Human Flourishing
Environmentalism is a luxury good
Random thoughts* on the subjects that the press (I’m an old-fashioned sort of guy; media sounds strange to my ancient ears.) distorts, manipulates, outright lies about or ignores entirely. All observations are satirized for your protection and possible amusement. Masks optional.
*Thank you, Thomas Sowell, from whom I’ve borrowed Random Thoughts.
Nature as Foe, Not Friend
Perhaps it was my experience as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Ecuador, walking the barrios of Guayaquil, that made me more aware of the costs of environmentalism that are borne almost entirely by the world’s poor. Alex Epstein was the first I heard use the term human flourishing. It struck a chord. I was reminded of my experience of mapping the rapidly expanding barrios suburbanos de Guayaquil, Ecuador.
The collapse of the cacao industry, circa 1967, was bringing migrants (campesinos) from el campo to the tidal estuaries on the city’s outskirts where the squatters constructed shanties on stilts to protect their dwellings at high tide and during floods. The city government could not keep up with the land rush. What new pathways had become streets? Who had water and electricity and who did not?
It’s not that the desperately poor are anti-environment, uncurious or insensitive to climate. It’s simply that when you lack electricity, running water and have to concern yourself daily with scrambling to feed your family, you do not have time to worry about saving the planet. If the peasants even know that the climate change issue exists or that some Scandanavian high school dropout or credentialed environmental studies major who wants to make a difference is offended by the means you are using to scratch out a living, no importa. It makes no difference.
The poor have work to do. To make a living is literally true in their case. It’s a proximate matter of staying alive. For the poor, more often than not nature is foe, not friend.
A Hell of Beans
A recent post by Green Leap Forward of a thread by @JusperMacogu on farminng beans in Kenya illustrates nicely the extensive amounts of time, manual labor and physical strain that are involved in producing a crop of beans without machinery, pesticides, herbicides or chemical fertilizers. Using only manure for fertilizer, the yields are a fraction of what they would be with the nitrogen-based fertilizer that comes from natural gas. Of course time and labor are considerably greater as well.