To Protect or Not to Protect?
Gwendolyn Hall
Department of Psychology, Liberty University
PSY 101-B16
Professor Elizabeth Debolt
April 26th, 2021
Introduction
There is no such thing as climate change, the world and environment can heal itself it is just
another economic scam to get us to put our hard-earned money in their pockets. “We are
harming the natural world, to our own detriment” (Chan et. al 2020). The environment is going
into shambles by the minuet and by the second due to humans making their harmful, careless,
mistakes along with the lack of empathy of their actions. When individuals do not protect the
environment, there are a lot of things at stake, and those things are, humans and the food supply.
The purpose of this argument is to shed light and show awareness concerning the environment
and address the writer’s viewpoint and share their common ground.
Team No Save: Anti-Environmentalist
Individuals who oppose in “protecting” the world believe that saving the world cost a lot of
money and it takes up too much time and interfere with other resources and individual’s job.
Little do they know, environmentalist protectors and or enthusiasts “cannot stop the industries or
businesses as they are the suppliers of our unlimited wants” (Mukherjee, Bhattacharjee,
Paul,Banerjee 2020). “As job creation is usually measured, most government programs create
jobs somewhere in the economy- just as they destroy jobs elsewhere” (Schmalensee 1993).
That screeching sound you heard last week was the sound of President Donald Trump making a
U-turn on the environment, pulling the United States out of the Paris climate accord. What a
difference a year and an election have made.
A year ago, the US was making notable progress on some of our toughest environmental
problems. Grassroots mobilizations and other forms of pressure helped nudge America’s political
leadership to halt pipelines and craft new policies on climate change, fracking, and toxics. The
rest of the world, even China, was coalescing around a commitment to curb greenhouse gases,
and the Paris accord had been signed into force.
Trump’s electoral victory has changed much of that. As part of Steve Bannon’s agenda for the
“deconstruction of the administrative state,” Trump’s appointees are sharpening their axes for
environmental agencies and science. Besides the Paris agreement, they’ve targeted Obama’s
climate policies, and the EPA’s budget, which they’ve proposed to cut by 31 percent.
It’s ironic that today’s Republicans see America’s environmental state as such a liability, given
that Republican presidents had such a big hand in constructing it. In the early 20th century Teddy
Roosevelt pushed a federal system of parks, forests, and monuments. In 1970, it was Richard
Nixon who created the Environmental Protection Agency and signed many foundational laws.
Even during the last Republican administration of George W. Bush, longtime EPA employees
have told me there was considerable if often tacit support by party leaders.
As COVID-19 spread across the world in 2020, some environmental extremists rejoiced at the
growing human death toll. The>New York Times>has noted that an upside of social-distancing
efforts is that they may help fight climate change, and CNN ran the headline “There’s an
unlikely beneficiary of coronavirus: The planet.” The BBC’s environmental correspondent
gleefully reported that air pollution and CO2>emissions fell rapidly as the virus spread. Some
environmentalists worried that, when things get better, post-recession economies might see a
surge in harmful emissions.
Of course, most environmentalists are not anti-humanist or anti-natalist. But extremist rhetoric
from the fringe of the environmental movement could have a lasting effect on America’s total
fertility rate (1.779 births per woman in 2020), which is already well below the replacement level
of 2.1 births per woman — with serious consequences for U.S. economic growth and tax rates, as
well as for the national fisc and the payment of unfunded liabilities accrued by the U.S.
government.
A 2020 study in the journal>Climatic Change>found that 60 percent of U.S. respondents between
the ages of 27 and 45 “reported being ‘very’ or ‘extremely concerned’ about the carbon footprint
of procreation,” and 96.5 percent of respondents “were ‘very’ or ‘extremely concerned’ about the
well-being of their existing, expected, or hypothetical children in a climate-changed world. This
was largely due to an overwhelmingly negative expectation of the future with climate change.”
The>word “ecology” was coined by the 19th-century German biologist Ernst Haeckel. Ecological
concerns in Western Europe were largely rooted in the Romantic opposition to industrialization
and urbanization. Such concerns were particularly prevalent in Germany, which was the center
of the Counter-Enlightenment and a hotbed of the general disgust with “modernity.”
