Not a Greenie!

Freedom and Heritage publishes here with approval an article by Viv Forbes “Why I am not a greenie.” Neither he, not we, are against the environment – far from it – but the greenie movement has been hijacked by doctrinaire fools, exaggeraters and downright liars. The Australian Greens are thoroughly toxic, pushing “solutions” to imagined or massively hyped “problems” that cause far more damage than they purport to cure. HERE BEGINS VIV’S ARTICLE.

Like most other people, I like to see clean air, clean waters, no erosion, no salinity, no weeds and happy contented animals in their natural surroundings.  But, like many other people, I am not a card carrying Greenie.  I despise the dishonesty of their leadership, I fear the likely results of their policies, and I detest the underlying values and philosophies of their prophets. 

It seems like a paradox – a greenie who won’t associate with the greenies.  Why do I detest them? There are SIX MAIN REASONS for my concern with the green leadership, philosophy and tactics.

Firstly, they are anti-human. 

They denigrate all aspects of civilised human activity – our technology, our achievements, our life style, our freedom, our market economy, our property rights and our values.  They promote pessimism and poverty, and they value every other organism above humans.  They see man as a systematic destroyer who has no place on this planet unless his population is reduced to a small number of primitive, subsistence, basket weaving vegetarians.

I do not question their right to drop out, but I object strongly to being forced to accept the same values and life style, and I refuse to contribute my energy, my time or my taxes to support them.  I certainly will not sacrifice my life or the future of my children for even the most cuddly koala, even if he is the last of his tribe. 

The best example of the anti-human bias of greenies is their attitude to population.  According to them, “Mankind is the virus on the planet”, and, “Human happiness, and human fecundity are not as important as a wild and healthy planet” and yet again, “My chief quarrel with DDT is that it has greatly added to the human population”.  Roderick Nash believes that smallpox virus should not be discriminated against or eliminated just because it is small and harmful to humans.  Christopher Manes of “Earth First” supports famine in Africa and AIDS as environmentally beneficial developments.

And Paul Erlich believes the any resources devoted to the problems or diseases of middle age will lead to disaster.  The British Green Party’s Program says that the British population has to be reduced from 60 million to 30 million, through coercive measures if necessary (gas chambers?).  These people are as totalitarian as Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot.  Hitler wanted to destroy particular races, Stalin eliminated particular classes, Pol Pot hated urbanised intellectuals, and the Greenies have it in for most of mankind.  They want to decimate our numbers and burn, bash and bury all evidence of our occupation. 

This totalitarian tenet of the greenie philosophers is my second reason for opposing them

Their goals are determined more by politics than ecology.  They oppose individual sovereignty, state sovereignty, and even national sovereignty.  They belong to the international command and control set – the reds have just become the greens.

Their ideal is a world of bucolic peasants wandering around in rampant rain forests and kept in control by an omnipotent and undemocratic world elite.  In such a world, rebels, dreamers, innovators and builders would all end up in the communal compost heap.  They claim to know better than me what is best for my life, my family, my property and my children (if I have managed to obtain the inevitable reproduction licence).  These are not my values and I will oppose them, even if they are disguised in a koala suit or use feel-good concepts like “Landcare” as a smokescreen. 

Thirdly, the deep greenies are anti-reason

Stephen Schneider, a doomsday forecaster, spilt the beans when he said “We have to capture the public’s imagination.  So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubt we may have …Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest.” This intellectual dishonesty and the propagation of irrational skepticism of science now permeates the green strongholds in key nationalised industries such as education and the ABC.

Fourth: They have a pathetic belief that the solution to all environmental problems is more government coercion

The greenies want more laws, more nationalised industries, more taxes, and yet more gutting of the rights of property owners.  Have they ever seen the polluted air, the noxious rivers, the blighted land and the dismal poverty in the old command societies? Denied any avenue for energy, innovation, risk taking or individual achievement, the only escape for the bored or desperate inmates who have not escaped is vodka, nicotine and opium.  The ACT Labor/Greens government has decriminalized “small quantities” of hard drugs. Evil imbeciles.

Fifth, the greenies are economic illiterates

They have no concept of the magic of the market or the ingenuity of human action to solve real human problems.  A typical greenie forecast reads “The rainfall and the sun’s warmth are both diminishing, and the metals are nearly exhausted” This was written in the third century.  Undeterred by the failure of this forecast, Malthus, the Club of Rome and today’s red greens continue to frighten our children with such rot. 

Famine and poverty are not products of rising population or declining resources – they are a product of poor politics – feudalism, communism, interventionism and radical environmentalism.  The earth is a solid ball of mineral resources.  We have only scratched the surface, and every atom ever extracted by miners and farmers still exists in or on the ball.  Freedom, and the ability of private owners to use and develop their own property and to protect its long term value from private polluters or government sterilisers has always confounded the prophets of resource doom.

Free men have always delivered an abundance of the minerals, food and fibre demanded by a free market.  Prosperity depends on politics, not resources. 

Finally, the actions and policies of the deep greens will harm our environment.

Only rich societies have the spare capital and the leisure to care about protecting native forests or endangered species.  Rich westerners with a guilt complex finance the green movement (or coerce their taxpayers into it).  But, in the new utopia, as in the feudal society of old, most of us will be poor peasants.  Our only chance of improving our lot will be by poaching, smuggling and stealing from the nationalised estate.  The most attractive targets will be rare plants and wildlife where private ownership and private trade is prohibited.

Nowhere are cattle or sheep endangered or expensive, because every herd has a vigilant owner watching over their health, safety and numbers.  But every “protected species” is in danger solely because there are thousands of poor poachers or feral predators hunting them and just a few bored bureaucrats protecting them (but only during public servant working hours).  Like the open range and the un-owned sea, which everyone uses but no one has the incentive to conserve, their extinction is inevitable even with draconian protection and punishments. 

So, because of their intolerance, their totalitarian streak, their economic illiteracy, their worship of irrationality, their deceptive practices and their fundamental inhumanity, the greenies have lost me.  I also object to the way their scaremongering has promoted a fear of technology, science, reason, industry and the future among our own children at our expense.  They will get no voluntary contributions from me.

I will practise conservation with my own resources to my own standards of value, and the environment would be better off if we were all allowed to do this unhindered by the coercive utopians in the red green movement.