It was from David Graber -- a mainstream biologist with the National Parks Service -- and it was in an article he wrote for the L.A. Times Book Review.

No wonder Dr. Patrick Moore, a cofounder and former director of Greenpeace, is appalled by what environmentalism has become.

He says it’s been “hijacked by political activists who are using environmental rhetoric to cloak agendas, like class warfare and anti-corporatism, that have almost nothing to do with ecology.”

Indeed, socialism plays a part. The Kyoto Accord calls for reducing industrial production. In “The Population Bomb,” eco-pioneer Paul Ehrlich said, “We’ve had too much economic growth in the United States. Economic growth in rich countries like ours is the disease, not the cure.”

What happens if we don’t want to go along with environmentalists?

Ehrlich says, “We must have population control at home, hopefully through a system of incentives and penalties, but by compulsion if voluntary methods fail” (emphasis added).

Yet to attack techno-capitalism and even reproductive freedom is to rage against the human mind itself -- and thus against human survival. Our reshaping of nature resulted from our applying our reasoning ability to practical matters like finding food, building shelters, and finding ways to use our natural surroundings to improve this process.

That’s what technology is about, and we’ve done this well through free enterprise.

In her book “Silent Spring,” eco-pioneer Rachel Carson wrote, “ The ‘control of nature’ is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal Age of biology and the convenience of man.”

Here, it was really the human mind and its practical applications for our own survival that she objected to.

Radical environmentalism preaches primitivism, material self-sacrifice, anti-capitalist economics, and wilderness-worship.

We ought to care for our natural environment for our own sake -- not its “intrinsic value" -- and we should simultaneously embrace our technology, free markets, rational self-interest and our ability to reason.

Yes, our modern technology’s effects on the environment must be taken seriously, but environmentalists’ claims cannot be trusted as objective as long as they believe their anti-capitalist, anti-technology agenda supersedes scientific accuracy.

What about cases in which some technology really is dangerous?

As the Ayn Rand Institute’s Peter Schwartz noted, “Yes, it may turn out that some allegation of theirs [environmentalists] turns out to be true -- by accident, as a parrot’s squawking may coincidentally parallel some fact of reality. If this occurs, as one can ascertain by rational means, appropriate steps should be taken to alleviate the danger -- steps that logically cannot include any renunciation of technological progress.” Or capitalism.

A philosophic attitude on science far healthier than Stephen Schneider’s has been taken by none other than Bjorn Lomborg. He’s still a socialist, but that doesn’t mean he can’t be objective about the scientific facts he’s uncovered.

The same goes for Paul Reiter -- chief entomologist at the U.S. government’s dengue research lab in Puerto Rico, who disputed claims that our industrial civilization creates malarial outbreaks induced from global warming.

“New Scientist” magazine once interviewed him, and the interviewer said, “OK. But can you see why some scientists go on about climate change and infectious disease? It's taken a long, hard fight to get the U.S. to take global warming seriously, and scientists don't want to throw that away. Even the slightest contrarian messages can be used by the oil and auto lobby to obstruct efforts to address global warming.”

Reiter replied, “You seem to be implying that the ends can justify the means. I disagree. ... My interest is in trying to keep the science straight. I love my subject and so do my colleagues. We are greatly concerned that a distorted picture has been presented to the public and is being used to drive [government] policy.”

Bravo to Reiter for his integrity. Incidentally, many scientists point out that global warming probably won’t even be dangerous.

Journalists and scientists should stop following the examples of Schneider and CNN producer Tera Ryan, and instead look to those set by Lomborg and Reiter. When that happens, we’ll have a more accurate picture of the true state of our environment, which is worth caring about.

At the same time, we can also appreciate our high-tech, free-market civilization and the great rational faculties that created it. That too is a grand feat of nature -- human nature, that is.

Stuart K. Hayashi is the president of the Reason Club of Honolulu and an undergraduate in Entrepreneurial Studies at Hawaii Pacific University, though his opinions do not necessarily reflect that of either institution. He can be reached at radical_individualist@hotmail.com (If you would like to continue seeing Stuart Hayashi's editorials on this site, please let Hawaii Reporter know at info@hawaiireporter.com)

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