A week ago Charles Murtaugh linked to this New Scientist article where “radical feminist” Betsy Hartmann expresses the opinion that the Green/Environmentalist movement in America has racist associations. A few days ago, Reason magazine’s Ron Bailey also used this article to hit the Left over the head with charges of racism. And today, I see that Vdare has noticed Charles’ blog-entry and commented on it (though the spin is a bit different).
So what gives here? Are environmentalists racist? Betsy Hartmann mentions the University of Imbler in Imbler in her interview as the place where she started to make a connection between environmentalism and “racism.” The UofO is my alma mater, and yes, it is pretty white. If you saw a black student on campus, there was a 50/50 chance that the person was an athlete. There was a large Asian & Jewish community, but these aren’t the type of minorities that give one rock-solid credentials when it comes to being attacked for being “lily white.” Eugene, and the campus area, is a hot-bed of Leftist politics. Most of the kids of course will move onto professional careers and few will continue the activism after college-it happens to be the “cool” thing to do and a way to meet people on a campus where frats & sororities aren’t that cool and religion isn’t very strong. Though I have to say that many of the people made stupid comments about race-it tended to be more along the lines of “Hey, so you must be more connected to the earth Razib, since you are Hindu” (I am brown, ergo, I am Hindu). A friend of mine once told me that a Native American professor recruited male grad students to his department that were of his ethnicity by telling them that the “white chicks really dig non-white guys.” The nativism that one finds in Eugene is more along the lines of “don’t Californicate Oregon” than anything else-there simply aren’t enough non-whites for familiarity to breed distrust or contempt.
Betsy Hartmann notes:
It’s more than that. There is an academic journal called Population and Environment, published by Kluwer, which is edited by Kevin MacDonald, an evolutionary psychologist who writes about a Jewish plot to liberalise immigration policies. In 1999, MacDonald appeared in court in Britain to defend the historian and holocaust denier David Irving. The journal’s advisory editorial board includes famous environmental scientists such as Paul Ehrlich, who wrote The Population Bomb, Pimental again, and Vaclav Smil, a professor at the University of Manitoba in Canada. Sitting beside them on the board is J. Philippe Rushton, a psychology professor from the University of Western Ontario in Canada, who has a theory about how black people have small brains, low IQ, large sex organs and high aggression. What are environmental scholars doing getting mixed up with these kinds of people?
This is a classic Leftist tactic, smearing by association. What if it was found out that the president of NOW was behind Dr. Rushton in the supermarket, and didn’t switch to the next lane even if it wasn’t express checkout? Just because you agree with person Y on issue A doesn’t mean that you agree with person Y on issues B, C, D, & E. Trying to connect Ehrlich is especially ignorant, the man just (and foolishly to my mind) recently challenged evolutionary psychology, so it is highly dubious that he is a race realist or believer in a “group evolutionary strategy” a la Rushton or MacDonald respectively. Ron Bailey in Reason says in a similar manner:
Poor Paul. All those awful, awful people! Indeed, a crisis. Curious that Ehrlich would pick Delhi to illustrate urban crowding. He could just as easily have picked New York City or London. That creepy passage has a lot in common with the yellow peril narratives from the last century.
Well Ron, I don’t know about Delhi, but I’ve been to Dhaka, and even though it has about the same population as New York City, I can tell you that it’s a lot different than any American city. As libertarians love to point out-“overpopulation” exists in a context, and 1970s Delhi was probably overpopulated by many criteria, while dense First World cities were not. I’ve also read Population Bomband its sequel, and though I disagree with a lot of Ehrlich’s predictions (well, he was wrong on a lot of things-that’s plain fact), I remember he was careful to be as PC as possible, he for instance stated that high birthrates in Muslim countries have nothing to do with Islam, but all to do with the cultures in question [1]. This sort of pattern is common, and he even cautioned against lifeboat style analogies getting out of hand in both books.
I’m sure Charles was just trying to poke fun at the Left’s tendency to smear (Dr. Murtaugh is becoming a regular molecular biologist Mickey Kaus from what I can tell). But the Right (as some have noted) has started to pick up some of the tendencies of the Left. This TechCentralStation article trying to connect environmentalists to the Nazi regime is probably the funniest and most bizarre I’ve seen. Yes, William Darre & the blood & soil ideology was romanticist as much of the modern Green movement is-but the Nationalist Socialists also built the autobahn and the Volkswagen, no Luddites they. Environmentalism in the United States has many origins-some of the more human-centered ideas come from Teddy Roosevelt, who is pre-Nazi from what I can recall. To love nature was not a Nazi innovation, it is a human tendency that exhibits itself to varying degrees in different cultures, times and places. Certainly, I agree that the “Deep Ecology” movement and the Nazi ideology share a contempt for humanity that is disturbing, but I see no genetic relationship between the two despite the convergent evolution, and as James Fulford points out-Deep Ecology proponents have a contempt for humanity as a whole (see Kim Stanley Robinson’s series on Mars to see the logical extension of Deep Ecology to space where the Reds want Mars to remain as it is-lifeless).
