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I like this story, but where are the individualist or free-market environmentalists. We iGreens obviously all have a lot of work to do. Sometimes to keep things organized, it's best to jot down a list. So, faced
with a flurry of news items and e-mails about unscientific goings-on, I find
myself filing them according to the political philosophies of the people
responsible for the goings-on. All of them are in some sense "greens,"
but I discern seven distinct types — or subspecies, if you will. It's worth
noting how their priorities differ. (I suspect this list will come in handy in
the future.) In rough chronological order of their historical emergence, here are
the seven varieties, accompanied in each case by a plausible slogan — or
mating call, if you will — for that subspecies: —Alternative medicine users (mating call: "My homeopath is no
psychopath!"): There may be a big current boom in herbs, worts, potions,
and the like, but in some sense these practices date back to before the dawn of
civilization, since we know that hunter-gatherer tribes employ natural remedies
and healing rituals. Sometimes it seems we haven't learned much since then. Witness an e-mail forwarded to me a few days ago that recommends a thirty-day
colon-cleansing regimen as the key to health, saying the technique will not only
lower your cancer risk but give you "more energy, less allergies, clearing
of acne, cessation of migraines, and many other results." See my e-monograph
on alternative medicine to hear about other unproven claims. —Organic food advocates (mating call: "What would Bilbo Baggins
eat?"): The arguments over the scientific claims of organic agriculture go
'round and 'round, but ultimately, this group is more attached to an agrarian
vision of the good life than to the spurious health claims they make. Members of
this group aren't so different, really, from nineteenth-century British Tories,
who lamented the sight of quaint peasant farms giving way to industrialization. Unfortunately, quaint often means inefficient, and that's certainly true of
organic agriculture. The Hudson Institute's Alex Avery notes
that raising all the crops in the U.S. with organic fertilizer, for instance,
would require some 1 billion additional cattle to produce the fertilizer —
cattle that would need new grazing space at least as vast as the entire U.S. —Safety fanatics (mating call: "Eeeek!"): For about a
century now, activists have been getting ever more suspicious about our food
supply, appliances, vehicles, asbestos insulation, etc. Anxiety never seems to
abate as wealth and comfort grow. Anxiety simply attaches itself to ever-smaller
threats (a doctor's expression for hypochondriacs may be apt for the safety
fanatics, too: "the worried well"). Take acrylamide, a substance in bread and fried foods that can give rats
cancer if given to them in astronomical doses but poses no known risk to humans.
An FDA director told USA Today this week: "We don't know if it's a
human carcinogen. Some animal carcinogens are. Some aren't." But that
doesn't stop Michael Jacobson of the Center for Science in the Public Interest
from telling reporters that acrylamide is a "probable" human
carcinogen, "an invisible contaminant that's never listed on labels,"
nor does it stop him from urging people "to eat less of the most
contaminated" foods. In keeping with CSPI's usual practice, Jacobson also
attempts to look like a moderate by assuring us that "People shouldn't
panic." We won't, no thanks to CSPI. —Environmentalists (mating call: "In Gaia we trust!"):
They're keen to save the wonders of nature but not terribly fond of the one
wondrous species that talks, reasons, invents machines, and expresses concern
about the state of the planet. Environmentalists tend to assume that nature, in the absence of humans, would
be a thing of harmony and unchanging bliss — that any changes for the worse
must be humanity's doing and any changes for the better nature's doing. How
troubled they must be then, by reports such as a new one in the journal Geology,
which suggests that periods of global warming occurred in the distant past —
long before humans were around — due to such natural causes as the release of
gas from sediments crushed during continental drift. —Animal rightists (mating call: "Let my pandas go!"): I'm
all for decreasing animal suffering, but animal rightists, like the
environmentalists, seem to think we humans are the unique cause of that problem
— ignoring the fact that nature would still be a merciless frenzy of rape and
murder even without humans in it. Those amoral, furry and scaly monsters have
claws and fangs for a reason, and they aren't afraid to use them. Animal rightists will be just as disappointed as environmentalists over a new
report
suggesting that natural climate change — not human hunters, as long believed
— killed off the impressive megafauna that roamed North America until about
10,000 years ago (such as my personal favourite, the giant ground sloth).
Would we really want these things roaming around today anyway? More importantly,
though, do we really want ailing monkeys from medical research labs wandering
free after being liberated by animal rightists? —Anti-biotech activists (mating call: "Genetic purity is moral
purity!"): Opposed to tinkering with plants in labs — despite several
productive millennia of tinkering with them even more haphazardly in fields and
gardens — the left-leaning genetic-modification-haters are finding some allies
on the anti-cloning right. Since most anti-biotech activists are by definition also members of the
"safety fanatics" subspecies — and thus terrified of even the
tiniest, harmless traces of arsenic in drinking water — how, one wonders, will
they react to a HealthScoutNews announcement this week that scientists have
created a genetically-modified plant that removes arsenic from the environment? —Anti-globalists, a.k.a. "anarchists," a.k.a. the antiglob,
a.k.a. globophobes (mating call: "Workers of the world, go back to your
own country!"): When all else has failed — when your utopian socialist
vision has turned into a dystopian hatred of the whole modern world — you can
always just behave like a vandal and throw pies at the corporations that do the
things that anger all the green subspecies mentioned above. Last month's anti-globalisation protests in Washington, D.C. were a reminder
that this movement has become not so much a footnote to the left or to
liberalism as a deranged, green interloper from somewhere beyond the political
spectrum — an interloper that may do as much as radical Islam to make
neo-liberals and neo-conservatives band together, defending the political centre
against the extremists. If the anti-globalisation activists remain hell-bent on
impeding commerce, modern agriculture, science, dam-building projects, foreign
investment, and virtually everything else humans do to keep themselves healthy
and well-fed, the rest of us may find ourselves reacting by growing increasingly
fond of the establishment, no matter where we fall on the old-fashioned,
twentieth-century-style right-left spectrum. Regardless of how these seven green subspecies feel about the way the world
is headed, though, at least by existing they're ensuring the planet's political
"biodiversity." Why not see how many of these subspecies you
can spot in tomorrow's news? They're not likely to go extinct any time soon. By Todd Seavey Reprinted from www.HealthFactsandFears.com |
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