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De Omnibus Dubitandum - Lux Veritas

Thursday, October 29, 2009

The Dark Side of Deep Ecology

By James A. Marusek

Mr. Maursek's old site, IMPACT, is no longer available. However, his work can now be found at The Other Side of the Global Warming Debate and The Legacy of the Environmental Movement which may be found at these new addresses. I would like to thank Mr. Marusek for allowing me to republish this excerpt which is from a much larger commentary, Solar “Grand Minima” Preparedness Plan, i.e. Little Ice Age Preparedness Plan. RK
Deep Ecologists push radical depopulation, perhaps to as few as 500 million people worldwide, as the best medicine to cure the human infection and again permit nature to flourish. Some believers have become advocates of thinning the world’s population through genocide, abortion, euthanasia, pestilence, famine and war. But some Deep Ecologist are actively pursuing this objective now with whatever means are available as we stand by and watch from the sidelines.

Science shows that adding chlorine to drinking water was the biggest advance in the history of public health, virtually eradicating water-borne diseases such as cholera. Every year, nearly 1.5 billion people --mostly children under five -- suffer from preventable water-borne diseases such as cholera, typhoid fever, amoebic dysentery, bacterial gastroenteritis, giardiasis, schistosomiasis, and various viral diseases such as hepatitis A. Yet now there is a mounting campaign, led by environmental activists in wealthy industrialized nations, to eliminate every last man-made chlorine molecule from the face of the earth.

As Greenpeace's Joe Thornton explains, There are no uses of chlorine which we regard as safe. Yet chlorination -- considered one of the greatest advances ever in public health and hygiene -- is almost universally accepted as the method of choice for purifying water supplies. In the United States alone, 98 percent of public water systems are purified by chlorine or chlorine-based products. In 1991, an epidemic of cholera started in Peru and spread to the rest of Latin American. This epidemic reached the U.S. in 1992 via an outbreak among 75 commercial airline passengers from Peru. This epidemic is reported to have caused as many as 1 million cases of cholera and as many as 10,000 deaths.

Although the epidemic was reportedly started by a ship which dumped its bilge within reach of Peruvian waters, the epidemic's spread has been credited in part to the Peruvian government's decision to stop chlorinating drinking water supplies under the urging of environmental activist.

Please read - Cholera Epidemic in U.S. Courtesy of EPA "Science" and Dirty Water; Will the United States repeat Peru's chlorine folly?

Ten thousand people were killed and 10 to 15 million left homeless when a cyclone slammed into India's eastern coastal state of Orissa in October 1999. The U.S. Agency for International Development provided corn and soy meal as humanitarian aid to thousands of hungry storm victims. A staunch member of this eco-religion, Vandana Shiva, of the Research Foundation for Science, Technology, and Ecology demanded this food aid distribution immediately be halted because it contained genetically modified (GM) food and accused the United States of using the people of India as guinea pigs. This is despite the fact that Americans have been growing and eating biotech crops for years with no ill effects (about one third of all the corn grown in the United States has been genetically modified).

In 2002, eco-religious groups from Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and Comers International convinced the government of Zambia to block the distribution of American-donated genetically enhanced corn to its starving people. As 3 million people in his country face starvation, the president of Zambia let some 15 million metric tons of donated corn sit untouched in storage because some of it was genetically modified.

Please read; Biotech Food Politics: Zambia Revisited and Africans Starve Rather than Accept Bounty of GM Corn and Zambia Allows Its People To Eat

In 2008 a cholera epidemic in Zimbabwe has sickened more than 100,000 and killed at least 4,500. A simple innovation, using GM rice plants, to produce a rice-based oral rehydration solution was developed. This innovation has been shown to cut the duration of disease in children in Peru. But its introduction and use in Zimbabwe was opposed by various eco-religious groups.

Environmental activist urged Chad to fight global warming and the government responded by banning the manufacture, importation and use of charcoal – the sole source of fuel for 99% of Chadians. Women giving birth could not even find a bit of charcoal to heat water for washing.

Another dark aspect of this religious movement is it spawns religious fanatics, such as the Earth Liberation Front (ELF), that believe terrorism such as the destruction of property and threatening human lives, are justified in the name of their eco-religious beliefs.

Sunday, October 25, 2009

Who is Responsible? Who Will Answer?

By Rich Kozlovich 

In one of Thomas Sowell’s Random Thoughts on the Passing Scene he made this comment; “Upon learning that the Constitution requires a president to be a natural born citizen, a college student said: "What makes a natural born citizen any more qualified than one born by C-section?"

Although this is humorous I have to ask; is anyone really shocked or even surprised at this? Over educated, under smart, misinformed and uninformed seems to be the pattern. Most disturbing is their lack of common knowledge ….you know….the kind of stuff that was taught in grade school at one time. Whenever on the street interviews are conducted with college students they fail in the most basic knowledge; supposedly what is considered part of our society's “common knowledge”. Furthermore, their knowledge and understanding of history is abysmal. Even their knowledge of the world’s geography is startlingly deficient. Why?