There are environmentalists who are friendly to ideas that the Left considers “racist.” Hell, most people don’t know that Charles Lindbergh, after his expulsion from polite society due to anti-Semitism and pro-German statements during World War II became involved in the environmental movement. Garrett Harden, the biologist that termed the “Tragedy of the Commons” is probably “racist” by Betsy Hartmann’s definition.
Why do I keep putting “racist” and “racism” in quotes? A few years ago Stanford University did a poll which showed that many “minority students” (at Stanford that means black, Latino and Native American) thought environmentalism was a “racist” movement. Nick Thompson (now of Washington Monthly) wrote a whole senior thesis on this issue. As a Left-Liberal, he really didn’t come up with anything about how to combat charges of racism (background, the Sierra Club had a tussle over immigration). He gives some general platitudes about sensitivity and what not-but even after exchanging some emails, I didn’t get much more out of Nick. I think it is empirically obvious that reducing immigration would reduce the strain on the American environment. I think it is clear that many new immigrant groups do not appreciate the environment in the same way that “natives” (quite often WASPs) do.
We don’t need recourse to racialist theories on this-when you come from a Third World nation where poverty is endemic, the wide open spaces are less important than your next meal, and it might take a generation or two (or three) to change your values. My parents are an example of this-they have no environmental awareness, not that they are anti-environmental like some Republicans, but they look at suburban sprawl and fatty foods as the “good life.” And I can only imagine how the less affluent Latinos view this country. It seems reasonable that there will be some generational latency in the transmission of the conservationist ethic to most children of immigrants from Third World nations.
Of course, I am taking a classic libertarian view of this and asserting that economic conditions and their influence over the decades changes one’s perception of the world and is the prime determinant. Culture also matters. India has a long history of appreciation of nature, almost certainly a product of the monistic strain of Hindu thought that imbues nature with sacredness. Note the controversy when the actor Salman Khan was caught illegally hunting endangered animals (is it a surprise that his last name is Khan?). The Bishnoi people of India zealously protect local animals. Also, though most of the world knows that Hindus do not eat cows, I have read of incidents where farmers are careful to only scare away birds eating their harvest, for they don’t wish to kill them [2]. Now, as a contrast, take China, where they have a joke that the reason that Adam & Eve couldn’t be Chinese is that they would have eaten the snake. Granted, China has a long tradition of landscape painting and some of the same pro-nature religious sentiments (the Taoists and some of the folk gods) as the Indians. But nevertheless, I think if China & India had the exact same GDP at First World levels, India would be much quicker to set aside land as protected spaces just for the sake of nature itself. Note that the Chinese (actually, the affluent Taiwanese) are responsible for the near extinction of the Indian tiger because of the medicine trade, and the government of India took proactive steps via “Project Tiger” to set-aside lands and manage and patrol parklands. Remember, this is India, one of the greatest armpits of the world-these aren’t affluent people who have time consider the implications of sprawl, yet nature is sacred still (and no, I’m not presenting a utopian view of India, deforestation and what not are problems-but plunder of the environment can be combated using the indigenous predispositions in a way that is more difficult in monotheistic cultures where dominion over spiritless nature is established). I am not implying that Indians are naturally nature lovers and that Chinese are capricious in their use of resources, but there are other factors at play besides economics-and we should remember that [3].
My point? Some minority groups might be less predisposed to value nature for nature in and of itself. Affluence might not lead to the same levels of appreciation of nature for a variety of reasons-despite what Ron Bailey and the Libertarians think (and I count myself as one of them, I have hopes that affluence will do some of the work-but we shouldn’t use it as the smoking gun explanation that we tend to). Additionally, every American does use many resources and immigration is probably contributing to this. If you do think that the environment is straining on the edge, and that nature is suffering, there might very well be non-racial reasons to still reduce immigration, or even prevent the migration of certain racial/ethnic groups into this country [4].
