October, 2004 (Paul Driessen) -
Thank you for your
kind introduction – and for the warm welcome I’ve gotten
from everyone I’ve met on this gorgeous peninsula. All of you
have been treating this CFA very well indeed.
Many moons ago, I actually applied to oceanographic
school at Dalhousie. My career path took me elsewhere,
though, and I never made it up here, until now. But now my
family and I are talking about a vacation up this way,
perhaps for next year’s Celtic Colors Festival – because all of
us are real fans of Carolan, step dancing and good beer.
Of course I’m here today for a much more serious
reason. I’ve come to discuss what I think is appropriately
called Eco-Imperialism – how it relates to you – and how your
situation relates to a much broader picture.
Elizabeth May, Bruno Marccochio and their Hollywood
friends are calling Sydney the worst toxic waste site in North
America. It’s great for power politics and fund-raising – but
it’s a libelous falsehood that delays any cleanup and makes it
much harder for that wonderful city to attract new teachers,
doctors and businesses.
Unfortunately, their situation isn’t unique. The Sierra
Club, and all too many organizations like it, brilliantly
promote themselves as the sole guardians of the public
interest … the sole arbiters of what represents corporate
social responsibility … the only ones truly concerned about
ethics, and the health and welfare of people, communities
and the environment.
They’ve also transformed what was once a mostly
pragmatic, grassroots environmental movement into a huge,
multinational, multi-billion-dollar crisis creation and
perpetuation industry. Its ethics and honesty are often
questionable. Its quest for ever more layers of red tape is
driving both rural
cleansing and a growing
rural revolution.
Its selfcontradictory (one could
say hypocritical)
policies have become
the stuff of legend.
Bemoan over-fishing of
wild stocks, but oppose
Paul Driessen addressing the breakfast in Halifax.
aquaculture. Champion
small farmers, and then
suffocate them with regulations. Oppose timber cutting – and
then stand mute when millions of acres burn in monstrous
infernos that destroy habitats, wildlife, soils, streams, homes
… and people’s livelihoods and lives.
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Its funding and dealings are hardly transparent. Its
policies cause endless suffering for millions of poor people.
And for the most part it is unaccountable to anyone.
Am I’m being too harsh? Listen to what Canada’s own,
Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore, has to say about the
movement he helped put on the map. He repeatedly calls it
intellectually and morally bankrupt – and he condemns it for
its anti-science, anti-technology, anti-civilization, and antipeople ideologies.
So the good news – and bad news – is: You folks aren’t
alone in having to confront problems that are made even
worse by organizations whose mindsets, agendas and ethics
are quite different from your own.
Other people, in fact, face infinitely worse situations.
ECO-IMPERIALISM
1. As Milton Friedman likes to say, there is no such thing as a
free lunch – not in economics, and not in the arena of
environmental policies.
The only questions are: Who pays for environmental
purity? How much do they pay? And who gets to decide?
My book, and my talk today, address what I believe are the
unethical, and unsustainable consequences of imposing the
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agendas of well-off activists in the United States and Europe
on the world’s most impoverished people.
2. These powerless people are too often forced to pay a
terrible price for what I call ideological environmentalism, or
Eco-Imperialism. That price is measured in perpetual poverty,
human rights violations, and lost lives – literally MILLIONS of
lives, every year.
It’s unconscionable. It reflects the false ethics and ecocentric ideologies that dominate far too many debates about
the environment and corporate social responsibility. It must
not continue.
3. As the song from Disney’s Lion King says, there is a circle
of life. If people are to be healthy and prosperous, they need
electricity, disease prevention, clean water and nutrition. All
are essential, and all are inter-connected.
4. But just as there is a circle of life, there is also a circle of
death. It connects policies that perpetuate poverty, disease,
malnutrition and early death – and will continue to do so as
long as ideological environmentalists are allowed to dictate
choices for the developing world.
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Far too many of these organizations oppose electrical
generation, economic development, biotechnology and
pesticides, especially DDT. In so doing, they deprive destitute
people of the blessings we take for granted – while doing
little to safeguard the environmental values we all cherish.
