New Scientist on ‘The Greening of Hate’
New Scientist recently ran an interview with Betsy Hartmann saying what anyone who has read some mainstream environmentalists could have told you 30 years ago — a significant part of them cross over into misanthropy (which Hartmann incorrectly ascribes simply to a right wing tendency).
That this comes as some sort of shock to Hartmann or New Scientist and that is passed off as some sort of brand new “right wing” tendency is simply ridiculous. For example, consider this exchange between Hartmann and New Scientist’s Fred Pearce,
Pearce: Aren’t these just political games?
Hartmann: It’s more than just that. There is an academic journal called Population and Environment, published by Kluwer, which is edited by Kevin MacDonald, an evolutionary psychologist who writes about a Jewish plot to liberalize immigration policies. In 1999, MacDonald appeared in court in Britain to defend the historical and holocaust denier David Irving. The journal’s advisory editorial board includes famous environmental scientists such as Paul Ehrlich, who wrote The Population Bomb, Pimental again, and Vaclav Smil, a professor at the University of Manitoba in Canada. Sitting beside hem on the board is J. Philippe Rushton, a psychology professor from the University of Western Ontario in Canada, who has a theory about how black people have small brains, low IQ, large sex organs and high aggression. What are environmental scholars doing getting mixed up with these kinds of people?
To which the best response is simply: well, duh!! Take Ehrlich. Ehrlich has never hidden his agenda. He wrote in The Population Bomb more than 30 years ago that,
A cancer is an uncontrolled multiplication of cells; the population explosion is an uncontrolled multiplication of people. Treating only the symptoms of cancer may make the victim more comfortable at first, but eventually he dies — often horribly. A similar fate awaits a world with a population explosion if only the symptoms are treated. We must shift our efforts from treatment of the symptoms to the cutting out of the cancer. The operation will demand many apparently brutal and heartless decisions. The pain may be intense. But the disease is so far advanced that only with radical surgery does the patient have a chance of survival.
And Hartmann would have us believe that it is just now that it is becoming apparent that some of these environmentalists have political views that are just this side of fascism? Give me a break.
Someone also needs to point out that while her fellow feminists and left wingers were putting Ehrlich and those like him on a pedestal and viciously attacking anyone such as Julian Simon who dared disagree, it was the right wing conservatives and libertarians who were telling anyone who would listen that these folks were dangerous statists. Hartmann admits this was the case with what she calls the “liberal” population establishment, but it was also the case with the Left that she is a part of which blindly latched on to this view because of its pro-state, anti-market features.
Hartmann portrays this as right wingers trying to infiltrate the mainstream environmental movement, but the mainstream environmental movement has always had it share of top down control freaks who see people as merely means to a greater environmental end. What she might better ask is why such an odious view of the world is so popular with liberals and leftists.
Source:
The greening of hate. New Scientist, 2003.
The New Scientist on ‘The Greening of Hate’ by Brian Carnell, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.
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