So this brings me to my another point-we should be careful to always wonder, “So is it good for the coloreds?” The zero-population movement that wants to shut down the immigration flow from the Third World can be thought to be racist if viewed through this lens, there would be fewer Asians and Latinos, and perhaps our cities would be less crowded and urban sprawl less extensive. They don’t want to end immigration necessarily because of race, though it tends to correlate with the factors that they want to control. Yes, there are others who join the movement for racial reasons, but to have allies of convenience is a human tendency (remember Dworkin’s radical feminists joining up with the Moral Majority to oppose porn?).
Similarly, the Right has a habit of using the “is it good for the coloreds?” card too, even though in the end, that is generally not the true concern. Examples? Libertarian David Boaz (and others) note that Social Security screws over blacks because they die sooner-that’s an argument against Social Security and more flexible privatized solutions. But what if blacks lived longer, would the libertarians switch their tune? Of course not, they care about other principles, they just know that to appeal to the Left with its concern for the colored and obsession with proportionality and delusion of sameness that the race card will work. Similarly, the Bush administration argues against the “Death Tax” because millionaire blacks will benefit, giving him moral cover. But of course, it screws over most blacks since they have much lower asset levels than whites. Bush doesn’t really care abut millionaire blacks per se, it’s just a good argument against white liberals that are wowed by the specter of doing good for the colored.
In the end, many of the arguments using racial reasons for conservative ends are simply meant to soften liberals-the principles behind them are general race blind. Similarly, I’ve heard of some guns-rights activists talking about how the Nazi regime confiscated guns, ergo the handgun control movement is Nazi. I’m against most forms of gun control, but the handgun control movement is as Nazi as the modern environmental movement. I might disagree with them, but the world will not end if you restrict some elements of the right to bear arms-and to the gas chambers NRA members will not go.
Now, to end, I’ll admit I’ve used the “but it’s good for colored” argument or the reverse, “but it’s bad for colored” before. To some extent, I use it as a tactic, and I know it. In the end, I don’t care about colored, or whitey, or whatever. My values revolve around liberty and personal autonomy, which I see most well defined in the Western cultural complex. I also go that route when liberals to try and smear Gene Expression through Nazi association (and some cultural conservatives like James Bennett), bringing up the Maggie Sanger card (her eugenic views) and utopian-Sweden’s rather recent history with sterilization of “mental defectives.” Those who live in glass houses….
Finally, to six degrees of Gene Expression, follow this link. This is why I associate myself with the Right more than the Left-the predeliction to witch-hunt might be most closely identified with McCarthy today, but the Left has a sizeable number of individuals that do it as a matter of course. Many people that probably have never even read Gene Expression are accused of being “Gene Expressors” by the individual that you see highlighted in the link. Though the Christian Reconstructionist movement on the Right is pound-for-pound far scarier, they are so marginal and insignificant in my mind that the more dilute intolerance on the Left that is spread out through much of that end of the political spectrum makes me wretch. I can’t associate myself with people that think in such a manner-professional posers they.
We on the Right (including myself) should be careful to use the poser Left’s rusty blades, because we might cut ourselves and get really wacked out….
[1] To separate Islam & the cultures that it resides in is difficult. Also, Islam’s acceptance of divorce, widow remarriage and polygamy probably do lead to a higher birthrates all variables being equal compared to other traditionalist cultures like Hinduism. Nevertheless, Ehrlich is aware of PC concerns and tries to placate, no Rushton is he.
[2] Two points. The ban on cow killing might have important economic underpinnings-for Hindus do use milk & manure copiously. Also, when I was a small child, we had friends from Orissa in India who were Hindus, and one day, a mouse ran across their living room floor. We found out that the man of the house had been feeding them and just couldn’t bring himself to kill them. My father found this totally inexplicable, but my mother explained that was part of the Hindu soft-heart toward animals. My father responded that he wished Hindus showed as much mercy to Muslims as they did cows and rocks (yes, Hindus still revere Holy Rocks and have beaten Muslims who sat on them to take a rest, this is one of the funny anecdotes my father likes to recount about his uncle who went to work in West Bengal before partition-of course, if I was an idolater I might respond that at least we don’t make a Hajj and run around one as one of the major tenets our of heathen faith).
[3] I think that the deep philosophical differences between India & China is part of the reason that the latter is more open to biotechnology and “progress” as a whole-while many Indians have connections with the organic food movement.
[4] Similarly, many feminists might be more friendly to immigrants from Thailand than Saudi Arabia, not because they are more racist against Saudis.
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