During the World Summit on Sustainable Development, CNSNews.Com published and interview with Gar Smith, editor of the Earth Island Institute’s online journal The Edge. Smith typifies an often submerged but ever-present strand of Western environmentalism that romanticizes Third World poverty for its allegedly pro-environmental effects.
To Smith, for example, the big enemy is electricity. In this he echoes doomsayer Paul Ehrlich who once quipped that the worst thing in the world would be abundant, cheap energy. According to Smith,
I have been to villages in Africa that had a vibrant culture and great communities that were disrupted and destroyed by the introduction of electricity. People who used to spend their days and evenings in the streets playing music on their own instruments and sewing clothing for their neighbors on foot-pedal sewing machines [now spend their time watching television].
Easy for some who edits an online newsletter to say. Perhaps Smith should be out making his own clothes instead of shoveling electrons around.
What is really sick is that Smith actually romanticizes the post-Soviet collapse of the Russian economy. According to Smith,
There is a solution to climate change and pollution. We saw it happen to Russia when their economy collapses. Their industrial plants closed down, the skies got clearer. Their air is a lot clearer now.
Of course mortality rates in Russia skyrocketed — it is one of the few places in the world where life expectancy declined in the 1990s. I guess if you can stomach thousands of additional dead babies, that might be a small price to pay for a little cleaner air.
Why is it that people who never have to worry about starving or not having access to safe water or medicine turn around and produce this poverty pornography which makes living in squalor and with high mortality rates seem like some lost golden age?
Source:
Lifestyles of the Poor and Obscure. Katherine Mangu-Ward, Weekly Standard, August 28, 2002.