The Danger of Environmentalism

[ARI Media Feed]

By Michael S. Berliner from The Ayn Rand Institute Stories,cross-posted by MetaBlog

The Danger of Environmentalism

By Michael S. Berliner

Earth Day approaches, and with it a grave danger faces mankind. The danger is not from acid rain, global warming, smog, or the logging of rain forests, as environmentalists would have us believe. The danger to mankind is from environmentalism.

The fundamental goal of environmentalism is not clean air and clean water; rather, it is the demolition of technological/industrial civilization. Environmentalism's goal is not the advancement of human health, human happiness, and human life; rather, it is a subhuman world where "nature" is worshipped like the totem of some primitive religion.

In a nation founded on the pioneer spirit, environmentalists have made "development" an evil word. They inhibit or prohibit the development of Alaskan oil, offshore drilling, nuclear power--and every other practical form of energy. Housing, commerce, and jobs are sacrificed to spotted owls and snail darters. Medical research is sacrificed to the "rights" of mice. Logging is sacrificed to the "rights" of trees. No instance of the progress that brought man out of the cave is safe from the onslaught of those "protecting" the environment from man, whom they consider a rapist and despoiler by his very essence.

Nature, they insist, has "intrinsic value," to be revered for its own sake, irrespective of any benefit to man. As a consequence, man is to be prohibited from using nature for his own ends. Since nature supposedly has value and goodness in itself, any human action that changes the environment is necessarily immoral. Of course, environmentalists invoke the doctrine of intrinsic value not against wolves that eat sheep or beavers that gnaw trees; they invoke it only against man, only when man wants something.

The ideal world of environmentalism is not twenty-first-century Western civilization; it is the Garden of Eden, a world with no human intervention in nature, a world without innovation or change, a world without effort, a world where survival is somehow guaranteed, a world where man has mystically merged with the "environment." Had the environmentalist mentality prevailed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, we would have had no Industrial Revolution, a situation that consistent environmentalists would cheer--at least those few who might have managed to survive without the life-saving benefits of modern science and technology.

The expressed goal of environmentalism is to prevent man from changing his environment, from intruding on nature. That is why environmentalism is fundamentally anti-man. Intrusion is necessary for human survival. Only by intrusion can man avoid pestilence and famine. Only by intrusion can man control his life and project long-range goals. Intrusion improves the environment, if by "environment" one means the surroundings of man--the external material conditions of human life. Intrusion is a requirement of human nature. But in the environmentalists' paean to "Nature," human nature is omitted. For environmentalism, the "natural" world is a world without man. Man has no legitimate needs, but trees, ponds, and bacteria somehow do.

They don't mean it? Heed the words of the consistent environmentalists. "The ending of the human epoch on Earth," writes philosopher Paul Taylor in Respect for Nature: A Theory of Environmental Ethics, "would most likely be greeted with a hearty 'Good riddance!'" In a glowing review of Bill McKibben's The End of Nature, biologist David M. Graber writes (Los Angeles Times, October 29, 1989): "Human happiness [is] not as important as a wild and healthy planet . . . . Until such time as Homo sapiens should decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along." Such is the naked essence of environmentalism: it mourns the death of one whale or tree but actually welcomes the death of billions of people. A more malevolent, man-hating philosophy is unimaginable.

The guiding principle of environmentalism is self-sacrifice, the sacrifice of longer lives, healthier lives, more prosperous lives, more enjoyable lives, i.e., the sacrifice of human lives. But an individual is not born in servitude. He has a moral right to live his own life for his own sake. He has no duty to sacrifice it to the needs of others and certainly not to the "needs" of the nonhuman.

To save mankind from environmentalism, what's needed is not the appeasing, compromising approach of those who urge a "balance" between the needs of man and the "needs" of the environment. To save mankind requires the wholesale rejection of environmentalism as hatred of science, technology, progress, and human life. To save mankind requires the return to a philosophy of reason and individualism, a philosophy that makes life on earth possible.

 

Michael S. Berliner is cochairman of the board of directors of the Ayn Rand Institute in Irvine, Calif.  The Institute promotes the philosophy of Ayn Rand, author of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead.

This Op-Ed was published in the Las Vegas Review-Journal, the Calgary Herald, and El Nuevo Herald (April 22, 2004)

http://ObjectivismOnline.com/archives/003558.html

[EC]

Maybe this just shows how much of an Objectivist I've always been but I have never been able to comprehend, even slightly, why these people seem to think just about everything man does is wrong, i.e., evil. Why it is they consider every other creature and thing in the Universe as good and valuable --as natural-- but not man? Do they really hate themselves that much, and why?

By the way this isn't just rhetorical, I'm really interested in certain forum members' opinions here if they wish to reply.

[Inspector]

By the way this isn't just rhetorical, I'm really interested in certain forum members' opinions here if they wish to reply.

There are all kinds of nihilists out there - this is another form. I think Orwell put it fairly well: "Four legs good. Two legs baaad."

[Benpercent]

Maybe this just shows how much of an Objectivist I've always been but I have never been able to comprehend, even slightly, why these people seem to think just about everything man does is wrong, i.e., evil. Why it is they consider every other creature and thing in the Universe as good and valuable --as natural-- but not man?

This is a question that has been on my mind lately and the only thing I can make a connection to the philosophical notion that man's consciousness is immaterial and supernatural, and thus unnatural. I forget what the grouping is called, but it's false alternative (in this circle of false alternatives) are the materialists.

It drives me crazy. Keeping the law of identity in mind will tell you that NOTHING is unnatural or against nature. Honestly, if the notion of the law of identity were to become popular, I would wish it to become popular first in grocery stores, as I get sick of hearing of natural snacks and organic fruit. Really the only distinction you need to make in the stores is between the healthy and the unhealthy, not the natural and unnatural.

[EC]

Honestly, if the notion of the law of identity were to become popular, I would wish it to become popular first in grocery stores, as I get sick of hearing of natural snacks and organic fruit. Really the only distinction you need to make in the stores is between the healthy and the unhealthy, not the natural and unnatural.

Thank you! I always think the same thing but it's not something you can just talk to about with most people in real life (not on an Objectivist forum), because the main argument seems to just go over their heads or something. Trust me, I tried to have the same conversation with my Mom--who is not an unintelligent lady--and she just wasn't getting my point that pesticides, fertilizers, etc. actually are a good thing.

That's why I love this forum.

[Clawg]

Maybe this just shows how much of an Objectivist I've always been but I have never been able to comprehend, even slightly, why these people seem to think just about everything man does is wrong, i.e., evil. Why it is they consider every other creature and thing in the Universe as good and valuable --as natural-- but not man? Do they really hate themselves that much, and why?

They see man as an animal whose nature is basically to live like an ape in the jungle.

[Maximus]

I've noticed that such people are not thinking, but rather, feeling. Thier emotions are clouding thier rational judgment. My teenage son has chosen vegetarianism, because of supposed "animal cruelty." He considers the "feelings" of the animals in making such a choice. I do not. Being raised on a farm, I appreciate that animals are meat on the hoof, and that our environment exists for our exploitation and improvement, so that we may derive benifit from it.

I think that people who are raised in a mostly urban situation, and are fed a steady diet of socialist and environmentalist nonsense in school, simply do not appreciate that nature is wild, raw, and hostile to our existance unless we actively control our living environment.