Environmentalism took longer to emerge in the United States. According to the>EPA
Journal(1985), “many environmental ideas [in America] first crystallized in 1962. That year saw
the publication of Rachel Carson’s>Silent Spring, first in serial form in the>New Yorker>and then
as a Houghton Mifflin best seller.” In her book, Carson attacked “indiscriminate use of
pesticides, . . . causing a revolution in public opinion.” Within a year, Congress passed the 1963
Clean Air Act, giving the federal government more power to regulate the environment.
Five years later,>The Population Bomb, by the Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich, caused a sensation
of similar proportions. The book, which sold millions of copies and was translated into many
languages, warned of the coming depletion of natural resources. “The battle to feed all of
humanity is over,” Ehrlich began, following with his famous prediction that “in the 1970s
hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon
now.”
The speed and extent of environmentalist triumphs in the United States are noteworthy. Earth
Day was born on April 22, 1970. In September of that year, the U.S. Congress beefed up the
1963 Clean Air Act. By December, President Richard M. Nixon inaugurated the Environmental
Protection Agency. Private environmental organizations also flourished, along with militant
groups such as Greenpeace, which was established in 1971.
As the 1970s rolled on, American environmentalism became increasingly anti-capitalist. Arthur
Herman of the Hudson Institute avers that it was the American writer Charles A. Reich who,
with his book>The Greening of America>(1970), brought the German ideas to America. Herman
notes that “modern ecology” in the United States “replayed the same enthusiasms that had
animated every modern cultural regeneration movement since the German Romantics.”
That is exactly the Marxist critique of capitalism as “alienation” of labor. Instead of
acknowledging that, however, Reich veered straight into environmentalism. Yet, like a typical
Marxist, he predicted revolutionary turmoil. “There is a revolution coming,” Reich prophesied,
and its “ultimate creation will be a new and enduring wholeness and beauty — a renewed
relationship of man to himself, to other men, to society, to nature, and to the land.”
Other voices critical of capitalism’s effect on the environment soon emerged. They included the
American biologist Barry Commoner, who argued that modern society was unsustainable.
Unlike Ehrlich, who focused on “overpopulation,” Commoner focused on capitalist production
techniques (e.g., synthetic textiles and pollution-causing detergents) and advocated “eco-
socialism.”
In 1972, the British economist Barbara Ward and the Franco-American microbiologist René
Dubos warned that the exponential economic growth of industrial society threatened the survival
of the entire planet. In their view, wealth generation was no longer capitalism’s saving grace. It
was a problem that needed to be tackled.
By the 1980s, environmental demands became more radical. The Norwegian philosopher Arne
Naess, for example, thought that reforming industrial society was not enough. Instead, he called
for a change of the culture that allowed ecological destruction to exist in the first place. In his
philosophy of “deep ecology,” Naess argued that the problem with modernity was that it placed
humans above other life-forms, creating an inflated ego that enabled our species to destroy
nature.
In>The Modern Crisis>(1986), the American social theorist Murray Bookchin called for the
replacement of environmentally destructive capitalism. His utopia was radically egalitarian, with
people, plants, and animals living on equal terms. As he saw it, such utopia had existed for
thousands of years in the form of primitive societies. His vision amounted to an inversion of
human progress. Civilization, he thought, was just domination over nature, wrenching away the
last remnants of an earthly paradise that still existed among the aborigines of Africa and South
America.
In his book>In the Absence of the Sacred>(1991), the American activist Jerry Mander argued that
primitive societies are based on a rejection of modernity, not ignorance of it. He saw the
subsistence lifestyle as a conscious cultural choice to avoid civilization. To this day, deep
ecologists view primitive societies as not only ecologically harmonious but free of the desire to
exploit nature.
In>Earth in the Balance>(1992), his critique of modernity, Al Gore fused some old ideas: that
modern society was ecologically destructive, materialist, and shallow, that it shielded us from
authentic experiences. The culprit, however, was new: humanity itself. In Gore’s vision, culture
represented control over nature. To wit, stone tools and cave paintings were simply early human
attempts to impose artificial order on the organic world. The West, capitalism, technology, and
even sexism and racism were extensions of the innate human desire to dominate.
Some ecologists began to salivate at the thought of the end of the world. The American writer
Edward Abbey dreamed of dams bursting and cities crumbling, forcing the last remnants of
humanity to return to a primitive lifestyle. The French ocean explorer Jacques-Yves Cousteau
called the idea that suffering and disease might be eliminated “not altogether a beneficial one.”