When my sons were small we used to attend teacher conferences to go over what was being done in the schools to educate our children and what we all could do to help. I commented to the geography teacher about an article that I had just read showing that students today were failures at knowing where almost anything was in the world, including places that were in the news daily. She acknowledged that this was a problem. I told her that I could fix that problem in one year. She smiled politely asked how I could do that. I said…draw the countries! She seemed somewhat surprised and asked for clarification. I said draw the countries!

When I went to grade school we studied one or two countries each week. Initially we drew them and then covered the particulars of those countries. We loved it. Drawing a new country each week and then being graded on our art work was great fun…and it worked! We knew where everything was in the world long before we went to junior high school. How long did it take for her to implement this plan? Never!

It is bad enough that organized education has never taught kids how to think, they don’t even teach them what to think, unless it has to do with the latest form of greenie socialism. In England almost all the kids believe CO2 causes global warming, and yet approximately half of them also thought that Winston Churchill was an astronaut.

Of course the young have always thought they were the bearers of “new knowledge” and a “new understanding” that would lead to “better solutions” to the world’s problems than their parents, in spite of the fact that they have little experience in life by which to weigh their views. And we all go through that brilliantly stupid stage. We talk in a demanding nonsensical patois completely unaware that we don’t have a clue. We not only don’t have the solutions, we don’t even know the right questions at that age.

In days gone by that didn’t matter so much because the adult population was much larger than the young population and could easily absorb them ….at least until the baby boomers came on the scene! All of a sudden we had a gigantic explosion of the young and dumb telling the world the way everything should be. This was the population the green movement exploited and continues to exploit. As a result it has expanded outrageously and powerfully. The green movement is so large that these groups, as a whole, bring in more money than 60 of the world’s nations.

There is a difference between traditional wisdom and conventional wisdom. Traditional wisdom has stood the test of time. Conventional wisdom is merely the latest philosophical flavor of the day and may not last as long as our memory of the last Super Bowl winner. Unfortunately, the young are quick to embrace the latest philosophical flavor of the day, and because their numbers are so large it soon becomes policy; and while waiting for the test of time to prove out these policies devastation may be left in their wake.

In his book, Economic Facts and Fallacies, Thomas Sowell defined a logical fallacy in this manner:

“Fallacies are not simply crazy ideas. They are usually both plausible and logical – but with something missing. Their plausibility gains them political support. Only after that political support is strong enough to cause fallacious ideas to become government policies and programs are the missing of ignored factors likely to lead to “unintended consequences,” a phrase often heard in the wake of economic or social policy disasters. Another phrase often heard in the wake of these disasters is, ‘It seemed like a good idea at the time.” That is why it pays to look deeper into things that look good on the surface at the moment."

What is the most frightening about this group is that they don’t seem to understand or care what tragic impact their policies may inflict on humanity. They seem to think that “all problems” are “due to other people not being as wise or as noble as they are.”  

I wouldn’t mind that so much if they were the ones who had to pay the penalty for being wrong. Unfortunately billions of others have to pay the penalty for their wrong headedness….and that penalty is often deadly.

In the U.S. the green movement is:

“exempt from false advertising, transparency and other laws that govern for-profit corporations”. They have “failed to apply ethical standard to themselves, despite ample precedent set by the legal, accounting, medical, public relations and other professions. As a result, say many critics, the activists NGO’s have for too many years had free reign to misrepresent facts, hide their financial dealings, blackmail companies, ignore needs and desires that conflict with their own, and avoid accountability for the adverse consequences of agendas they promote of impose.” 1

That is always a problem when you never have to face the consequences for your actions…you don’t have to care, you don’t have to suffer, you don’t have to be responsible or bear the blame for those actions; especially when you believe that you are involved in a noble experiment that will save the world; with humanity as the guinea pig. After all, their intentions were good. 

Along with those who have been sickened by those policies, I am really tired of hearing that. As for those who have died as a result of their policies - they can’t hear it.

We absolutely know this; all the evidence we need in order to come to a correct understanding of what the green movement represents is available for all to see…. and yet …..we accommodate them, we excuse them and now even worse, we're crawling into bed with them.

Those in leadership positions in our industry are older and now have enough experience in life which should enable us to weigh reality against each new philosophy that comes down the pike. We are no longer among the young and dumb. The young at least can be excused for their foolish enthusiasm regarding these things simply because they are young. We no longer have that excuse. I have serious misgivings about those who have led the pest control industry down this path. I have to ask; are we then willing to bear the guilt for the consequences of the green movement’s actions?

1. Eco-Imperialism, Green Power, Black Death by Paul Driessen, page 12. Also see “Rules for Corporate Warriors”, by Nick Nichols for additional examples of false or deceptive advertising, factual misrepresentations and extortionate activities by activist NGO’s.