ELECTRICITY
5. A lot of Americans along the East Coast got a rude
reminder of what life is like without electricity, when
Hurricane Isabel struck last year.
Schools, offices, factories, even water purification plants shut
down.
Lights, computers, telephones, stoves, refrigerators, air
conditioning were all out of commission. Millions of dollars
worth of food got thrown out.
We had no drinking water. No hot water for showers and
baths. Worst of all, no television!
6. Isabel also reminded us what life is like every single day
for 2 billion people who never have electricity.
In Uganda and other parts of Africa, less than 3 percent
of the population has access to electricity.
5
In much of
India, China,
Central Asia and
Latin America, the
deprivation is
nearly as bad.
People there never
enjoy any of the
conveniences we
take for granted.
7. In developing
countries around
the world, in an era
when the average
European cow is
subsidized to the
Paul Driessen takes questions after his Sydney talk as
Brian Lee Crowley looks on.
tune of $250 a
year, a billion
people struggle to
survive on less than $200 per year. Three billion people – half
the world’s population – live on less than $700 a year.
8. Life for these people would be infinitely better if they
simply had abundant, reliable, affordable electricity. For lights
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and refrigeration in their homes. Hospitals and clinics.
Schools, shops and factories. Water purification and sewage
treatment.
The terrible reality is that, without electricity, the world’s
poorest people will never have any of these things, or the
healthcare, nutrition and prosperity that we view as our
birthright.
9. Unfortunately, they’re not likely to get electricity anytime
soon, because wealthy, powerful environmental pressure
groups oppose electricity. They’re part of an 8-billion-dollara-year global industry, and their comments often betray what
can only be called a callous, paternalistic, eco-centric
attitude.
10. Friends of the Earth president Brent Blackwelder: “It’s
just not possible for people to have the material lifestyle of
the average American. I’m proud that we’ve blocked over 300
hydroelectric projects in developing countries.”
11. Earth Island Institute editor Gar Smith: “African villagers
used to spend their days and evenings sewing clothing for
their neighbors, on foot-peddle-powered sewing machines.
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“Once they get electricity, they spend too much time
watching television and listening to the radio. If there is going
to be electricity, I’d like it to be decentralized, small and
solar-powered.”
12. Actor Ed Begley, Jr: “I would promote solar and wind for
power, not damming more rivers. It’s much cheaper for
everybody in Africa to have electricity where they need it –
on their huts.”
Little solar panels on huts – and huts forever. Keep the
locals cute, indigenous, traditional – and impoverished – just
like their ancestors, for another hundred years.
13. So, instead of switching on a light or appliance, millions
of mothers and daughters will continue spending hours every
day collecting firewood – or squatting in mud reeking with
animal feces and urine, to collect, dry and store manure for
cooking and heating fires.
14. Instead of turning a faucet handle, millions will continue
spending countless more hours carrying water from distant
rivers and lakes, often miles away, and often tainted with
parasites and bacteria.
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15. Instead of enjoying a modern kitchen, they will continue
spending hours a day over primitive hearths, constantly
breathing polluted smoke from their fires.
16. Instead of going to school, their children will continue
washing the family laundry in the river, tending crops and
cattle, weaving carpets or picking through trash, to help put
food on the table.
17. The human health,
economic and
environmental impacts
are horrendous.
Four million infants,
children and mothers
die every year from
asthma, pneumonia,
tuberculosis and other
lung infections – caused
by breathing the
AIMS’ Board member, Jacquelyn Thayer Scott with
Paul Driessen and Brian Lee Crowley in Sydney.
smoke, dust, bacteria
and pollutants that are a constant fixture in their homes and
throughout their villages.
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Six million more perish every year from dysentery and
other intestinal diseases, caused by unsafe water and spoiled
food. Few are lucky enough even to get cancer, much less
die from it. They simply won’t live long enough for that.
18. And still, radical environmentalists claim that they are
“stakeholders,” who have a right to make decisions that
affect these people’s lives, by determining what is in “the
public interest.”