He thought that “we must eliminate 350,000 people per day.”
The American environmentalist Christopher Manes called HIV/AIDS “the necessary solution” to
environmental degradation. Paraphrasing Voltaire, he said that “if the AIDS epidemic didn’t
exist, radical environmentalists would have to invent one.” In his 1994 best seller>The Hot Zone:
A Terrifying True Story, Richard Preston of the>New York Times>wondered whether super-deadly
viruses such as Ebola and Marburg might be the biosphere’s reaction against “the human
parasite” and the “cancerous rot-outs” of advanced industrial societies.
The environmentalists of yore were concerned that we would run out of resources. Today’s
environmentalists are concerned about, in addition to the well-known issue of rising
CO2emissions, the possibility of “running out of nature.” As the American environmentalist Bill
McKibben has explained, “it’s not that we’re running out of stuff. What we’re running out of is
what the scientists call ‘sinks’ — places to put the by-products of our large appetites. Not
garbage dumps, . . . but the atmospheric equivalent of garbage dumps.”
Overconsumption, in other words, will not exhaust planetary resources. Instead, the
environmental catastrophe will be brought about by the destruction of humanity’s broader
environmental support systems, such as high-quality soil, groundwater deposits, biodiversity, and
so on. The key to understanding this “problem” is the concept of an ecological threshold, or “the
point at which a relatively small change or disturbance in external conditions causes a rapid
change in an ecosystem.”
Environmentalists worry that even if the human population shrinks, consumption of resources
and the concomitant pressure on the environment will increase. Yet, as Andrew McAfee of the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology discovered when he looked at U.S. consumption of 72
resources (from aluminum to zinc), the>absolute>annual use of 66 resources peaked prior to 2019.
Even energy use decreased between 2008 and 2017, while the U.S. economy expanded by 15
percent in the same period. The U.S. economy, in other words, has reached such a level of
efficiency and sophistication that it is possible for it to produce an ever-increasing amount of
goods and services while, at the same time, using ever fewer resources.
To give just one simple example: When aluminum cans were introduced in 1959, they weighed
85 grams. By 2011, they weighed 13 grams. Why pay more for inputs if you don’t have to? The
universality of the profit motive should drive other economies in the same approximate direction.
Economic growth does not have to come from bigness — bigger and deeper mines, larger and
more-polluting steel mills, and so on. It can and does come from “smartness” with processes
such as miniaturization (the computing industry, for example, saw the replacement of massive
mainframe computers with smaller and much more efficient personal computers) and
dematerialization (a smartphone, for example, combines functions that previously required a
myriad of separate devices, including a telephone, camera, radio, newspaper, compass, television
set, alarm clock, photo album, voice recorder, and maps).
Environmentalists assume that humanity will sit idly by and allow environmental problems to
overwhelm our planet. That is highly improbable given our species’ track record of tackling
challenges. According to Ted Nordhaus of the Breakthrough Institute in California, it took six
times as much land to feed a single person in the Neolithic period as it does now. If we were still
harvesting einkorn with sticks and stones, we would certainly transgress our “environmental
means,” as Nell Frizzell put it. Instead, we’ve improved our agricultural efficiency so much that
less than 2 percent of the U.S. population has to farm at all.
In fact, if the productivity of the world’s farmers increases to U.S. levels, humanity will be able
to restore at least 146 million hectares (about 560,000 square miles) of cropland to nature,
according to Jesse Ausubel et al. in their article “Peak Farmland and the Prospect for Land
Sparing” (2013). Such efficiency-driven “human withdrawal from the landscape,” noted Ronald
Bailey of>Reason magazine, could be a “prelude to a vast ecological restoration” over the course
of the 21st century.
Many additional problems identified by the environmentalists are being addressed or are on the
cusp of being addressed. Forest coverage is growing in rich countries, species are being protected
at record levels throughout the world, freshwater reserves are being replenished through
desalination in the Middle East, soil erosion is being reduced through precision agriculture in
Israel, and CO2emissions have fallen in nuclear-friendly France and Sweden. In the future,
genetically modified crops could lead to a decline in the use of nitrogen and phosphorus, and
wild fish stocks could bounce back through greater use of aquaculture, which is rapidly
expanding in China.
