- In every newspaper and magazine you read these days,
you find environmental groups like Sierra Club, Nature Conservancy, Greenpeace
and World Wildlife Fund beseeching, imploring and encouraging Americans
to save, conserve and preserve. In a word: balderdash!
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- Because human overpopulation provides them with all their
'do-gooder' fodder for saving land and animals, they enjoy 'forever' purpose
to save the environment-but never deal with the root cause of the problem:
overpopulation. None of them will touch it! If we actually stabilized
America and Canada's-those organizations would be out of business.
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- If our two countries decided to stop mass immigration,
we could become the first two countries in the world to mandate and provide
an example of stabilized and sustainable civilizations-or, at least move
toward them with 'steady state economics' as promoted by Dr. Brian Czech
in his ground breaking book: Shoveling Fuel for a Runaway Train. www.steadystate.org
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- We cannot simultaneously preserve the wilderness and
environment and continue population and economic growth. Period!
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- In a brilliant piece at www.steadystate.org by
Canadian population expert Tim Murray wrote, "What If We Stopped Fighting
for Preservation and Fought Economic Growth
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- "Seriously," said Murray. "Each time environmentalists
rally to defend an endangered habitat, and finally win the battle to designate
it as a park "forever," as Nature Conservancy puts it, the economic
growth machine turns to surrounding lands and exploits them ever more intensively,
causing more species loss than ever before, putting even more lands under
threat. For each acre of land that comes under protection, two acres are
developed, and 40% of all species lie outside of parks. Nature Conservancy
Canada may indeed have "saved" at least for now two
million acres, but many more millions have been ruined.
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- "And the ruin continues, until, once more, on a
dozen other fronts, development comes knocking at the door of a forest,
or a marsh or a valley that many hold sacred. Once again, environmentalists,
fresh from an earlier conflict, drop everything to rally its defense, and
once again, if they are lucky, yet another section of land is declared
off-limits to logging, mining and exploration. They are like a fire brigade
that never rests, running about, exhausted, trying to extinguish one brush
fire after another, year after year, decade after decade, winning battles
but losing the war.
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- "Despite occasional setbacks, the growth machine
continues more furiously, and finally, even lands which had been set aside
"forever" come under pressure. As development gets closer, the
protected land becomes more valuable, and more costly to protect. Then
government, under the duress of energy and resource shortages and the dire
need for royalties and revenue, caves in to allow industry a foothold,
then a chunk, then another. Yosemite Park, Hamber Provincial Park, Steve
Irwin Park the list goes on. There is no durable sanctuary from economic
growth. Any park that is made by legislation can be unmade by legislation.
Governments change and so do circumstances. But growth continues and natural
capital shrinks. And things are not even desperate yet.
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- "Here's a thought. Stop fighting the brush fire.
Stop investing time and effort in fighting for park preservation, and instead
direct that energy into stopping economic growth. If the same energy that
has been put into battles to save the environment piecemeal had been put
into lobbying for a steady state economy, development pressure everywhere
would have ceased, and habitat would be safe everywhere. After all, what
area is not "sacred?"
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- "For most of us who care about nature, bypassing
local fights would seem like driving by an accident scene without stopping
to offer help. Environmentalism, after all, is typically born from passionate
concern about a threatened treasure very close to our hearts. But as General
MacArthur and Admiral Nimitz concluded during the Pacific War, to achieve
the long-term strategic objective, it is sometimes necessary to conserve
strength by "island-hopping" over enemy strong points so that
resources can be saved to fight the bigger, more decisive battles. Each
of us has only so much time and energy to budget for the cause.
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- "The question is, are we deploying it to our best
advantage? So far, environmental victories have been won at the cost of
losing the strategic war. Environmental watchdogs bark, but the growth
caravan moves on.
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- "The practice of designating hallowed places as
nature reserves must no longer be seen as "victories," but rather
as concessions. They are a permit issued to keep on growing as long as
a small portion of the land base is left off the shopping list. The declaration
by certain politicians to "protect" 12% of our land surface from
exploitation is a permit to leave 88% unprotected.
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- "What they are really talking about, is licensed
exploitation. It is like paying the mob not to rob your neighborhood, so
that they can ravage others. The Saxons called it Danegeld, and all it
bought was time. What is magical about this 12%? Does 12% somehow represent
the area of land necessary to protect wilderness and wildlife? Or is it
a political figure designed to achieve a compromise between conservationists
and developers?
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- "According to wildlife biologist Dr. Keith Hobson
of Environment Canada, a veteran warrior of decades of battles to save
habitat:
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- "There is no biological basis to 12%. It came out
of the Brundtland Commission and is a dangerous concept most biologists
I know consider the number to be totally arbitrary and political, with
no relationship to actual biology or conservation. As for abandoning the
nature preservation schtick in favor of reduced human and economic growth,
I emphatically agree. After all, what have been the true 'victories' of
the environmental movement? Largely postage-stamp pieces of real estate,
which, once designated, open the floodgates of development around them.
And like you, I have absolutely no faith in the longevity of these designations.
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- "Sir Peter Scott once commented that the World Wildlife
Fund would have saved more wildlife it they had dispensed free condoms
rather invested in nature reserves. Biodiversity is primarily threatened
by human expansion, which may be defined as the potent combination of a
growing human population and its growing appetite for resources. Economic
growth is the root cause of environmental degradation, and fighting its
symptoms is the Labor of Sisyphus."
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- Article at:
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- http://steadystate.org/what-if-we-stopped-fighting-for-preservation-
- and-fought-economic-growth-instead/
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- Join the debate by emailing your views at the above URL.
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- _______
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- Tim Murray can be reached at: luddite1@telus.net
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- Tim Murray, www.immigrationwatchCanada.org , http://sinkinglifeboat.blogspot.com
- or http://biodiversityfirst.googlepages.com, said "I
came upon an orchestration, the environmental movement, and all the musicians
were playing violins to the tune of "Overconsumption, overconsumption,
overconsumption." They refused to play any other tune or use any other
instrument to compliment that narrow repertoire. Apparently some corporate
donors were paying them to be a one-trick pony.
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