19. These eco-imperialists insist that ‘renewable energy’ and
‘clean development’ are the future for Third World countries,
says India’s Barun Mitra. This, they argue, represents
environmental ethics, sustainable development, and prudent
precaution to prevent global climate change and other
hypothetical risks. DELAY NEXT SLIDE
20. However, it is groups like the Sierra Club, Greenpeace
and NRDC who define these terms, decide which risks should
be addressed, and determine who pays the price. Their antidevelopment agendas focus on distant, conjectural, imagined
risks.
They show little regard for the very real, immediate, lifethreatening risks that the world’s poor face every day.
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These people want better lives, a chance to see their children
live past infancy. Few of them are thrilled by the ecoimperialists’ assertions that they simply want to “protect”
“traditional” life styles.
21. “Cute, indigenous customs aren’t so charming when they
make up one’s day-to-day existence,” says Kenya’s Akinyi
Arunga.
“Then they mean indigenous poverty, indigenous
malnutrition, indigenous disease and childhood death. I don’t
wish this on my worst enemy, and I wish our so-called friends
would stop imposing it on us.”
22. Opposition to these energy projects is “a crime against
humanity,” a man in Gujarat, India angrily told a television
news crew.
“We don’t want to be encased like a museum,” a
Gujarati woman told the crew, in primitive lifestyles so
romanticized by Hollywood and radical Greens.
23. Blocking the construction of centralized power projects,
as not being “appropriate” or “sustainable,” condemns billions
of people to sustained poverty and disease – and millions to
premature death.
11
It may reflect the activists’ “passion for the
environment.” But it hardly reflects concern for the poor –
and it’s hardly moral, ethical or socially responsible.
24. Ironically,
anti-energy
policies also
harm the
environment.
“People cut
down our
trees,
because they
don’t have
Community and business leaders gathered in Sydney to hear
Paul Driessen’s message about the dangers of unaccountable
environmental extremism.
electricity,”
Uganda’s
Gordon
Mwesigye points out, “and our country loses its wildlife
habitats, and the health and economic benefits that abundant
electricity brings.”
25. It’s pure fantasy to suppose that solar panels or wind
turbine farms can produce as much electricity as gas, coal,
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hydroelectric or nuclear generating plants – enough for a
modern society.
It’s just as illusory to claim renewable energy is
ecologically preferable to fossil fuel plants. A single 555megawatt gas-fired power plant generates more electricity in
a year than do all 13,000 wind turbines in California.
26. The gas-fired plant uses a mere 15 acres. The 300-foottall windmills impact 106,000 acres, destroy scenic vistas,
and kill thousands of birds and bats every year –
to provide expensive, tax-subsidized, intermittent, insufficient
energy. And you still need gas-fired power plants, as backup
every time the wind stops blowing.
27. South Africa’s Leon Louw accurately sums up the
reaction of many poor people to these anti-electricity policies:
“Telling destitute people they must never aspire to living
standards much better than they have now – because it
wouldn’t be ‘sustainable’ – is just one example of the
hypocrisy we have had thrust in our faces, in an era when we
can and should grow fast enough to become fully developed
in a single generation. We’re fed up with it.”
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Unfortunately, depriving people of all the benefits that
electricity brings is not the only human rights violation
committed in the name of preserving the environment.
Let’s look at Patrick Moore’s hot-button issue: biotechnology.
BIOTECHNOLOGY
28. Nearly 14 million people face starvation in southern Africa
alone. Worldwide, 800 million are chronically undernourished.
Some 740 million people go to bed every night on empty
stomachs – and nearly 30,000 (half of them children) die
every single day from malnutrition and starvation.
29. Over 200 million children suffer from Vitamin A
Deficiency. Up to 500,000 of them go blind from it every year
– and 2 million a year die from malaria, dysentery and other
diseases they would survive, if they weren’t so malnourished
and had so little vitamin A in their bodies.
