The Environment

The Environmentalist Body Count and Conservation Refugees

By J. Wesley ⋅ April 29, 2008 ⋅  Email This Post ⋅  Print This Post ⋅ Post a comment

The narrative of the Environmentalist/Anti-Globalist Left has all the moral clarity of an old Western flick — white-hat Greens fightin’ to save innocent town folk from greedy, pollutin’ Big Businessmen. In this narrative, the Greens are omnibenevolent, seeking only to save the world from itself and asking that we give up little more than our gas-guzzling SUVs. The press plays along, dutifully reporting their inflated claims of “climate change refugees” and pollution deaths.

Back in the real world, the moral picture is a bit more complex. The first rule of economics is scarcity. Every good thing environmentalists achieve (and much of what they want IS good) comes with a corresponding cost. Oftentimes, it is the very poorest of the world who bear the brunt of these costs. Rich, Western environmentalists cajole and pressure the 2/3rds World to enact laws and protections which are paid for by indigenous peoples and others least able to do so.

Greens celebrate the banning of DDT, but don’t see the millions who die from malaria as a result. When Ghana is successfully pressured into not building a hydroelectric dam, they cheer from their well-lit offices, oblivious to the villagers whose lives would have been transformed. They stop genetically-modified “Frankenfoods” from reaching the Developing World, robbing individuals of vital nutrition.

And they turn a blind eye to the hundreds of thousands of people displaced to make way for grand conservation projects. Around the world, cultures which have existed for centuries are being uprooted to preserve animal habitats. In India alone, 300,000 people have already been forcibly relocated to scrubby, undesirable land.

Environmentalism has its own body count and rarely acknowledges it. Green can be good, but it comes at a price. Environmentalists should be more honest about the human toll of their projects.