A number of years ago seventh graders at a tony personal college near San Francisco have been given an uncommon Earth Day assignment: Make a record of environmental tasks that could be achieved with Bill Gates’ fortune. This strategy to environmental awareness fits in nicely with the Obama-Pelosi-Reid worldview that the correct to personal house is subsidiary to undertakings that others think are worthwhile – the redistributive theory of society. And how intriguing that the resources produced “available” for the students’ considered-experiment were not, say, the aggregate net worth of the members of Congress but the wealth of 1 of the nation’s most productive, modern entrepreneurs.
One more Earth Day assignment for individuals very same students was to read Rachel Carson’s best-selling 1962 book, “Silent Spring,” an emotionally charged but deeply flawed excoriation of the widespread spraying of chemical pesticides for the management of insects. As described by Roger Meiners and Andy Morriss in their scholarly nevertheless eminently readable 2012 analysis, “Silent Spring at 50: Reflections on an Environmental Traditional,” Carson exploited her reputation as a properly-identified nature writer to advocate and legitimatize “positions linked to a darker tradition in American environmental thinking: neo-Malthusian population management and anti-technologies efforts.”
Carson’s proselytizing and advocacy led to the virtual banning of DDT and to restrictions on other chemical pesticides in spite of the fact that “Silent Spring” was replete with gross misrepresentations and scholarship so atrocious that if Carson were an academic, she would be guilty of egregious academic misconduct. Carson’s observations about DDT have been meticulously rebutted level by point by Dr. J. Gordon Edwards, Professor of Entomology at San Jose State University, a prolonged-time member of the Sierra Club and the Audubon Society, and a fellow of the California Academy of Sciences. In his stunning 1992 essay, “The Lies of Rachel Carson,” Edwards demolished her arguments and assertions and named consideration to vital omissions, faulty assumptions, and outright fabrications.
Consider this quote from Edwards: “This implication that DDT is horribly deadly is fully false. Human volunteers have ingested as a lot as 35 milligrams of it a day for nearly two many years and suffered no adverse results. Hundreds of thousands of men and women have lived with DDT intimately throughout the mosquito spray programs and nobody even received sick as a consequence. The Nationwide Academy of Sciences concluded in 1965 that ‘in a little far more than two decades, DDT has prevented 500 million [human] deaths that would otherwise have been inevitable.’ The Planet Well being Organization stated that DDT had ‘killed far more insects and saved much more men and women than any other substance.’”
Meiners and Morriss conclude properly that the influence of “Silent Spring” on present day environmentalism “encourages some of the most destructive strains inside environmentalism: alarmism, technophobia, failure to contemplate the expenses and advantages of options, and the discounting of human effectively-becoming all around the world.” Sounds like a description of the mindset of the U.S. Environmental Safety Agency.
The 1st Earth Day celebration was conceived by then-U.S. Senator Gaylord Nelson and held in 1970 as a “symbol of environmental duty and stewardship.” In the spirit of the time, it was a touchy-feely, consciousness-raising, New Age experience, and most routines have been organized at the grass roots degree. In current many years, Earth Day has offered an possibility for environmental Cassandras to prophesy apocalypse, dish anti-technology filth and proselytize. Passion and zeal routinely trump science, and provability will take a back seat to plausibility.
One particular of the U.K.’s wonderful thinkers, Dick Taverne, aka Lord Taverne of Pimlico, discusses numerous of the shortcomings of New Age philosophy in his excellent book, “The March of Unreason.” Taverne deplores the “new type of fundamentalism” that has infiltrated several environmentalist campaigns — an undiscriminating Back-To-Nature motion that views science and technology as the enemy and as a manifestation of an exploitative, rapacious and reductionist perspective towards nature. It is no coincidence, he believes, that eco-fundamentalists are strongly represented in anti-globalization and anti-capitalism demonstrations around the world.
In this, Taverne echoes the late physician and novelist Michael Crichton, who argued in his considerably-acclaimed novel “State of Fear” that eco-fundamentalists have reinterpreted traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths and produced a religion of environmentalism, a religion with its own Eden and paradise the place mankind lived in a state of grace and unity with nature until finally mankind’s fall — which came not from eating an apple, but after consuming from the forbidden tree of knowledge (that is, science). This religion also has a judgment day to come for us all in this polluted planet — all of us, that is, except for true environmentalists, who will be saved by attaining sustainability. One particular of Crichton’s characters argues that given that the end of the Cold War, environmental alarmism in Western nations has filled the void left by the disappearance of the terror of communism and nuclear holocaust, and that social management is now maintained by hugely exaggerated fears about pollution, worldwide warming, chemical compounds, genetic engineering and the like. With the military-industrial complicated no longer the main driver of society, the politico-legal-media complex has replaced it.
This politico-legal-media complex peddles dread in the guise of advertising safety. French author and philosopher Pascal Bruckner captured its tone nicely: “You’ll get what you’ve got coming! That is the death want that our misanthropes handle to us. These are not wonderful souls who alert us to troubles but tiny minds who wish us suffering if we have the presumption to refuse to pay attention to them. Catastrophe is not their fear but their joy.”
The small-minded misanthropes have appreciated some dubious “successes.” They have effectively banished agricultural biotechnology from Europe, have the chemical sector on the run and the pharmaceutical market in their crosshairs.
Lord Taverne believes these are ominous trends that are contrary to the rules of the Enlightenment, returning us to an era in which inherited dogma and superstition took precedence over experimental data. Not only do the practices of eco-fundamentalism retard technologies and the availability of items which, employed responsibly, could significantly boost and lengthen many lives and shield the environment, but they strangle scientific creativity and technological innovation.
By limiting citizens’ and businesses’ capacity to engage in voluntary transactions, irrational practices born of eco-fundamentalism undermine the overall health of civilized society and of democracy. Defend science and cause, argues Taverne, and you defend democracy itself. Nicely said, Milord, and Happy Earth Day to you.
Henry Miller, a doctor and molecular biologist, is the Robert Wesson Fellow in Scientific Philosophy and Public Policy at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.
Celebrating Earth Day: Science And Engineering Should Join The Get together
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