30. Biotechnology could fortify plants with vitamins, to reduce
malnutrition and blindness. Genetically engineered Golden
Rice is rich in beta-carotene, which humans can convert to
vitamin A, to prevent blindness and save lives. Just 200
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grams a day will suffice – not the 2 kilograms a day that antibiotech radicals claim they would need. (2 oz – 4 lb)
31. Genetic engineering can also produce plants that can
grow better in saline and nutrient-poor soils … fight off
insects and viruses …
Replace crops devastated by disease and drought … reduce
allergens … and even produce vaccines against diseases like
hepatitis.
Biotechnology can also increase the shelf-life for foods
(even without refrigeration), and eliminate dangerous fungal
contamination, like aflatoxin, the most potent carcinogen
known to man. (1 ppb)
32. By increasing crop yields, gene-spliced plants can help
farmers in developing countries earn a decent living, build a
real house …
and compete better with European and American farmers,
who get over $300 billion a year in subsidies.
Poor countries would be able to grow more nutritious
food, and more of it, to feed their hungry people. But they’d
need fewer people to work the fields – so more people would
be able to do other work, and generate greater prosperity for
poor families, communities and nations.
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33. Biotech crops also reduce soil erosion, by allowing
farmers to use herbicide-resistant plants and no-till farming
methods.
And they typically need fewer fertilizers, fewer pesticides
and less water – important considerations in poor, arid
regions.
34. Biotechnology also saves wildlife habitats. If we had tried
to produce as much food as we did in 2000 using the
agricultural technologies of the 1960s – says Dr. Norman
Borlaug, Nobel Prize winning father of the first Green
Revolution – we would have had to DOUBLE the amount of
land under cultivation.
Where would this land have come from? Farmers would
have plowed under millions of acres of forests, grasslands
and scenic areas all over the world.
And millions of starving people would have been forced
to hunt and cook virtually anything that swims, runs, crawls
or flies.
35. Modern biotech methods are precise, predictable
refinements of plant breeding techniques that have been used
for centuries. They’re safe for people and planet.
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I’ve been eating GM foods for years. In fact, Americans
have collectively consumed more than a TRILLION servings of
food containing gene-spliced ingredients – without a single
mishap that resulted in injury to a person or ecosystem.
But none of this seems to matter to radical greens.
36. Greenpeace
claims genespliced
organisms
“pose
unacceptable
risks to
ecosystems and
have the
potential to
threaten
Peter Dwyer speaks with Paul Driessen prior to the Halifax talk.
biodiversity,
wildlife and sustainable forms of agriculture.”
Professional worrier Jeremy Rifkin rants that
biotechnology threatens “a form of annihilation every bit as
deadly as nuclear holocaust.”
Sierra Club wants a moratorium on all GE crops –
“including those already approved.”
17
People are starving and dying, and these organizations
are talking about far-fetched, hypothetical risks to the
environment – and then claiming they’re moral and ethical for
doing so.
37. “I appreciate ethical concerns,” Kenyan plant biologist
Florence Wambugu remarks. “But anything that doesn’t help
feed our children is unethical.”
We wouldn’t stop using penicillin just because it causes
allergic reactions in a few people, she points out. We wouldn’t
stop driving our cars or crossing the street, despite the
obvious risks.
And we shouldn’t ban genetically engineered crops, just
because vocal activists raise speculative safety concerns.
38. Nor should we allow them to foment fear about food aid,
on the ground that some of the grain might be genetically
modified.
But they did exactly that in 2002, when the United
States sent Zambia 26,000 tons of corn – the same delicious
corn that millions of Americans have been eating safely for
years.
Radical Greens spread rumors that the corn was
poisonous, and might cause cancer, or even AIDS. So it got
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locked up in warehouses, while children starved – until
desperate people broke into the warehouses, and simply took
the corn.
39. A man was asked, wasn’t he concerned that the corn
might make him sick? Reflecting the lies he’d been hearing,
he told the news crew: “If I eat the corn, maybe I’ll get sick
and die in a few years. But if I don’t eat it, I will die
tomorrow.”
40. Even when starving people want to plant diseaseresistant GM crops only to feed themselves, anti-biotech
zealots shriek “Frankenfoods” and “genetic pollution.”
