Time Immortal

The connection between what we call, in modern times, Earth Day and the birthday of the monstrous man once known as Lenin is tenuous, admittedly. But not so tenuous that some people don’t remember that the first April 22nd Earth Day was put on that day to deliberately coincide with the marking of what would have been Lenin’s 100th birthday.

Because the Russians — especially during the Soviet heyday — were so environmentally friendly, after all. Not that the fact that there are, shall we say, close ties between modern rabid environmentalism and modern rabid socialism comes as much of a surprise.

Ed Darrell writes in with a response to this article, in which I remark on David Warren’s observations that once again, the latest fad among the rich and trendy in the West (that is, environmentalism) is serving only to further oppress those who live in poverty in Third World nations, as the biofuel craze drives the price of food through the roof world-wide.

…environmentalism seems to have become just one more playground for wealthy Westerners, a way we can wring our hands and make ourselves feel good for having done something, the same as when we banned DDT. And yet we do not, by our actions, achieve any meaningful positive environmental impact. Indeed, the only impact we manage to achieve is that, in our selfish desire to be “green,” we further impoverish and condemn to a most terrible fate thousands or millions of people living in poorer nations. And in the end, our selfishness backfires on us as well — the same “green” fuels we might desire to use in our cars are, in fact, very difficult to produce, and the production processes far more polluting than those used to refine crude oil into petrol.

But then, that pollution happens elsewhere, and not in our back yards or on the roads upon which we drive. We do not see it, and so can safely pretend it does not exist.

But, had we listened to the “environmentalists” about DDT in 1962, and dramatically reduced its broadcast use, it would still be effective against mosquitoes that carry malaria. Rachel Carson was right about DDT — it’s a killer, especially released willy-nilly in the wild. Bald eagles were just big canaries in our mine.

If we must designate a culprit in the DDT annals, it would be those who thought we could just poison the heck out of Africa and forget about the people there, rather than make serious efforts to fight malaria. Malaria is a complex problem, and throwing poison into the wild won’t improve the health care system, make governments stable, educate people how to look out for their own health and well being, or stimulate the economies so people can afford adequate housing to protect them from malaria-bearing mosquitoes.

Environmentalism is based in increasing our knowledge about God’s creation and where humans can and should fit in, and asking the question, “How can we be better stewards of this planet?” I think you may have given short shrift to those grander ideas.

Malaria really isn’t that complex a problem to solve — the ancient Romans knew exactly what they were doing when they dredged the swamps of Old Italy and wiped out mosquito breeding grounds on that little archipelago. In South American nations where comprehensive DDT programs were implemented, the same effects were achieved without the need to dredge swamps and destroy the natural habitats of other forms of wildlife.

The fact of the matter is, even the WHO ended its ban on DDT because the resurgence in malaria-related deaths marched in lockstep with the DDT ban in the first place. And in much the same way as Western use of biofuels is killing the poor in the Third World, the countries primarily afflicted by a resurgence in malaria (and the countries in which most malarial deaths occur as a result of the pressure by the West to ban the use of DDT) are poor, Third World countries. Western environmentalism, like every other fashionable trend, piggy-backs itself on the suffering and blood of the poor elsewhere in the world, and all so rich white folks can pump an alternative fuel into their SUV and tell themselves that they’re working to save the planet (even though that fuel cost more, in terms of pollutants released, to produce than normal petroleum does).

Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was not a scientific study or a comprehensive research paper. It was a novel, and then a fictional one. And on the merits of the picture she painted with that novel, the West rushed to ban the use of DDT world-wide, despite the fact that DDT was later demonstrated to cause none of the harmful effects it was blamed (and banned) for. It does not cause eggshell thinning in avian populations, the American Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) concedes that it does not pose a carcinogenic risk to human beings, and that it likewise poses no mutagenic/teratogenic danger. It does not appear to have any damaging effect on freshwater aquatic ecosystems either.

It was banned because of a work of fiction and the knee-jerk, guilt-ridden emotionalism of Western liberalism. And the poor, globally, in many Third World countries, will and have paid with their lives for that particular Western fad.

The thing is, DDT was effective — damn effective. In Venezuela, it reduced the number of cases of malaria from over eight million in 1943 to eight hundred by 1958. India and modern Italy saw similar dramatic reversals (Italy, in particular, recorded only 37 cases of malaria in 1967, down from over 400,000 roughly fifteen years earlier).

It would be nice to believe that environmentalists only want to increase our knowledge about the creation that God has made us stewards over. But the evidence on the ground tends to paint a different picture, and then not a pleasant one. environmentalism may have had noble intentions at its origin, as feminism did. But, like feminism, environmentalism has shaped itself into something much more malevolent. In the case of environmentalism, it has become a weird mash-up between those who would use it as a vehicle to advance an explicitly socialist (if not outright Marxist) political and economic agenda, and those who would use bad science to play upon the knee-jerk guilt of the modern Western liberal and by so doing enrich themselves (Al Gore would be a great example here).

David Warren spotlights a trend that I’d suspected might just be the case after all — that production of “environmentally friendly” biofuels not only results in increased carbon emissions* (since the process of refining various grains into vehicle-ready fuel requires many processing stages, all of which require fossil fuels to be burned in order to drive the various processes — by comparison, refining crude oil into petrol is a fairly clean and efficient process), but that it drives up the price of food globally, especially in already impoverished nations.

And while folks like me, living and working in Canada, might be able to absorb a twofold or threefold increase in the cost of food, people living in Third World nations would be crushed by similar increases. And here’s the kicker: such increases aren’t just possible or likely. They are already happening.

Even in the economically advanced West, the rise in Food prices has become noticeable. My observant reader will find plenty of signs in his local supermarket, where the price of dairy products is leading an advance that must necessarily spread — for wholesale prices are outstripping retail prices in food across the board. The secondary effect of the monetary inflation this re-ignites is in itself beginning to cause economic havoc.

But we, who spend (in North America) less than 15 percent of our income on food, can nevertheless survive if that proportion doubles or triples.

It is in the poorest countries of the world, where people often spend more than half their income obtaining food, that a doubling or tripling of prices is fatal. And note, the supply of food does not need to halve, in order to double prices. It only has to fall, consistently, a little behind demand.

Please don’t take my word for this. The United Nations’ World Food Programme and various other collectivist agencies are already becoming eloquent on the subject. In a statement to the European Parliament last week, the executive director of the WFP explained that their own cost of obtaining food for distribution to the world’s hungry had risen by 40 percent since last June. They are not predicting a catastrophe. They are experiencing one.

environmentalism seems to have become just one more playground for wealthy Westerners, a way we can wring our hands and make ourselves feel good for having “done something,” the same as when we banned DDT. And yet we do not, by our actions, achieve any meaningful positive environmental impact. Indeed, the only impact we manage to achieve is that, in our selfish desire to be “green,” we further impoverish and condemn to a most terrible fate thousands or millions of people living in poorer nations. And in the end, our selfishness backfires on us as well — the same “green” fuels we might desire to use in our cars are, in fact, very difficult to produce, and the production processes far more polluting than those used to refine crude oil into petrol.

But then, that pollution happens elsewhere, and not in our back yards or on the roads upon which we drive. We do not see it, and so can safely pretend it does not exist.