In a word – poverty. The most poverty stricken people of the world are usually the most ecologically friendly.
Eh?
That\’s Neil Harding.
He really seems to have missed the point that poverty is the inefficient use of resources. The creation of wealth is the moving of said resources from low value uses to higher value ones. The richer we ae, by definition, the more efficiently we are using resources.
Would that include landless peasants burning down forests to plant crops.
What makes a green lifestyle?
Being dead.
ie. Having no humans at all – or as few as possible (‘just thee and me’, perhaps?).
That’s the sad implication of this whole line of ecological thinking. It is anti-life.
‘Treading lightly’ sounds poetic but translates into doing as little as possible, preferably nothing at all, even better never having existed.
The old leftist-pacifist slogan of “Better to be red than dead” has mutated into the green slogan of “Better to be dead than red (or blue)”
But the leftist-pacifist slogan was coined as a parody of the rightist-militarist “better dead then red” slogan in the first place…
How about North American Indians burning forests because deer don’t like forests?
How about the same Indians running entire herds of buffalo over a cliff to collect meat for a small tribe for a few days?
How about the same Indians right now, this very instant, shooting pregnant female game out of season, at night with lights and overfishing salmon to the point of extinction?
Oh wait, lefties never criticize Indians, or other primitives, past, present or future.
The poorest people in the world don’t have electricity, each of their homes has a stove which burns wood, coal or peat. Their land is used to grow crops, and raise livestock, non-intensively. So they wipe out huge swathes of forest and wilderness every year just to maintain their poor quality of life, because of their high birth rate.
The rainforests, the highland gorilla, the tiger, the clouded leopard, are all threatened by the poor, not the rich.
Monty:
The birth-rate may be involved in the persistence of poverty but usually cannot be the sole–or even the main– cause. Rather, it’s a persistent inability to accumulate capital for the intensification of agriculture. That condition is usually the result of political and property-rights instability. In such places the property relations are such that few with capital can be interested without the prospect of large (and quick) profits; whatever might be the prospect that the impoverished themselves might improve methods through saving are rendered almost nonexistent, not by their pressing needs alone but by the uncertainty that their effort will ultimately reap benefit.
There are many persuaded that the fundamental cause of such conditions is insufficient intelligence; and that may, indeed, characterize many such places and even account for the political instabilty. But, to the extent that reasonable political frameworks exist, low average intelligence is no insurmountable barrier to proper agricultural technique. The world’s full of agricultural (and every other kind of ) brains available for hire. Given a free market and political stability of the imperfect sort routinely available in what we call the “developed” nations, literally everyone hires experts smarter (or sometimes merely more adept at a particular task) than themselves.
But the leftist-pacifist slogan was coined as a parody of the rightist-militarist “better dead then red” slogan in the first place
Given the real experience was “red and dead” perhaps the realist slogan should have been “neither red nor dead”.
Maybe I should elaborate. If we look at per capita GDP – the lowest ranking countries do tend to have the lowest carbon emissions. I wasn’t saying that poverty is the solution, just a hint that reducing consumption is key to tackling manmade climate change (I know most you deny mankind has anything to do with it – but I go with scientific consensus on this).