Meanwhile, well-fed European bureaucrats threaten to ban
the import of crops from any nation that dares to defy their
anti-biotech edicts, by planting disease-resistant bananas,
corn and sweet potatoes for consumption by their own
inhabitants.
Hassan Adamu is right: “To deny desperate, hungry
people the means to control their future, by presuming to
know what is best for them, is not only paternalistic. It is
morally wrong. The harsh reality is that, without the help of
agricultural biotechnology, many will not live.”
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41. Activists claim the malnutrition, disease and death isn’t
their intent. However, it is the result – and the result is
certainly predictable. They simply ignore, or deny, the very
real likely consequences, and do absolutely nothing to alter
their anti-biotech campaigns.
42. In fact, according to the Wall Street Journal, they intend
to spend $175 million battling biotech foods between 2002
and 2006 – on top of the $500 million they spent between
1995 and 2001, courtesy of “socially responsible”
foundations, governments and organic food companies.
The director of Uganda’s banana research program has
been blunt in his outrage. “The Europeans have the luxury to
delay,” he said. “They have enough to eat. But we Africans
don’t.”
43. Dr. Borlaug, puts it this way: “There are 6 billion people
on the planet today. With organic farming, we could only feed
4 billion of them. Which 2 billion would volunteer to die?”
A more accurate question might be: Which 2 billion
would Greenpeace and the Sierra Club – and foundations like
Pew, Ford, MacArthur and Packard – “volunteer” to die?
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MALARIA
44. This intolerable situation brings us to an even worse
ethical outrage – my personal hot-button issue: policies that
make millions of poor people get sick and die every year from
malaria.
In fact, almost nothing impacts African lives the way
malaria does. Not dysentery, not tuberculosis, not
malnutrition or typhus. Not even AIDS.
45. “I’ve suffered high fevers for days, vomited until I
thought I had no stomach left,” Ugandan farmer and
businesswoman Fifi Kobusingye told me. “It has left me
dehydrated, thirsty and weak. And sometimes I couldn’t even
tell day from night.”
46. “My friend’s little
child hasn’t been
able to walk for
months because of
malaria,” Fifi said.
“She crawls around
on the floor. Her
eyes bulge out like a
chameleon, her hair
AIMS’ Board member, George Cooper discusses the
negative effects of the DDT ban during the talk
21 in
Halifax.
is dried up, and her stomach is all swollen because the
parasites have taken over her liver. Her family doesn’t have
the money to help her, and neither does the Ugandan
government. All they can do is take care of her the best they
can, and wait for her to die.”
The horror of this tragedy is incomprehensible.
47. Malaria infects 300,000,000 people a year – ten times the
population of Canada. It kills 2,000,000 every year – twice
the population of Ottawa. The vast majority are in subSaharan Africa, and nearly 90 percent of them are children
and pregnant women.
As Fifi says: You just can’t imagine.
48. Those victims the disease does not kill, it leaves so weak
that they cannot work, go to school, care for their families or
cultivate their fields – often for weeks on end.
Malaria leaves other people with severe brain damage –
or makes them so weak that they die of AIDS, typhus,
dysentery or other serial killer diseases that stalk these lands.
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49. It’s no wonder that central Africa, where malaria is most
prevalent, is also the most destitute region on this
impoverished continent.
How is this possible, in this age of pesticides and wonder
drugs?
50. It happens in large part because those same
environmental extremists – along with the World Health
Organization, UNICEF, wealthy foundations and the U.S.
Agency for International Development – tell these desperate
countries that they must rely on bed nets and drug therapies,
and must never use pesticides, especially DDT.
Use DDT or other pesticides, rich countries say, and we
will cut off your funding for other healthcare programs. We’ll
ban your tobacco and other farm products, if we find even a
tiny trace of DDT on them.
Yes, the US Environmental Protection Agency banned
DDT in 1972. But it did so primarily for political reasons, in
response to Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring, and an
unrelenting campaign by Environmental Defense and the
same people who later concocted the Alar-and-apples scare:
the Natural Resources Defense Council.
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Moreover, it did so AFTER we had used DDT and other
pesticides to eliminate malaria in the United States, Canada
and Europe.
