The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) staged a counterprotest against Greenpeace on Saturday. Their charge? That policies advocated by groups like Greenpeace destroy human lives in third world countries, and keeps those who survive poor and destitute.
There is a pretty good case to be made for that position. What I find interesting is that a group like CORE would be making it. The gals at On the Third Hand spotted plans for this the day before it happened, and the Jersey Journal confirms that it did happen.
Environmental groups like Greenpeace have been getting a free pass on this issue for some time. Many "environmentally friendly" policies kill people, and keep others in poverty. That's not even debated by many environmentalist groups, who only respond that the planet's more important than those people, or that more birth control would fix the issue--never mind that some of the countries with the highest population densities are also the wealthiest and most environmentally clean.
Is this the start of a new trend? I hope so, to be honest. Serious debate on environmental issues--based on sound science, reasonable economic and biological tradeoffs, cost-benefit analyses, and so on--all too rarely occurs. We can damage human lives, and even harm the environment, when we fail to address these issues rationally.
It's been blogged all over the place, but one can't forget the Western wildfire issue, with environmentalists actually causing damage to the environment and placing endangered species at greater risk.
If you missed it: Environmentalists have been opposing forestry service efforts to artifically thin forests to make up for the small fires that normally clean out old twigs, branches, etc. This has been cited as a cause of the large wildfires that have destroyed hundreds of thousands of acres of forest.
CORE isn't your garden-variety, operational-unit-of-the-Democratic-Party civil rights organization. Another way in which they have distinguished themselves from the Unity über Alles Left is on their interpretation of the Second Amendment as an individual right.
Ask the NAACP about the Second Amendment and they'll give you Sarah Brady, chapter and verse.
CORE's Roy Innis is on the board of directors of the NRA.
CORE is no longer a Liberal/progressive organization. I believe the transformation took place back years ago as Roy Innis saw himself and the organization unable to compete for an ever-shrinking pool of monies.
So they switched. I guess they figured it's better than fighting.
Unwittingly, the media has trashed the environmental movement by taking all of it very seriously. Things are changing now. A most interesting development is the NIMBY opposition to a windmill farm in the waters between Nantucket and Cape Cod. The media are actually pointing out the silliness of environmental claims made by opponents.