The other day, I was discussing the environment with a liberal friend of mine when he said all the actions we were talking about, restoring rangelands, saving endangered species, an that srot of thing were better than doing nothing, but what we really need to do to solve most, if not all, of the problems with the environment is for about half of the people on this planet to disappear. Actually (after acknowledging that what he was going to say wasn’t “politically correct”) he said was that what needed to happen is that about half of the people on earth should be killed in a nuclear war or a plague or something. The reason he said that, of course, is that he, like all liberals (and many conservatives), believes that the real cause of environmental problems is that there are too many people.
As happens frequently in situations that make me uncomfortable, I couldn’t think of a clever and appropriately devastating rejoinder to make on the spot, so I just grunted and acted disinterested and hoped he would change the subject.
Later on it occurred to me that I should have called him on what was a totally cruel, tasteless, stupid, and completely empty comment—I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t want to be responsible (by wishing it) for the death of a couple of billion people, but when it comes to liberals, I’m not so sure anymore.
A good retort to his comment, it occurred to me, would have been to say, “Knowing how you feel about peace and love and all that I’m sure you would never condemn anyone else to be nuked or plagued or committ suicide, or even ask them to do it in your stead. So, I assume what you just said means you, and the other people who think like you, are volunteering to remove yourselves from the planet in order to save it from overpopulation. That is so courageous and self sacrificing, I’m totally in awe. When do you plan for this to happen, and is there anything you’d like me to do for you after you’re gone?”
While I was kicking myself for not having said the above, another thought came to mind that was much more of an awakening and absolutely chilling. It occurred to me that liberals really are removing themselves from the earth, and that they really are committing mass suicide, and they are doing it at a really startling rate. Shades of Hale-Bopp and Jonestown!
At that point I remembered a couple of environmentalists I knew, and a couple more I’m aware of, who killed themselves because they thought they were “part of the problem.” I thought of a woman in England whom I had heard had herself sterilized so she couldn’t increase her carbon footprint by producing other humans. I thought of myself and my wife who had essentially done the same thing—We didn’t have kids at least partially because we swallowed the “Earth is overpopulated” propaganda, too.
I also thought of an article by Mark Steyn called “It’s the Demography, Stupid”). In this article Steyn pointed out that in the U. S. there are only 2.07 births per woman. In Ireland 1.87. In New Zealand 1.79, Australia 1.76, and in Canada 1.5, which is well below replacement rate. Germany and Austria come in at 1.3. Russia and Italy at 1.2; and Spain is at 1.1, which is only about half replacement rate. This means, Steyn points out, that “Spain’s population is halving every generation. By 2050, Italy’s population will have fallen by 22%, Bulgaria’s by 36%, Estonia’s by 52%.”
In America, demographic trends suggest that the majority of this attrition by far is happening among liberals. Steyn notes that, “In the 2004 election, John Kerry won the 16 states with the lowest birthrates; George W. Bush took 25 of the 26 states with the highest.” By 2050, the 100 million more Americans who will be alive will be mostly red-staters.
The next time you talk to a liberal tell him or her goodbye, thank them for their sacrifice, and ask them if you can have their Prius or, better yet, their wine collection.
Ed Abbey, guru of modern radical environmentalism, promised his followers that they would live to “piss on the graves of their enemies.” It appears that he may have had it backwards.
But before you start thinking that liberalism and liberal environmentalism contain the seeds of their own suicide, you should consider the fact that this movement is a very, very good recruiter.
That is the real issue here, and it is the subject of the next and most important post of this blog yet.
I learned about the liberal disconnect in accountability (that liberals identify success as a matter of installing liberal policies, rather than in terms of the results they produce) while I was involved in a collaborative effort to resolve the long standing war over predators that has had ranchers and environmentalists at odds for more than a century. The particular get-together that provided the learning opportunity involved a “conflict resolution” facilitator. The facilitator of this meeting was a woman, Tommie Martin, who came from a ranching background and had considerable experience and success in this line of work. The technique Tommie used (identifying shared interests among the parties to the conflict) is a common one, I have since learned, but Tommie used this technique in a way that, I believe, remains unique and revealing.
What is unique about Ms. Martin’s approach became apparent whenever one of us said something like: “I want all the cows off public lands.” or ” I want higher grazing fees,” or when a rancher said, “I want fewer regulations and fewer meetings like this to go to.” Whenever a demand like this was made, Tommie would ask the demander what he or she hoped to achieve by such an action. How we would expect the land to change as a result? How would it look? How would it make us feel? What would we want to change? And she would keep asking questions like this until we answered in terms of real world results: that we wanted less bare dirt. More plants. Healthier populations of wildlife, and so forth.
The result was that, whenever Tommie used this technique, in almost every case, ranchers and environmentalists ended up affirming that they wanted the same results. Everyone wanted green mountainsides and more vital plant communities and populations of wildlife appropriate for the type of land it was.