51. So today, American and European activists can afford to
oppose DDT. They live in wealthy, malaria-free societies –
where we still use pesticides to protect people against
diseases like West Nile virus, which has killed about 300
Americans over the past three years.
But their inhumane anti-pesticide policies against poor
countries mean hundreds of thousands of children and
parents die every year who would live, if their countries
could also use DDT.
[malaria kills an African child every 30 seconds]
52. In fact, since 1972, at least 50 million people have died
from malaria. Heaven knows how many might have lived, if
their countries had been able to use DDT – how many might
have become the next Nelson Mandela, Florence Wambugu,
or George Washington Carver.
53. Sprayed in tiny amounts on walls of homes, this
inexpensive miracle pesticide repels mosquitoes for six
months or more. It kills any that land on the walls, and
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disorients those it does not kill or repel, so they don’t bite.
Almost no other pesticides have this triple action feature.
Where DDT is used, malaria cases and deaths plummet.
Where it is not used, they skyrocket. South Africa learned
this the hard way.
54. After using DDT to slash malaria disease and death rates,
the country got complacent. It bowed to environmentalist
pressure, and stopped using DDT. Within just a couple years,
malaria skyrocketed from a few thousand cases a year to
nearly 70,000!
So
South Africa
reintroduced
DDT, for
indoor
residual
spraying.
A year
later, it
added
ArtemesininPaul Driessen expands on the benefits of South Africa’s decision
to reintroduce DDT during the question period in Halifax.
based
Combination
25
Therapy (or ACT) drugs to the program. In just three years, it
cut malaria rates by over 90 percent! Hundreds of people
lived, who would have died.
South Africa population = 35 million  60,000 = 0.2%
(much higher in Uganda)
Africa’s richest, most developed country needed DDT –
other nations clearly need it
USA comparable to South Africa: 536,000 cases / yr
USA comparable to sub-Saharan Africa: 100 million cases
and 500,000+ deaths
Healthcare system overwhelmed – we wouldn’t tolerate
being told not to use DDT
55. Despite vocal claims to the contrary, DDT is not
carcinogenic or harmful to humans. Poor nations can afford it.
Used properly, it’s safe for the environment.
And malaria-carrying mosquitoes are far less likely to
build immunities to DDT than to other pesticides, which are
still used heavily in agriculture.
56. But Greenpeace, the Pesticide Action Network, NRDC,
Physicians for Social Responsibility, WHO and USAID still
oppose DDT.
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Perhaps even worse, the WHO, USAID, UNICEF and Roll
Back Malaria have continued to promote, prescribe and
provide anti-malarial drugs that they have known for years
are no longer effective in treating this killer disease. In fact,
they fail 50 to 80 percent of the time! That’s flagrant medical
malpractice, in my opinion.
But mention DDT, and all they want to talk about is
traces of DDT in mother’s breast milk, and theoretical harm
to crocodiles or birds.
57. Fifi has a simple answer for them: “I lost my son, two
sisters and two nephews to malaria. Don’t talk to me about
birds.
“And don’t tell me a little DDT in our bodies is worse
than the risk of losing more children to this disease. African
mothers would be overjoyed if that were their biggest worry.”
58. What drives these anti-pesticide policies? Putting
environmental values ahead of everything else is one factor.
Another is a fear of chemicals that borders on the
pathological. But another may be their callous belief that the
world has too many people.
Developing countries would be better off, said one
USAID worker, if people were “sick with malaria and spread
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the job opportunities around. In fact, people in the Third
World would be much better off dead than alive, and riotously
reproducing.”
59. Maybe banning DDT would cause a lot of deaths,
Environmental Defense scientist Charles Wurster once
remarked. “So what? People are the cause of all the
problems. We have too many of them, and banning DDT is as
good a way to get rid of some of them as any.”
“To stabilize world populations,” Jacques Cousteau told a
French magazine in 1991, “we must eliminate 350,000 people
a day.” And Club of Rome founder Alexander King once
wrote: “My chief quarrel with DDT is that it has greatly added
to the population problem.”
