College of Business Administration

Article Reprints:

Michael S. Berlinger

Environmentalists Pose The Greatest Danger The Plain Dealer Cleveland, OH, Apr 22, 1998

Abstract:
Berliner is the executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute in Marina del Rey, Calif. The institute's Web address is www.aynrand.org. Today's issue: Is Earth Day a triumph of grass-roots concern for the environment or a celebration of a philosophy that opposes technology and progress

Full Text:
Berliner is the executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute in Marina del Rey, Calif. The institute's Web address is www.aynrand.org. Today's issue: Is Earth Day a triumph of grass-roots concern for the environment or a celebration of a philosophy that opposes technology and progress?

Earth Day has arrived, and with it, mankind faces a grave danger. The danger is not from acid rain, global warming, smog or the logging of rain forests, as environmentalists would have us believe. The danger to mankind is from environmentalism.

The fundamental goal of environmentalists is not clean air and clean water, rather it is the demolition of technological and industrial civilization. Their goal is not the advancement of human health, human happiness and human life; rather it is a subhuman world where nature is worshipped like the totem of some primitive religion.

In a nation founded on the pioneer spirit, they have made development an evil word. They inhibit or prohibit the development of Alaskan oil, offshore drilling, nuclear power - and every other practical form of energy. Housing, commerce and jobs are sacrificed to spotted owls and snail darters. Medical research is sacrificed to the "rights" of mice. Logging is sacrificed to the "rights" of trees. No instance of the progress that brought man out of the cave is safe from the onslaught of those protecting the environment from man, whom they consider a rapist and despoiler by his very essence.

Nature, they insist, has "intrinsic value," to be revered for its own sake, irrespective of any benefit to man. As a consequence, man is to be prohibited from using nature for his own ends. Since nature supposedly has value and goodness in itself, any human action that changes the environment is necessarily immoral. Of course, environmentalists invoke the doctrine of intrinsic value not against wolves that eat sheep or beavers that gnaw trees; they invoke it only against man, only when man wants something.

The ideal world of environmentalists is not 20th-century Western civilization; it is the Garden of Eden, a world with no human intervention in nature, a world without innovation or change, a world without effort, a world where survival is somehow guaranteed, a world where man has mystically merged with the "environment." Had the environmentalist mentality prevailed in the 18th and 19th centuries, we would have had no Industrial Revolution, a situation environmentalists would cheer - at least those few who might have managed to survive without the life-saving benefits of modern science and technology.

The expressed goal of environmentalism is to prevent man from changing his environment, from intruding on nature. That is why environmentalism is fundamentally anti-man. Intrusion is necessary for human survival. Only by intrusion can man avoid pestilence and famine. Only by intrusion can man control his life and project long-range goals. Intrusion improves the environment, if by "environment" one means the surroundings of man - the external material conditions of human life. Intrusion is a requirement of human nature. But in the environmentalists' paean to nature, human nature is omitted. For the environmentalists, the natural world is a world without man. Man has no legitimate needs, but trees, ponds and bacteria somehow do.

They don't mean it? Heed the words of the consistent environmentalists. In his book, "Respect for Nature: A Theory of Environmental Ethics," philosopher Paul Taylor writes: "The ending of the human epoch on Earth would most likely be greeted with a hearty `Good riddance!'" In a Los Angeles Times review of Bill McKibben's "The End of Nature," biologist David M. Graber writes: "Human happiness {is} not as important as a wild and healthy planet. ... Until such time as Homo Sapiens should decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along." Such is the naked essence of environmentalism: It mourns the death of one whale or tree but actually welcomes the death of billions of people. A more malevolent, man-hating philosophy is unimaginable.

The guiding principle of environmentalism is self-sacrifice, the sacrifice of longer lives, healthier lives, more prosperous lives, more enjoyable lives, i.e., the sacrifice of human lives. But an individual is not born in servitude. He has a moral right to live his own life for his own sake. He has no duty to sacrifice it to the needs of others and certainly not to the "needs" of the non-human.

To save mankind from environmentalism, what is needed is not the appeasing, compromising approach of those who urge a balance between the needs of man and the "needs" of the environment. To save mankind requires the wholesale rejection of environmentalism as hatred of science, technology, progress and human life. To save mankind requires the return to a philosophy of reason and individualism, a philosophy that makes life on Earth possible.

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