environmental orthodoxies

Those who write about population overshoot or a coming population crash frequently find a cold reception from any of the current raft of “progressive” publishers whose self-proclaimed mission is to create an ecologically sustainable and “just” society, mobilize the “green imagination”, encourage grass roots community action and foster a sense of optimism in among the herd who carry that banner. Naturally, anything that smacks of “population control”, a challenge to “reproductive rights” or support for “anti-immigrant” causes immediately sets off an alarm. Up goes the shields and out goes the submitted manuscript.

It is apparent that for most of these social justice crusaders, “the environment” is something that they put up in the shop window to attract customers. Its the flavour-of-the-month that legitimizes an old-fashioned agenda by making it seem “relevant” to current planetary concerns. Scrape away the nauseating cant, and one discovers that it is not really about saving the environment, but about saving an ideology that should have died when the Berlin Wall came down. But alas, the Phoenix has arisen from the ashes under a new guise, “The Environmental Justice” or “Climate Justice” movement. “Justice” is the blade, the “environment” is the sheath. Case in point:

On such publisher, having reviewed a submitted manuscript whose topic was natural resource depletion, asked the author if he could provide corroborative testimony from a credible expert in the field. When he complied by forwarding a positive review by William Catton, this publisher of “environmental justice” books replied that she did not know who Catton was ! She demanded assurance that Catton was a not a member of the “Population Institute” or any “right-wing organization.” In other words, rather than treat the submission on its own merits, she seemed more concerned with the ideological orientation of the author. Despite providing such assurance, the author could not persuade this publisher to read his book. It was an experience he had over and over again---one shared by many of us who fall outside the box of green-left orthodoxy. It seems apparent that the “Smear Network” has succeeded in arming publishers with a blacklist of proscribed organizations and people. Ecological ignorance does the rest.

To vent my frustration, I wrote the following response. The names have been changed to protect the guilty.
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C. Noevil
Editorial Director
Blinkered Press
Dear Ms. C. Noevil,

As an ecologically illiterate ideologue of progressive politics, could you provide me with the list of proscribed authors and organizations which Betsy Hartmann, the Center for New Community and Southern Poverty Law Centre has provided you in order that I may not waste my time in submitting a manuscript?

I had intended to submit a manuscript that described the nature of our environmental crisis. But then I realized that I might violate your code of political correctness, so I purged it of math and logic, and any hint of any message to the effect that population growth was an ingredient of the problem. Trust me, there is no mention of the IPAT equation anywhere in my text. Population growth implies that there are women who are conceiving and giving birth to babies, and to cite overpopulation as an ecological problem of legitimate concern would seem to assign blame to these women and such an attitude would be simply unacceptable in this modern progressive age.

So I reviewed what I had written and was careful not to offend any sacred cows like for example:

"The Poor"
"Women"
"Women-of-color"
"Immigrant women of color"
"Indigenous peoples"

or simply,
"The People"

None of the above should be held responsible for ANYTHING, for ANY part of what ails the world. People are never the problem, they are always the solution. And the more of them, the merrier. The only time the population level should diminish is if women CHOOSE to have fewer children. But it must be their choice. If they want to have an unsustainable number of children and destroy remaining wildlife habitat, cause deforestation and poaching, more housing on farmland, more pollution and congestion and lessen the per capita share of precious non-renewable resources, then that is their Human Right. On the other hand, those human rights cannot apply to Islamic countries because we have no moral right to make judgments about other cultures. No, I was determined not to make any statement that would imply even the slightest criticism of any downtrodden portion of humanity. Except white European males who live below the poverty line. They don't deserve any sympathy.

So instead, I deleted reference to the above and substituted approved politically correct scapegoats. Eg.

"The rich"
"Rich white men who blame the poor for their excesses"
"The corporations"
"The Wall Street bankers"
" The greedy"
"The greedy rich white men of the northern hemisphere"
“Zionists”. If all else fails and no scapegoats make themselves available, there is always the Zionists. They are behind everything and always were.

I made a particular point to hold Israel up to standards that we should not apply to Islamic states. For example, I mentioned how badly treated Palestinians were in Israel, even the ones who are able to vote and sit in the Israeli Knesset, but I made no mention of how horribly treated the Jews of Iran, Egypt or any of the Arab states were. Nor did I mention any passages in the Koran about how women are to be treated. In short, I was careful to leave out any judgments of Muslim culture as that would be Islamophobic and racist. But I took a lot of shots against Israel, because they're fair game. Keep in mind, I am not anti-semitic, I am just against Jews....I mean, Zionists. There is big difference you know.

Zionists are Jews who took refuge in Palestine, the former home of Jews, after rumours about 6 million of them being gassed in Europe. Amazing what excuses people will resort to just so that they can go to a desert in the Middle East, turn it into a Garden of Eden with hard work, maintain a democracy despite rocket attacks and terrorism, and try hard to preserve quaint traditions of free speech and a free press in spite of all this. If they were to disappear, Palestinians could go back to the fabulous life they had before 1948, and with a fertility rate of 5 kids per woman, soon fill it up to the point where the region was chalk full of people trying find enough water to drink. Perhaps Israeli Jews can be relocated to the Moon. That would give an incentive to Arabs to develop a Space Program because no doubt they would come to believe that the Moon was Arab land.

I also conflated any arguments against the policy of mass immigration with being "anti-immigrant", and I made great pains to say that any environmentalist who mentions that mass immigration is damaging the environment of the United States (as did the founder of Earth Day, Democratic Senator Gaylord Nelson and three time Nobel Peace Prize nominee and Sierra Club director David Brower) is not really an environmentalist but a nasty nativist who is using environmentalism as a cloak for his nasty nativism. That includes guys like that light-weight socio-biologist E.O.Wilson of Harvard. On the other hand, I didn't mention anything about how big corporations were funding the mainstream environmental NGOs because that would have implied that pro-immigration environmentalists were not real environmentalists but shills for big business and cheap labour employers.

And I put in as many plugs for Bill McKibben as I could. He is an icon of pragmatism. Politics is the art of the possible, and if you can't achieve what you need from Congress to save civilization, then settle for half a loaf. We'll die, but not quite as quickly. Bill is the model for all of us who want to manage growth rather than stop it. Gotta keep the economy rolling, otherwise government won't have the revenue to fund all those entitlements that the poor, the immigrant poor, the poor immigrant women of color, the indigenous peoples, and The People deserve. Michael Moore says that these entitlements should be a constitutional guarantee. Lets go further and follow Isaac Asimov's advice, lets make "Freedom of the Bathroom" a constitutional right. Even if 20 people share a one-bathroom apartment, they can all have the same right to use it anytime they want just by passing a law. As the Soviets showed, all you have to do is enshrine something as a right in your constitution, and voila, the people will get what they deserve.

I hope, as a consequence of my sincere efforts to sanitize my manuscript of the truth, that I can get it published by Blinkered Press----possibly with some funding from the Carnegie Foundation, that beacon of behind-the-scenes manipulation. I hope you will receive my manuscript with the objectivity that you are famous for. It would be an honour to have my book published by your politically correct publishing house so that it could take its place alongside other magnificent books of scientific veracity that are found on your book list.

Tim Murray

PS Rather than submit my cv, it might be more efficient just to refer to the CNC or SPLC data bank, or phone the Department of Women's Studies at Hamphsire College. Say hello to Betsy for me, won't you? Didn't Senator Joe McCarthy graduate from Hampshire College? If he was a woman he might, I think, have headed the Department o f Women’s Studies.....