Machan's Musings - Environmental Extremism
by Tibor R. Machan
In my region of the world living in an apartment can cost a month what a younger person, new to the market place, earns a month. So, new housing developments are a desperate human necessity. The more houses are built, the lower the cost of housing, including apartments, since those who move to homes will ease up the demand for apartments. This is elementary economics.
Ah, but here come all those "biologists" of the Oregon and San Diego-based Conservation Biology Institute (a special interest group if there ever was one), as our newspaper reports who claim that "rare species, wildland would be jeopardized" under plans to add human homes in the region. As the newspaper reports it, "Significant portions of important breeding and feeding sites for a variety of rare or troubled species could be lost, the biologists say."
What no one says, however, is by what standard of what should count as important do these "biologists," who at their best are but natural scientists and not ethicists or political theorists, determine such matters. Nor do we learn who would be the ones to whom these sites would be "lost" presumably one can only lose something if one owns it and it is only those who own the land that is to be developed who are to lose anything here, not the "biologists," conservationists, ecologists, or environmentalists.
Or do we now have a country in which these elites, these unabashed special interest groups, are granted the authority to take whatever they deem is "important" from those who actually own it? Never mind that no objective criteria are provided at all for determining this so called "importance" it is just a word thrown in to make it seem that there is something vital that others should accede to, indeed, be forced to accede to. Because, as I have argued in my recent book, 'Putting Humans First, Why We Are Natures Favorite' (Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), the environmental extremists, who discount human goals and interests as something unworthy and completely negligible, have nothing to offer at all when the issue comes up: by what criteria this matter of "importance" is to be decided.
Sure, certain species of non-human animals could be in danger of some harm no one ever spells out just how much harm exactly, it's always "may be," "could be," "might be." But so what? That is exactly how nature works various living things strive to flourish and their flourishing often involves other living beings perishing. Any study of the wilds will inform one of this elementary fact and these "biologists," so called, should not be given special expert authority to have the last say on the matter they have no grounding in doing so. And in many cases, of course, human beings enhance the wilds. They often produce more living things than they consume. There are more trees now than there have ever been, more horses, more cows, more canaries and more parrots, I am told by reliable authorities on the topic.
But never mind that for now in nature there will often be rivalry for space and resources and the "biologists" who chime in so cavalierly about what is lost when human habitats are being increased are engaging not in science but in vested interest politics and hyperbole: the wilds as they are happen to be their favorite, so they want it all preserved, period. And they neglect entirely to consider that this is costing millions and millions to human beings, not because some greater good is being attained in the process but simply to satisfy arbitrary wishes backed with junk science.
It is really outrageous, also, that those who defend human habitation in these areas are dismissed as nothing but crass profiteers, as if building homes for people were not every bit as honorable a task as giving them an education, providing for their medical care, or helping them to find good vacation spots. Such a nasty way of arguing about this then gets reported by newspapers which do not interview serious dissidents from the scholarly community, making it appear that there are these two groups: the benign, sweet and tender-hearted biologists who love all those little critters being endangered, and all those nasty owners in suits, sitting in lifeless offices counting up the dough they will make by means of their callous profiteering.
In fact, it is often the environmental extremists who lack the requisite measure of humanity to advise a sensible public policy on these issues.
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