“Eco-manslaughter”
IBD indicts a substantial portion of the environmental movement for global “eco-manslaughter”:
The WWF, Greenpeace, Oxfam, Sierra Club, Rainforest Action Network and other multinational activist groups battle mines in Romania, Peru, Chile, Ghana and Indonesia; electricity projects in Uganda, India and Nepal; biotechnology that could improve farm incomes and reduce malnutrition in Kenya, India, Brazil and the Philippines; and DDT that could slash malaria rates in Africa, where the disease kills 3,000 children a day.
They harp on technology’s speculative hazards and ignore real, life-or-death dangers that modern mining, development and technology would reduce or prevent. They never mention the jobs, clinics, schools, roads, improved housing and small business opportunities — or the electricity, refrigeration, safe water, better nutrition, reduced disease and fewer dead children. They pervert “sustainable development” to mean no development…and ignore human rights to energy and technology, and people’s desperate cries for a chance to take their rightful places among the Earth’s healthy and prosperous people.
They extol the virtues of microcredit, to support minimal family enterprises, and demand debt forgiveness and more foreign aid for corrupt dictators — but oppose economic development that would eliminate the need for international welfare. They blame Newmont Mining for accidents that killed five people over a two-year period in Ghana, but refuse to admit that their pressure campaigns cause millions of deaths every year. One could justifiably call it eco-manslaughter — or a racist experiment on powerless, impoverished Third World families.
Yes, there are environmental impacts from mines, dams and other development. There are health and other risks. But the Industrial Revolution also brought those changes. Are we worse off for it? Do we want to return to the jobs, lifestyles and living standards of pre-industrial, pre-electric America, when 95% of Americans were farmers, cholera and malaria were ever-present, and the average life expectancy was 45?
Would any of the greens, politicians and celebrities who clamor to keep the world’s poor “indigenous” (and thus impoverished, energy-deprived and diseased) care to live that lifestyle for even one month? Would they exchange their 10,000-square-foot mansions for a hovel, give up electricity and stop globe-trotting in private jets? Why hasn’t the United Nations criticized the institutional racism being perpetrated in the name of “saving the planet”? Where are U.S. civil rights groups, media, churches and these poor countries’ leaders?
These are very good points. It is undoubtedly true that economic development comes with a cost — but it is a cost that the forbears of the men and women of the now-developed world chose to better their lives and those of their children. (To take our most recent large example: which is better, the China of 1967 or the China of 2007, in which GDP is almost 100x larger?)
To pull up the ladder on the lifeboat, which is the approach of many in the professional environmental industry, is deeply immoral. Banning DDT should perhaps itself be a crime, given the terrible human death toll of that feel-good action. Exposing and shunning the fantasy thinking that attributes global wealth to “progressive” movements would also make an important contribution to human progress.