Canadian writer Tim Murray again exposes the logic of professional environmentalists who are not really helping the environment. Their message is all about having your ecological cake and consuming it at the same time. [Ed:Note that Tim is an environmentalist; just not faux-environmentalist.]
“Brothers and sisters. Deliverance is at hand!
Smart growth means ...
We can have our cake and develop it too!
We can grow “up” without growing “out”.
We can keep packin’em in as we go forth and multiply!
We can continually offset the growth in total consumption by reducing our per capita energy consumption and waste!
We can jam half the world into North America and protect greenbelts and nature reserves with land-use planning at the same time! We can have “smart growth”!
We can scale up alternative energy production to meet current and future needs!
We can sustain our industrial economy by extracting a diminishing and increasingly inaccessible supply of natural non-renewable resources by increasing technological efficiencies ad infinitum!
We can continue to draw water from empty aquifers by tinkering with the pumps!
We can counteract remorseless economic contraction engendered by non-renewable resource scarcities by simply redistributing wealth, that is, poverty!
We can let institutions off the hook by making environmentalism a matter of personal responsibility! We can save the world by changing our individual behaviour and modelling it to others who will be impressed by our posture of self-righteousness and moral superiority!
We can save our souls be endless Mea Culpas and expressions of Western self-loathing and guilt-tripping!
We can employ junk anthropology and prefabricated Marxist narratives to believe that indigenous people, ‘women of colour’, and the global poor are never to be held responsible for anything and that it is all down to the Greedy Rich of the Wicked West! Biodiversity loss and deforestation cannot be attributed to overpopulation in any way!
We can believe in the Myth of the Noble Savage, that aboriginals were and are invested with an exclusive wisdom, intrinsic to their race, a capability as “wise stewards” who felt a close bond to the land ----and yet still accuse our critics of racism!
We can, by our trivial green living habits deflect attention from the fact it is our per capita share of collective infrastructure costs (hospitals, schools, roads, rolling stock, bridges, tunnels etc.)---some half-million dollars for each Australian, American and Canadian---that accounts for the lion share of our consumption!
We can, by playing “Green” forget that each of us by mere virtue of living in this North American industrial society consumes 38,000 lbs of fuels, minerals and metals each year and thereby achieve smug satisfaction about the fact that we eat vegan, use CFLs and bike to work!
In summary brothers and sisters, all of this is possible if you give your heart and your credit card number to me, your Green Apostle of False Hope. And if it does not all pan out, as I promise, if my green prophecies do not materialize, so what?
Verily I say unto you, whosoever will believeth in me and my ineffectual cause shall feel good about himself!
And when all is said and done, is that not what it is all about? Feelings? Feeling guilty, feeling sin and expiating it with trivial acts of self-abnegation? Is that not what you crave? That old-time religion that was good enough for Grampa and Grandma but not good enough for you?
Don’t listen to your Left Brain. That’s the Devil talkin’. Come to me. Come home to the Sierra Club.
Tim Murray
June 19, 2012
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