecting on. The environment is a luxury that the world's poorest can't afford to bother about. The only solution is to make the world's poor farmers rich. And - Bush is right - the only way to do that is to spread democracy, the free economy, and trade across the planet.
Post lifted from the Adam Smith blog
GREENPEACE FOUNDER LISTS THE GREENIE DECEPTIONS
I am often asked why I broke ranks with Greenpeace after 15 years as a founder and full-time environmental activist. I had my personal reasons, but it was on issues of policy that I found it necessary to move on. By the mid-1980s, the environmental movement had abandoned science and logic in favor of emotion and sensationalism. I became aware of the emerging concept of sustainable development: balancing environmental, social and economic priorities. Converted to the idea that win-win solutions could be found by bringing all interests together, I made the move from confrontation to consensus.
Since then, I have worked under the banner of Greenspirit to develop an environmental policy platform based on science, logic and the recognition that more than six billion people need to survive and prosper every day of the year. The environmental movement has lost its way, favoring political correctness over factual accuracy, stooping to scare tactics to garner support.
We're faced with environmental policies that ignore science and result in increased risk to human health and ecology. To borrow from the vernacular, how sick is that?
Genetic enhancement: Activists persist in their zero-tolerance campaign against genetically enhanced food crops. There is no evidence of harm to human health or the environment, and benefits are measurable and significant. Genetically enhanced (GE) food crops reduce chemical pesticides, boost yield and reduce soil erosion. Enriched with Vitamin A, Golden Rice could prevent blindness in 500,000 children per year in Asia and Africa if activists would stop blocking its introduction. Other food crops contain iron, Vitamin E, enhanced protein and better oils. The anti-GE campaign seeks to deny these environmental and nutritional advances by using ''Frankenfood'' scare tactics and misinformation campaigns.
Salmon farming: The campaign against salmon farming, based on erroneous and exaggerated claims of environmental damage and chemical contamination, scares us into avoiding one of the most nutritious, heart-friendly foods available. The World Health Organization, the American Heart Association and the Food and Drug Administration say that eating salmon reduces the risk of heart disease and fatal heart attack. Salmon farming takes pressure off wild stocks, yet activists tell us to eat only wild fish. Is this how we save them, by eating more?
Vinyl: Greenpeace wants to ban the use of chlorine in all industrial processes. The addition of chlorine to drinking water has been the greatest public-health advance in history, and 75 percent of our medicines are based on chlorine chemistry. Greenpeace calls for a ban on polyvinyl chloride (PVC or vinyl), claiming it is the ''poison plastic.'' There is not a shred of evidence that vinyl damages human health or the environment. Apart from lowering construction costs and delivering safe drinking water, vinyl's ease of maintenance and its ability to incorporate anti-microbial properties is critical to fighting germs in hospitals. Banning vinyl would raise the cost of an already struggling healthcare system, denying healthcare to those who can least afford it.
Hydroelectricity: International activists boast to have blocked more than 200 hydroelectric dams in the developing world and are campaigning to tear down existing dams. Hydro is the largest source of renewable electricity, providing about 12 percent of the global supply. Do activists prefer coal plants? Would they rather ignore the needs of billions of people?
Wind power: Wind power is commercially feasible, yet activists argue that the turbines kill birds and ruin landscapes. A million times more birds are killed by cats, windows and cars than by all the windmills in the world. As for aesthetics, wind turbines are works of art compared to some of our urban environments.
Nuclear power: A significant reduction in greenhouse gas emissions seems unlikely given our continued heavy reliance on fossil fuel consumption. Even UK environmentalist James Lovelock, who posited the Gaia theory that the Earth operates as a giant, self-regulating super-organism, now sees nuclear energy as key to our planet's future health. ''Civilization is in imminent danger,'' he warns, ``and has to use nuclear -- the one safe, available energy source -- or suffer the pain soon to be inflicted by our outraged planet.'' Yet environmental activists, notably Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth, continue lobbying against clean nuclear energy and for the Band-Aid Kyoto Treaty. Renewable energies, such as wind, geothermal and hydro are part of the solution. Nuclear energy is the only nongreenhouse gas-emitting power source that can effectively replace fossil fuels and satisfy global demand.