Sunday, October 11, 2009

World Forests

By Wendell Krossa
Intro: The rate of deforestation is decreasing (FAO). The rate of species loss is decreasing (UNEP). This is occurring while population and industrialization are increasing. Go figure, eh. Now why are the environmental alarmists telling us that overpopulation and industrialization are destroying nature?
Forest Facts

Total forest area on earth today is 4 billion hectares (46 million square kilometers out of 148 million total square kilometers of land on earth). This is 30.8% of the total land area on earth which is 13 billion hectares.

Interesting here is that the FAO notes that the rate of deforestation is decreasing.

This area of forest is the same as the total forest area in 1948 which was also 4.0 billion hectares. This area apparently dipped to 3.8 billion hectares in 1963, to 3.6billion hectares in 1980, and to 3.4 billion in the 1990s.

But the FAO Production Yearbooks show no significant decline of forest area from the 1960s to the 1990s (see graph of the history of forest cover in The Skeptical Environmentalist, Bjorn Lomberg, p.111). Gathering forest statistics has been notoriously difficult but the FAO provides the best rough estimates.

What these stats show is that forest cover on earth has remained fairly stable at about 30% of total land area over the past seven decades but it actually appears to be increasing now (46 million square kilometers today versus only 43 million square kilometers in the 1990s).

Note also that the world population in the 1940s was about 2.4 billion. It is 6.6 billion today. And industrialization has increased significantly with increasing population across the globe.

Several things stand out from these statistics. First, they undermine the basis of the alarmist’s argument that species are going extinct at increasing rates. This argument is based on the assumption that a certain number of species go extinct per area that is deforested. But this assumption is obviously wrong because there is no massive deforestation occurring and, correspondingly, species extinctions are not occurring anywhere near the rate that environmental alarmists claim (Paul Erhlich, for instance, states that some 70,000-130,000 species go extinct every year.)

However, the 1992 IUCN study found no species extinctions above the historical rate of 1.5 per year. Known extinctions have been about 675 over the past 400 years.

The environmental alarmists have been wrong on this issue because they ignore the research that shows species adapt well to secondary habitat (fragmented habitat) or they migrate to new areas. They also ignore the fact of reforestation and recovery of habitat (see “No convincing evidence for decline in tropical forests” by Simon Jenkins.)


Further, they ignore the fact that higher rates of CO2 in the atmosphere have led to a significant greening of the earth, with a 6.17% increase in Net Primary Production (NPP) which refers to world vegetative productivity (this particular increase was for the 1982-1999 period). This increase was especially notable in tropical trees (“Greening of the Earth- Summary”).

This increase in NPP may explain in part the decreasing rate of deforestation. It appears that with larger trees, more people on earth need to cut fewer trees to meet their needs. More efficient use of forest products also plays a role in reducing the need to cut trees.

To help understand the decreasing rate of extinctions in relation to the increase in NPP, I would point to research that shows that with increased CO2, plants survive better and species dependent on such plants therefore survive better also. As the Idso science team notes, “Higher atmospheric concentrations of CO2 make plants more heat tolerant, and less susceptible to extinction. If plants are better able to survive, then the animal species that depend directly or indirectly on these plants will also be better able to survive” (“The Specter of Species Extinction: Will Global Warming Decimate the Earth’s Biosphere?”, S.B. Idso, C.D. Idso, and K.E. Idso, quoted in The EKC literature provides empirical support for that claim.

Also helpful to understanding this situation re population, forests, and species is to note that improvements in GM crops, along with higher levels of CO2, have increased crop yields significantly (see research papers at co2science.org). This has led to higher crop yields on less land and this too has relieved pressure to cut more forests (“The historical increase in the air’s CO2 content has improved human nutrition by raising crop yields during the past 150 years on the order of 70% for wheat, 28% for cereals, 33% for fruits and melons, 62% for legumes, 67% for root and tuber crops, and 51% for vegetables” Climate Change Reconsidered, p.8). And, in fact, increasing agricultural yields have also resulted in the return of excess agricultural land back to nature (100 million acres of farmland were returned to nature in the US over the last century- see A Moment On The Earth by Greg Easterbrook).

These ongoing improvements in agriculture and increases in CO2 levels are vital to preserving natural areas. And contrary to the alarmist’s counter argument, we have not reached a plateau of diminishing returns in GM research. We are just getting started. The only plateau is that of reduced funding for GM research due to environmental opposition.

The sensible response to such information is to recognize that the human discovery of fossil fuels, and consequent emissions of CO2 (industrialization), has benefited all life. We have contributed significantly to the increase in NPP on earth (and particularly to increased crop yields) and this has ‘saved nature’- both plants and animals. Also, our advances in GM crop research have supported the trend toward using less land to grow more food. This too has helped save nature. We ought then to celebrate and support the human enterprise and industrialization, instead of wrongly demonizing it as a curse on nature.

These facts show that the human enterprise is not destroying nature.

Wendell Krossa wkrossa@shaw.ca
For more of Mr. Krossa's thoughts you may wish to log on to his site, The Human Spirit.