60. To their everlasting credit, many other people have taken
a far more humanitarian and ethical position.
The New York Times said in a strongly-worded editorial:
the developed world “has been unconscionably stingy in
financing the fight against malaria or research into
alternatives to DDT. Until one is found, wealthy nations
should be helping poor countries with all available means –
including DDT.” (December 22, 2002)
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61. “There is no charitable way to put it,” said the
Washington Times. “Children are dying, while Westerners
worry about fictitious environmental effects. Aid agencies
need to drop their opposition to the use of DDT in Africa and
encourage the countries now considering using it, to do so.”
(April 17, 2004)
62. Jurassic Park author (and PhD molecular biologist)
Michael Crichton is even more blunt: “Banning DDT is one of
the most disgraceful episodes in the twentieth century history
of America.
“We knew better, and we did it anyway, and we let
people around the world die, and we didn’t give a damn.”
(September 2003)
DDT is certainly not some magical potion that – all by
itself – can wipe out malaria, and bring health and prosperity
to Africa and other countries where this killer disease is still
epidemic. But it is a vital weapon in the war against a disease
that is constantly mutating, is carried by many species of
mosquitoes, and exists under varied conditions in different
countries and even different regions of the same country.
63. For environmentalists and their allies to force people to
suffer and die – by telling them they must never use DDT and
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other pesticides – is a moral outrage that we must challenge
with every ounce of our being.
WRAPPING IT UP
64. What it all comes down to is this. Environmental activists
who’ve never known starvation, never had to live without
electricity, never had to watch their children die of malaria or
dysentery, must no longer be allowed to put their anxieties
and agendas ahead of the desperate pleas – the most basic
needs – of destitute people who wish only to improve their
lives, and save their children’s lives.
That’s why it’s vital to change the focus and terminology
of the environmental debate – and ensure that these vital
ethical and human rights issues become a central part of
every public policy discussion.
65. Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore is correct. “The
environmental movement has lost its objectivity, morality and
humanity. The pain and suffering it is inflicting on families in
developing countries must no longer be tolerated.”
66. As Rabbi Daniel Lapin has put it – these families must
be allowed, encouraged and helped to take their rightful
places among the Earth’s prosperous, and healthy, people.
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They need sustained development – not “sustainable
development.”
They need a precautionary principle that safeguards
them from real, immediate, life-threatening risks – instead of
condemning them to poverty, misery and premature death,
to prevent risks associated with conjectural, or concocted,
eco-catastrophes.
67. Simply put, opposition to energy development projects,
biotechnology, pesticides and prosperity is callous EcoImperialism. It’s unnecessary, because most of the supposed
environmental “crises” are minor, hypothetical or even
imaginary. It certainly is not ethical, socially responsible or
compassionate.
Worst of all, it’s lethal. It’s callous eco-manslaughter, at
the hands of environmental pressure groups.
If you confront the claims and agendas of environmental
activists … help educate others about the harmful effects of
eco-imperialism … and promote more ethical and humane
policies – you will help bring a measure of hope, life and
prosperity to people who long to have just a few of the many
blessings we take for granted.
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68. Niger Innis, national spokesman for the Congress of
Racial Equality, puts it this way: “There is no more basic
human right than to live. Saving, sustaining and improving
lives is the most fundamental form of environmental justice
and corporate social responsibility. We all want to protect the
environment. But we must stop trying to protect it from
distant or imaginary threats. We must stop trying to protect it
on the backs, and the graves, of the world’s most powerless
and destitute people.”
69. I'm glad you are here to take up the challenge – and put
honesty, ethics, human rights and basic humanity back into
the environmental debate.
To make regulations and restrictions commensurate with
the actual risks. To ensure that risks to people, communities
and businesses – from doing or not doing something – are
considered just as carefully as the risks to environmental
values.
And to insist that “environmental ethics” and “corporate
social responsibility” reflect the needs and concerns of people
who have to live with, and pay for, the political decisions –
both here in Nova Scotia, and in Third World countries.
Thanks for coming, and thanks for listening.
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