Dean's World

Stewart Brand has an excellent piece on environmental heresies, and predicts that in the next ten years or so the environmentalist movement will "reverse its opinion and activism in four major areas: population growth, urbani­zation, genetically engineered organisms, and nuclear power."

I certainly hope so, on at least three of those anyway. The environmentalist movement's absolute irrationality on at least two of those issues drove me to turn my back on most of it.

For example, fear of overpopulation is simply not rational. It has no scientific basis whatsoever. The world is not overcrowded in any meaningful sense of the word, nor is there any reason to believe it ever will be. Furthermore, in any free society--one which is democratic and fundamentally free--more people equates to greater wealth and prosperity for all. Greater population--in free societies--also equates to massive improvements in the natural environment. (Those of you who complain about snarled up traffic jams and such are barking up the wrong tree if you think it's caused by overpopulation, by the way. The real problem is called "poor urban planning" and there are ready solutions to that if we have the will. Ditto the much-ballyhooed nonsense about "sprawl.")

Fear of nuclear power by the environmentalist movement is even more disturbing and depressing. It, too, has little basis in rationality, and is driven almost entirely by fear and ignorance. Nuclear power is quite simply the cheapest, cleanest, safest form of power generation ever invented, and would and should be considered the greatest boon to environmental health that humanity has ever conceived. Instead we continue to have irrational, utterly unfounded terror of nuclear waste, and we allow freak occurrences like Chernobyl--a disaster no worse than many non-nuclear accidents, by the way, and which would have been impossible with modern nuclear plant designs--to continually keep us from using this incredibly beneficial technology.

Brand does the one rational fear of nuclear power: that breeder reactors can be used to create materials for nuclear weapons. The solution to that particular problem is much simpler than he suggests, however. The fact is that free amd democratic regimes are no danger to each other. They simply are not--both the scientific and historical data all bear this out. Thus, a simple worldwide program to deny nuclear technology to any regime which does not enshrine free elections and free speech into its rule of law should suffice to alleviate that concern. (And should help with our current efforts to promote democracy and freedom around the world.)

I am mildly skeptical of Brand's views on genetically modified foods, if only because I find myself wondering how long before that leads us to creating entirely new species. That said: I remain open-minded on the subject.

Anyway, his whole piece is good, and I hope his predictions pan out. Click here to give it a read.

(Thanks, Gerund.)