Malthusians

The Story of Leftist Propaganda in Schools

by Ivan Osorio on April 8, 2010

in Culture, Environment, Natural Resources

At BigHollywood.com, Anne McIlhinney critiques the anti-industrial environmental propaganda film, The Story of Stuff. The film’s narrator, Annie Leonard, argues that modern civilization uses too many resources to produce too many things. The film is so idiotic (I’ve seen part of it) that it ordinarily wouldn’t merit a response–except for the fact that it’s being shown in schools around the United States.

Problem is when children see Leonard’s film in the classroom they don’t get to hear about all the good things stuff does. Stuff gave my Dad a hip replacement at 91; I think that’s good. Hospitals use loads of stuff so people don’t die really young like they do in places where there’s very little stuff. Your bicycle is made of stuff and your computer is made of loads of stuff not to mention your car. Artists use lots of stuff to make other stuff that they hope someone might like, like jewelry or movies or sculpture or paintings. Lots of stuff allows us to travel much further than our bicycle will take us, it allowed 45,000 people to travel from all over the world to Copenhagen in December 2009 to campaign against other people traveling across the world.

Stuff builds homes so people are protected from the elements and don’t die just because it rained for a week. And stuff is nice to eat. I like sushi and chicken pie and avocado, not necessarily together. People who don’t have access to enough stuff die all the time in places like Africa and that is really not good. Stuff brings water to places that would never ever, ever get water otherwise and that’s good because you can’t live without water.

Making stuff, even silly stuff gives someone somewhere a job that didn’t exist before and that allows his kids go to school and people to get all the other stuff that makes life lovely.

Well put.

My colleague Lee Doren offers a point-by-point rebuttal of Leonoard’s silly film below (in four parts).

O’Neill on the Sorry Heritage of “Overpopulation”

by Ivan Osorio on February 17, 2010

in Culture, Environment, Natural Resources

At Spiked Online, Brendan O’Neil dissects the absurdity of neo-Malthusians who seek to portray themselves as intellectual mavericks, by presenting “overpopulation” as the environmental elephant in the room no one wants to talk about. “If overpopulation is taboo, unmentionable, so inflammably risqué,” asks O’Neill, “then why can you not open a newspaper, switch on the box or listen to any one of millions of green activists without hearing someone say: ‘There are too many people’?”

Probably because population control advocates feel they need to prime their audiences for what they recognize, however reluctantly, as a monstrous idea. While O’Neill doesn’t explicitly state that conclusion, it’s hard not to come to it when he lays out where the neo-Malthusians fit in the West’s intellectual history.

The rise and rise of neo-Malthusianism speaks to today’s powerful sense of misanthropy and lack of social imagination. Everyone from royals to republican commentators, from feminists to fascists (the neo-fascist BNP says ‘The planet is overpopulated!’), accepts there are too many people. Increasingly, social problems such as poverty and inequality, and practical problems such as pollution, are recast as demographic problems, brought about not by the irrational organisation of society, but by people’s own stupidity and fecundity. So the solution becomes, not to have more debate, more politics, more development and more brainstorming for social leaps forward, but to demonise people who have large families, to make fertility into a new f-word, to cajole people into having fewer children, and to limit freedom and choice rather than expand them.

Yet the neo-Malthusians, despite facing no serious challenge from mainstream thinkers, feel defensive about their arguments. Recognising that Malthusianism has a very chequered history – not only in terms of making wildly incorrect predictions but also in terms of its origins in the racist and eugenics movements of yesteryear – today’s Malthusians present themselves as brave intellectual warriors daring to rescue what look like sullied ideas from the past but which are actually (allegedly) sensible. They have discarded the discredited language of eugenics, the outdated talk of ‘too many little black babies’, and even the seemingly PC but actually duplicitous discussion of ‘family planning’ introduced in the 1960s, and now justify their misanthropic people-bashing in the new language of environmentalism. And of course, presenting themselves as taboo-busters also gives the impression that they’re at the cutting edge of public debate and policymaking when in fact their miserabilism is mainstream.

Population controllers would be right to be embarrassed at any association with ideas like eugenics, but, however outraged they may get at people bringing up such a connection, they cannot run away from it. They continue to be wrong for the same fundamental reason Malthus made his famous error: underestimating the potential advances in human productivity to such an extent as to define survival in near-zero-sum terms. As Fred Smith puts it, when the neo-Malthusians see a human being, they see only a mouth, not the brain and hands to go with it.

Worse even, they see a population, they see not a group of individuals, but a soulless mass. Thus, population controllers seeking to portray themselves as taboo breakers makes sense. When advancing an idea that is both morally and economically wrong, a little contrived rudeness adds a dash of honesty.

One Down, Six to Go!

by Fred Smith on April 8, 2009

in Energy, Environment, Global Warming, International, Natural Resources, Trade

Oh the Worries of Our Modern Malthusians! In Washington this week, the Anarctica and Arctic Councils met for the first time.  Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, used the occasion to discuss the problems that global warming was “causing” in these areas.  Among the myriad disasters is the possibility that the region’s energy resources will become available and that an all-year passage around the pole might open.  

As I recall my history, European explorers spent centuries searching for a Northwest Passage.  Given the massive increases in global trade, the efficiencies that this would provide could give our flagging global economy a significant boost – and reduce energy use also.  And increasing access to new secure energy reserves (especially given that Norwegian and Alaskan activities have already shown we can extract such resources safely) would do much to address energy security concerns.  But to our Modern Malthusians, these are problems! 

As I remember geography there were seven continents – North and South America, Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia/New Zealand, and Anarctica.   Since humanity never reached the latter continent, it had no real defenders and, thus, in 1959, the global Antarctic Treaty, transformed it forever into a ward of the United Nations.  The treaty suggests the global goals of our Modern Malthusians. 

There is a total ban on economic activity, even though continental drift over the eons has meant that Anarctica might well have extensive fossil fuel reserves.  The treaty forbids almost all economic activities but does authorize residency by “scientists.”  This illustrates another bias of the left – “Research good, technology bad!”  In her speech however, Hillary went further calling for tourist restrictions (so much for eco-tourism).  One begins to understand – to protect the planet, we must wall it off from humanity!  

An ambitious goal but one that shouldn’t be ignored.  Malthusians have now captured one continent – only six to go!