I used to be a really big environmentalist and I still strongly support environmentalism as long as it’s rational and reasonable, but I feel like *radical *environmentalists have an agenda that’s essentially anti-modern. With their rejection of GMOs, pesticides, and even things like sustainable logging and their demonization of global warming skeptics I feel like it’s moved away from a moral movement into the territory of a misanthropic doomsday cult.
Considering that if believed, the primary cause of climate change is the massive growth of the human population over the last few centuries. The quickest solution would be a massive population contraction. However, the irony is that if the world is changing so as to make it less habitable by humans, it will kind of solve itself. The earth will continue, with or without us.
Uh, no. That’s completely crazy. I’ve met one or two extreme to the point of advocating human extinction type animal rights people in my day, but the vast majority of environmentalists (even “extreme” ones) are trying to improve the human condition. Some environmentalists go overboard with the “naturalistic fallacy” and create a good/evil dichotomy out of a sometimes rather arbitrary concepts of natural/synthetic, but that’s not the same thing as being misanthropic.
The environmental movement has always had a scientific wing and a sort of pseudo-spiritual wing, although they’ve certainly never been entirely separate (and people in the latter camp often imagine themselves to be in the former.) I think as environmentalism has become more mainstream in recent years, the pseudo-spiritualists have grown in prominence a bit and have sometimes adopted positions that don’t completely jive with empirical reality, but strictly scientific environmentalism is also still alive and well. I’d agree that things like anti-GMO hysteria are mostly fomented by people with irrational ideas about nature and technology, but things like climate change are very legitimate scientific issues with wide ranging implications to the well-being of humankind.
Very true!
Among conservation, preservation, and environmentalism, the latter is the most extreme, IMO. They seem to want little to no human interaction with nature. Anyone can call him or herself an environmentalist though, so you get all kinds of definitions.
I know some people who just hate humanity and wish it would die out. Those people don’t mind driving cars and using lots of electricity, so I’m not sure they count as environmentalists. They’re not very committed to their cause, at any rate. You first!
Yeah. I think it’s almost seen as hip or cool to be a misanthrope, like a lot of people think it makes them sound intelligent or original or something to think we’re ruining the planet or whatever.
Well, duh. You are talking about radicals. The radicals of every movement tend to be anti-everything. Almost by definition, all radicals think the end of the world will come if we don’t cleave to their program. Why would radical environmentalists be any different?
However, as much as they rankle me professionally, I appreciate them. Every movement needs the crazy faction because they make the moderates look more reasonable and palatable. I LOVE when crazy environmentalists badmouth the work that my office does, because then greedy industrial/big business folks can’t accuse us of being a bunch of librul treehuggers . If both sides walk away hating your guts, you know you’re doing something right.
No.
Just another SATSQ.
I hate “green”, that is so damn chickenshit.