environmental rant #1

Sometime soon, the US Congress is going to have to decide whether or not to drill for oil up in Alaska, home of some special kind of caribou. You can be sure most of the Democrats will vote against it, with their usual charge that Republicans don’t care about the environment, just about money, etc.

(Same as it ever was, same as it ever was.)

But I have a bone to pick with anyone who thinks drilling for oil in some godforsaken place is BAD, while setting up a wind farm (whatever that is) in Nebraska or off the coast of Maine is GOOD. Or why a gasoline-powered car is BAD, while an electric car, which requires hundreds of pounds of lead (a poisonous heavy metal, remember) to make the battery, is, somehow… GOOD.

It doesn’t make sense to me, and it shouldn’t make sense to you either.

The fact is, I don’t know a single Republican or conservative or neo-con who wants to breathe polluted air, drink contaminated water, be pelted by acid rain, or watch indifferently as the poor porcupine caribou’s birthing grounds and summer pastures are slashed to ribbons by greed-crazed oil barons.

(A side note: Remember the Exxon Valdez? When a drunk captain grounded his huge tanker and a gazzilion gallons of crude oil leaked into the ocean? And all the environmentalists went berserk with grief, and set about scooping up oil by hand and scrubbing baby birds and steam cleaning beaches? Well, it turns out that the steam cleaning actually killed some beaches – I read a paper on this last year, and can’t find it, sorry – and most of the scientific evidence seems to indicate that the area has recovered either (a) splendidly or (b) fairly well, while the sentimental evidence insists that we’re all still suffering horribly.)

Environmentalists don’t seem to understand the way planet earth actually works. Long before homo sapiens were around to despoil the environment, earth did a pretty good job of killing off millions of species of plants and animals without any help from man. Volcanoes shooting ash into the air, raging forest fires, asteroids slamming into the tundra, mountains rising from the sea, etc, altered environmental conditions on earth without any prodding from gas-guzzling SUV’s and smoke belching power plants. And guess what? The earth survived! Just look around. Sky’s still blue, fish and whales still swim in the seas, and packs of coyotes are still hunting deer in downtown Washington DC.

Okay: in the interest of full disclosure, I must confess I’m not a nature lover. Somewhere, deep in my hard-wired paranoid self, I think nature is trying to kill me… not out of any malevolence, but just because that’s nature’s way. Unlike the environmentalist, who sees humans as rapacious destroyers preying on Nature, The Defenseless Victim, I see nature trying to destroy our cities and farms and sidewalks. The disease-bearing mosquito is nature. Tse-tse flies are nature. Flesh-eating bears are nature. Tsunamis and tornadoes and lightning bolts are nature, which is why the only green place I ever go is a golf course.

Pssst. Kyotophiles. Nature's not the victim. We are.

Here’s a guess: if, the day after tomorrow, every human being on the planet woke up with the urge to KILL THE EARTH AND ALL LIVING THINGS, and promptly proceeded to detonate every nuclear bomb in our arsenals, release every deadly disease locked up in our labs, soak every rainforest (formerly known as a jungle) with gasoline and set them ablaze, release every ounce of mercury we have into the water… in fifty years the earth would look pretty much like it does today. Yes, there’d be a lot fewer people around, but isn’t that what environmentalists really want? Fewer people? To make more room for trees and warblers?