Realizing that we wanted so many of the same things made a huge change in the tone of the meeting. We had started the meeting by making the same demands ranchers and environmentalists always made in situations like this, and the mood had been typically confrontational. Each side cheered for their side and hooted at the demands made by the other side. But, the first time Tommie Martin’s facilitation led one of the ranchers to say he wanted something that was considered “environmental,” I remember that we all sat in stunned silence. At least I know I did. And as this happened a second and third time the meeting became more friendly. We joked. We laughed. Some people even hugged.
I remember being extremely impressed by what had happened, and very puzzled. After I thought about it, I decided that Tommie’s facilitation had revealed that there are two kinds of goals, and I labeled them: “Goals that Incite” and “Goals that Unite.” I also labeled these different kinds of goals “prescriptive” and “descriptive.”
Prescriptive goals involve prescribing (or demanding) that a certain process or policy be adopted —”Get the cows off.” or (getting back to Obama) forcing energy companies to use wind power and solar rather than drill for more oil or develop cleaner ways to burn coal.
Descriptive goals involve achieving certain results—greener rangelands, less dependence on foreign oil, or greater prosperity.
Prescriptive goals are “Goals that Incite” because no one, not even a two-year-old likes to be told what to do.
Descriptive goals are more likely to be Goals that Unite, as they were at the meeting I described above, because, when you get right down to it, most of us really do want the same things. This is especially true with regard to the environment. Who doesn’t want clean air and clean water and healthy ecosystems?
So, why do people who want the same things fight?
The best way to answer that question was given to me at a small get-together with a couple of friends at which I was showing my slides and talking about what I had discovered at that facilitated meeting.
When I pointed out that the ranchers and environmentalists at that meeting had discovered that they had the same goals, one of my friends, an ecologist and activist, was so offended she positively fumed.
“We have no right to set goals for nature.” she spat. “We need to do the right thing and whatever happens is what’s supposed to happen.
That explained to me better than anything else I have encountered why so few environmentalists were interested in the message that they could achieve what they wanted more effectively by working with ranchers (and other people they saw as environmental adversaries) than by fighting with them. I had made the mistake of believing that, for the people within the mainstream (liberal) environmental movement, environmental goals, such as healthy rangelands, functional watersheds, and healthy wildlife are primary, while, in truth, they are not.
My friend, the ecologist/activist, and all the others who have no interest whatsoever in working with their adversaries to achieve Goals That Unite, made it very clear that for them and many other mainstream environmental activists, what is primary is getting other people to do what they (the environmentalists) think is “the right thing” regarding the environment, and that protecting endangered species, reducing the human “footprint” on the land, fighting global warming, and the whole list of environmental causes are the excuses they use to impose the regulations, elect the politicians, and win the lawsuits that enable them to dictate people’s actions vis a vis the environment, which means vis a vis everything.
And if the threatened fish disappears, the endangered bird nests somewhere else, and the rangeland turns into desert; that is what’s supposed to happen. You can’t blame them, and you can’t blame the policies they promote.
My friend took issue with my “manage for common goals” solution to rangeland conflict because, to her, the question of how to manage the environment is a matter of moral judgement—and as with all moral matters, outcomes are irrelevant. How’s that? When we are exhorted to be honest or to follow the golden rule we are told that we must do so whatever the outcome. Whether it benefits us or not. The problem is, how we manage the environment has a practical as well as a moral side. Although the people who forced the removal of cattle from along the Verde River did it because they considered it the right thing to do (See earlier post). They also did it to save a “threatened” fish, and when their action exterminated the fish they and their method deserve to be held accountable.
What does this have to do with Barak Obama? The policies he has promised to bring to government, and is now in the process of enacting, have been sold on the basis of their morality. We’re supposed to abandon the most successful energy source humans have ever devised (fossil fuels) for a bunch of 1960s pipe dreams: windmills, biofuels, solar, and cogeneration (whatever that is), which are technologies into which we’ve poured billions for almost half a century and still they haven’t performed, because “it’s the right thing to do.” We’re supposed to negotiate without preconditions with enemies who place plenty of preconditions on us; turn loose murderers who can’t wait to murder more of us, kill ourselves via increased abortions and euthanasia disguised as restricting treatment to elders and others who are “low priorities” because a socialist economy won’t support as many of us. And last, but certainly not least, we’re supposed to scrap the most effective economy humans have ever devised—free market capitalism—for the real “failed policies of the past”—socialism.
We’re supposed to do all of this for the flimsy reason that a lot of liberals think it is “the right thing to do.”
As for accountability: When the “chickens” of this transformation come home to roost, you know what’s going to happen. When the economy tanks, when our enemies gain strength and we weaken, when our freedoms disappear and government control is extended into every aspect of our lives, the proponents of these policies are going to tell us that this is “what’s supposed to happen.” They’re going to tell us that it’s is the best we can hope for. It’s what we have to do to live within our means—to keep from destroying the planet. They’re going to give us all these excuses when the real reason is these disasters are the best a socialist economy and policial system can produce.
When that happens will the fact that in a socialist society the people who live highest on the hog are the political leaders be any solace?