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?
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I'm note sure whether you're still on your Jewish Adventure, whether you've Reconfigured Ecological Politics, or if you have any more Thoughts on Free Enterprise, but you did leave a comment on my blog that raises a counterpoint to Pope Benedict's claim that one can be both pro-life and ecologically just.
You say that human overpopulation is causing habitat deprivation and consequently extinction of species. First, I would agree that humans are causing habitat deprivation; however, the cause is not human overpopulation but reckless and unethical methods of development. The myth of overpopulation has been spread by the eugencis movement as a way to eradicate racial minorities and the burden of the lower class.
The West is actually on the verge of a demographic winter, meaning that in Europe and Australia and Canada, there will be a higher death rate than birth rate. Soon replacement levels in the US will reach the point of going in reverse; already among African Americans, if trends continue, there will be a zero replacement level by 2100. So if you are vexed about endangered speices, consider your black friends among that list.
I think we should be very outspokenly opposed to the current trends in agriculture and development that are destroying natural habitats around the globe; yet the solution should not be to kill more humans. The solution should be to make humans more ethically responsible and just (i.e. humane). That's what the Pope is calling for in his encyclical.
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