Environmental groups like the League of Conservation Voters and the Sierra Club are urging people to support Obama's Stimulus package. Does this make any sense? To answer that we have to address what is environmentalism today?
Environmentalism's original impulse was love of Nature and the desire to conserve most of it. (We should tell the truth and admit that we don't care to conserve all of it. Even the most hard core advocates of negative population growth would like to see the guinea worm and some other scourges go.) This original impulse was combined with mostly justified fears that we were putting into the environment things that may make us sick or even kill us.
Environmentalism as such has spurred many to reduce our consumption in both big and petty ways. For instance, many environmenmtally minded people I know avoid getting a new bag with each purchase. In fact, I usually plan to have a bag with me when I go shopping and thus reduce the amount of bags wasted.
How does this environmental virtue of reducing consumption jive with sharply increasing government spending? Government spending is commonly viewed as having a lot of waste and pork. Can environmentalists really want to support the production of a bunch of stuff that people didn't want enough to pay for themselves?
Tuesday, February 3, 2009
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)