Excerpt of the Day: George Reisman on Environmentalism as Misanthropy

I definitely do not get to Reisman’s blog often enough. It should be a once a week requirement for the economically sane.

One of the more recent entries by the Pepperdine University Professor Emeritus of Economics, who is also the author of Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics, hits the bullseye of what, at bottom, the environmental movement’s movers (as opposed to those duped by them) are all about:

Thirty years ago, the land under the house I live in, in Southern California, was empty desert. Had I wanted to sleep in the same location that my bedroom now stands on, I would have had to bring a sleeping bag, take precautions against rattlesnakes, scorpions, and coyotes, and hope I could find a place for my sleeping bag such that I wouldn’t have rocks pressing into my body. If it rained, I would get wet. If it was cold, I would be cold. If it was hot, I would be hot. Going to the bathroom would be a chore. Washing up would be difficult or impossible.

How incomparably better is the environment provided by my house and my bedroom. I sleep on a bed with an innerspring mattress. I don’t have to worry about snakes, scorpions, or coyotes. I’m protected from the rain, the cold, and the heat, by a well constructed house with central heating and air conditioning. I have running water, hot and cold, a flush toilet, a sink, a shower, and a bathtub, in fact more than one of each of these things, and I have electricity and most of the conveniences it makes possible, such as a refrigerator, a television set, a VCR, and CD and DVD players.

It’s obvious to me that the existence of my house constitutes an enormous improvement in my environment compared with living at the same location on the bare ground, and that the same is true of the existence of virtually all houses in relation to the environment of their occupants. It’s further obvious to me that the process of improving the environment in this way starts with developers and contractors who bring in bulldozers and other heavy construction equipment to clear the tops of hills, level and compact the land, build streets, and utility connections, and construct houses.

Yet those who are called “environmentalists” describe the exact same process of development and construction as harming the environment. Why? Because they have a profoundly different standard of environmental good and evil than the one that is present in my example. The standard that is present in my example is that of human life and well-being. What is environmentally good according to this standard is the promotion of human life and well-being, notably, housing construction and the existence of houses. What is environmentally evil is what impairs human life and well-being, such as preventing housing construction.

The environmentalists call the construction of houses evil because, as I say, their standard of value is very different. Instead of taking human life and well-being as their standard of value, they take nature in and of itself as their standard of value. Nature, they say, has intrinsic value, i.e., value in and of itself, apart from all connection with human life and well-being. Thus, in their view, hillsides and empty land, as they exist in a state of nature, together with their wildlife, have intrinsic value. And it is those alleged intrinsic values that are harmed by development and construction. In other words, the harm the environmentalists complain about in such cases is harm only from a non-human, indeed, anti-human perspective.

….. The doctrine of intrinsic value is present in such statements as the North Slope of Alaska is “a sacred place” that should never be given over to oil rigs and pipelines. It is present in such statements as, “There is a need to protect the land not just for wildlife and human recreation, but just to have it there.” It is present in all instances in which forests, rivers, canyons, hillsides, or any other natural formation is presented as automatically deserving to be preserved, irrespective of its value in being put to use by human beings. And, of course, it is present in all the numerous cases in which human life or well-being have been sacrificed for the sake of the preservation of this or that species of animal or plant. Such cases range from the sacrifice of the property rights of human beings for the sake of snail darters and spotted owls, to the sacrifice of untold millions of actual human lives. This last has occurred as the result of the resurgence of malaria because the use of DDT was prohibited in order to preserve the alleged intrinsic value of some species of birds.

It is crucial that people recognize the distinction between the two standards of environmental good and evil and that the standard of the environmental movement is fundamentally that of the intrinsic value of nature, not that of human life and well-being. Given its standard of value, it is certainly not possible to accept as sincere or well-motivated any of the claims the environmental movement makes of seeking to improve human life and well-being, whether in connection with its allegations about global warming, the ozone layer, acid rain, or anything else.

Indeed, environmentalism’s acceptance of the doctrine of intrinsic value implies a profound hatred of man and a desire to destroy him.

….. All advice, all policy recommendations emanating from the environmentalist movement must be summarily rejected unless and until they can be validated on the basis of a pro-man, pro-wealth, pro-capitalist standard of value. Such a standard will never imply such a thing as the destruction of the energy base of industrial civilization as the means of addressing global warming.

The environmental movement is the philosophic enemy of the human race. It should be treated as such. If we value the material well-being and, indeed, the very lives of billions of our children and grandchildren, we must treat it as such. We must treat environmentalism as our mortal enemy.

If you don’t agree with Reisman’s conclusion, you simply must go to his post and read the excerpt he quotes from a leading environmentalist.