Forestry: Activists tell us to stop cutting trees and to reduce our use of wood. Deforestation is caused by clearing forests for farms and cities. Forestry operations are geared toward reforestation and the maintenance of forest cover. Forests are stable and growing where people use the most wood and are diminishing where they use less. Using wood sends a signal to the marketplace to plant more trees and produce more wood. North Americans use more wood per capita than any other continent, yet there is about the same forest area in North America as there was 100 years ago. Trees are the most abundant, renewable and biodegradable resource in the world. If we want to retain healthy forests, we should be growing more trees and using more wood, not less. This logic seems lost on activists who use chilling rhetoric and apocalyptic images to drive us in the wrong direction.
Prognosis: Environmentalism has become anti-globalization and anti-industry. Activists have abandoned science in favor of sensationalism. Their zero-tolerance, fear-mongering campaigns would ultimately prevent a cure for Vitamin A deficiency blindness, increase pesticide use, increase heart disease, deplete wild salmon stocks, raise the cost and reduce the safety of healthcare, raise construction costs, deprive developing nations of clean electricity, stop renewable wind energy, block a solution to global warming and contribute to deforestation. How sick is that?
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GLOBAL WARMING CLAIMS UNSCIENTIC
The waves of the tsunami had hardly receded before environmental alarmists linked the tragedy to . . . global warming! One newspaper, the Independent, quoted a British environmental activist saying that "here again are yet more events in the real world that are consistent with climate-change predictions." On New Year's Eve, Sir David King, Britain's chief science adviser and top climate-change fanatic, told the BBC, "What is happening in the Indian Ocean underlines the importance of the Earth's system to our ability to live safely. And what we are talking about in terms of climate change is something that is really driven by our own use of fossil fuels." It was almost as if environmentalists were trying to vindicate Michael Crichton's scenario in State of Fear, where eco-terrorists attempt to start a tsunami in the Pacific to scare people about global warming.
Although a few environmental activists have attempted to back away from these ludicrous and embarrassing statements, the predictability with which climate change was linked to a geological event shows the difficulty of taking climate change seriously. Climate change is a legitimate issue, but between the shabby way environmentalists and the Left exploit it, and the faulty record of so many past predictions of the eco-apocalypse, deep skepticism remains the sensible default position.
For climate alarmists, climate change has become what logicians call a "non-falsifiable hypothesis." Every weather anomaly is said to be a sign of climate change. After the near-record January 1996 blizzard hit the northeastern U.S., Newsweek ran a cover story attributing the storm to climate change. A year later, when an unusually warm winter led to early snow melt and floods in the upper Midwest, Vice President Al Gore and others attributed it to climate change. And the three hurricanes that struck Florida in close succession last summer were a bonanza for the climate-change chorus, even though serious climate scientists readily admit that ascribing today's extreme weather events to global warming is scientifically insupportable. In fact, the intensity of hurricanes and cyclones has diminished slightly over the past 30 years.
Even the catastrophic scenarios painted by enthusiasts clash. In one extreme case, the Greenland ice sheet and much of the polar ice caps could melt, raising the global sea level by as much as 30 feet, inundating billions in coastal areas. (Keep in mind, though, that such a scenario would take decades to play out, unlike a tsunami.) But hold on: A variant of catastrophe theory holds that warming might cause the Greenland and polar ice sheets to thicken and bring on a new ice age - the scenario of the movie The Day After Tomorrow. Incidentally, the sea level would fall by several feet, creating new opportunities for beachfront development.
These competing scenarios have some theoretical plausibility, but the inability of the scientific community to assign a probability estimate to either a temperature increase or the effects of such an increase - regionally as well as globally - shows how limited our climate knowledge remains. Although computer climate models are being constantly refined and improved, their compound uncertainties and blind spots make it impossible to know the probability of any future outcome. For all their sophistication, the models have not even been able to "backcast" - i.e., match up greenhouse-gas emissions with the climate record - for the last 30 years.
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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.
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Jim Hansen and his twin
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