In an article entitled, “Greening
the Globe: a time for Action”, columnist Neal Peirce praises “The
Bridge at the Edge of the World", a book by James Gustave Speth which
envisions a grand coalition of environmentalists, old line leftists, and
ordinary Americans who are turning “green” in droves as a result of the endless
“green” propaganda permeating the culture.
He waxes enthusiastic over the approach of a critical mass of the
population which will buy less, eat less, and use fewer resources and thereby
achieve the environmentalists’ goal of saving the earth from humans.
Peirce credits Capitalism as the engine that has satisfied
our material needs, but condemns it as the main cause of the “…near-calamitous
decline of species, soils, forests and oceans, and the dangerous advance of
global warming” and hence the enemy that must be defeated.”
Our goal should no longer be to put a roof over
our heads and get enough to eat, on the contrary there is too much of that, we
should go in the opposite direction, towards “…working less, reclaiming time,
eating slow food, downshifting”, in short accepting self imposed poverty.
A major thread in the article is this uniting
of socialists, whose stated goal has been lifting the poor out of poverty, with
environmentalists. But what are the
common concerns of a man struggling to get enough food to feed his family and an
environmentalist safely ensconced in his New York
condo with the time and luxury - made possible by Capitalism - to gaze wistfully
through his windows at an unpolluted Hudson River?
In reality they have no common concerns; a starving man in
India
is less concerned with polluting a river, then getting food to feed his family.
It is not the actual poor that Seth and Peirce
wants to make common cause with, but all those wide-eyed idealistic socialists
who became disenchanted when communism fell and they saw that in one socialist
experiment after another the poor were left worse off.
The goals of “social justice” for those
leftists living in Capitalist economies were always about redistribution of
wealth from the successful to the unsuccessful, i.e. from the countries and
individuals who embraced Capitalism and its virtues of independence and personal
ambition, towards those that did not. What
the environmentalists offer the socialists is the chance to achieve the
socialists’ goals by leveling the successful countries downwards until they
approach the starvation levels of the poorer third world countries.
Equality of poverty by sacrificing for “the people” – that’s what
Communism achieved – the environmentalists offer equality of poverty be
sacrificing for “mother earth”? That
is what these two groups truly have in common.
It is the idealism of the socialists Peirce and
Seth are hoping to join to their cause, not any real benefit to the poor,
because he himself has admitted that Capitalism, the very means of lifting the
poor out of destitution, is the system he wants to restrain, so he can achieve
his new moral ideal.
So in the end environmentalism will achieve the
same result as Communism – material scarcity and people reverting to subsistence
level, while Peirce and his ilk pray at the alter of Mother Nature and revel in
their moral goodness.
The environmentalists offer disillusioned
leftists a new ideal or at least a chance to join their worn slogans to the
“fresh” slogans of environmentalism and a common enemy – Capitalism.
