In message <3B71F567.BDF57AE9 at sprintmail.com>, Gar Lipow <lipowg at sprintmail.com> writes
>Yes undoubtedly a lot (maybe a majority) of green activists have
>contempt for working people. (But there are still a hell of a lot who
>don't.)
I think this blurs the point. There is something in the green philosophy that causes contempt for working people to re-occur as a theme. Green thinking is anti-mass, anti-industrialisation. It is hardly surprising that that tends to merge into hostility to the popular mass and the industrial classes.
>But this does not change the fundamental fact that capitalism (and at
>least some forms of Leninist rule as well) are extremely wasteful of
>sinks and sources --both in terms of making them last in the long run
>rather than exhausting them, and in terms their effects on human health
>as well.
This is a statement that though it seems commonsensical, ought to be un- picked. What do you mean exactly? Compared to what, is capitalism wasteful? Compared to the ideal of the consciously organised producers then yes, plainly capitalism is wasteful. But capitalism has - albeit in the most chaotic way - increased the carrying capacity of the earth many times over, through its increases in agricultural productivity. The growth in human population is evidence of that (as more prosaically is the increase in total grain yields, in parallel with falling land area under cultivation).
Is this great expansion of human civilisation to be dismissed collectively as 'waste'?
In message <3B71FAD5.9174B35F at sprintmail.com>, Gar Lipow
<lipowg at sprintmail.com> writes
>Let me take a few minutes to answer some of the concrete charges against
>the enviromental movement:
>
>1) - Overpopulation -- on this the critics are right and the malthusians
>are dead wrong.
Gar goes on to try to differentiate a non-malthusian environmentalism. I'm not sure that this can succeed. If you start out from the assumption that we have reached natural limits on resources, then you can only argue for restricting population.
If on the other hand you think that increased productivity is the solution to the relative limits on output thrown up by capitalism, then you must ditch the environmental outlook.
>2) De-forestation. Is forest acreage increasing? Yes - but OLD GROWTH
>forest is decreasing.
Well, forgive me if this sounds like nit-picking. The quality of the forested areas might be less good, but that is to dismiss the underlying trend for more agricultural product from less land due to increased agricultural productivity.
Isn't that better than the nightmare scenario that greens have been selling us for so long of the world's forest disappearing?
>3)This leads to the question of extinction. While you can argue about
>the number of species we are wiping out, I don't think anyone can argue
>that we are wiping out species at an accelerating rate.
Assertion, never has been demonstrated (nor one suspects could it be, since you have to factor out the increased recording of species).
More to the point, 99.9 species that ever existed are now extinct. Extinction is a law of nature.
>4)In terms of enviromenalism helping people:
> A) No uncontrolled production without reqard to environmental
>consequences does not help improve the "human environment". Killer smog
>is not good for humans.
Air quality in the developed world has been improving for decades. The 'killer smog' that took out hundreds of lives in London in the 1950s is a thing of the past, thanks largely to the replacement of coal fires with gas central heating.
>Toxic waste does not have nutritional value.
Well, that's a safe bet. But farm produce does have a nutritional value, and one that has increased vastly in the last hundred years, thanks to the application of fertilisers and development of high yield grains.
>Random climate change is not likely to prove beneficial to the poor, or
>to the working classs.
Random climate change is, sadly, another law of nature. The desire to live without it is utopian. Architects, engineers and developers, though, are at least building homes that protect us from its worst ravages.
>
>B)In terms of environmentalism standing in the way of ending say hunger:
>We have been producing enough food for quite some time to feed everyone.
Be cautious. 'Everyone' is a variable. Their are six billion mouths to feed today. They cannot be fed with pre-industrial farming methods.
>It is distribution, or to be blunt class oppression by capitalism, and
>bureaucratic oppression under Lenism, and occassionally imperialist
>oppression by both that has caused famines and hunger.
Agreed. Let's liberate those mighty forces of production from their capitalistic integument!
-- James Heartfield