Environmentalism Turns Against Itself
Apr 24th, 2008 by Micah Tillman | 5 Comments |
I’ve got a post on the recent spate of articles dealing with the clash of environmentalism, food shortages, and government “pro-environment” energy policies up over at Free For All, the Free Liberal’s blog.
It’s a mess I can’t quite wrap my brain around out yet. But something big is happening. I can feel it.
(Dramatic enough for you?)
Interesting stuff. I guess my thoughts are these:
Is there any good reason to expect a magical bulltet?
It seems to me that the environemtnal movement has taken a cue from physics and is looking for some sort of grand unified theory of environmental rescue.
In the case of physics, there is atleast a few good reasons to expect that such a theory exists. But in the case of environmental issues, we stumbled into many of these problems in a fashion that was isolated and piecemeal.
This is pretty scary to me. I see the logic of looking for some sort of centralized authority on the issue that you suggest. Otherwise, it seems to me that conflicting pet causes are going to bring about a gridlock: the folks who focus on world hunger are going to counter act the folks who promote ethanol, and nothing will get done in either area, for example.
Even such a central authority, whatever that looks like, would bring about problems. If it enacted specific solutions by choosing one groups agenda over anothers, it ends up creating a counter-authority, those whose agenda are ignored would seem likely to band together… it appears that this simply conglameritizes (can I make that a word) the issues into large blocs.
Is there any hope in such a group taking on a big way a few rather basic problems? If it were to focus on the industrialized world, particularly the US, goals such as reducing consumption, simplifying lives, and perhaps lowering the birth rate are goals which would impact many problems. It it were to focus on the non-industrialized world creating structures which increased health and provided alternatives to relying on large groups of sons and daughters as a safety net seems similarly wide-sprayed.
It ought to be noted that these goals are almost more socio-cultural than scientific-political.
FWIW, you can generally tell which “green” companies are really concerned about being good to the environment because they make their products (1) affordable to the average consumer and (2) work really well.
And then there’s this from yesterday:
Jeff–
Excellent points. Indeed. My call for a centralized authority to solve environmentalism’s implosion was tongue-in-cheek, however. Add the problems you point out to my belief that you can’t centrally plan the environment (and my general libertarian tendencies) and you get one very anti-bureaucratically-centralized-environmental-movement Micah.
Amanda–
Excellent point. You want sustainable products, after all!
Ahh. I hate it when I miss fecitiousness. I did, just for the record, find it a bit uncharacteristic that you’d be calling for a centralized authority.
Well, it wasn’t obvious. Or rather, I was intentionally not-obvious about it.
Lack of non-verbals is one of the chief problems with written communication . . . . Highlights the value of face-to-face conversation, I suppose :-)