Real Progress Doesn’t Come from “Progressives”

I was a young teen with the first Earth Day happened in 1971. I remember it well. Who can argue with the idea that we need to make the earth a cleaner, greener place? Thr problem is, the environmentalist movement became hijacked by anti-capitalist, crypto-Marxists. In order to deter capitalism, you have to hurt industry, so theyve become anti-technology which actually works at cross purposes to making the world a greener place.

As John Stossel explains, the aims of Earth Day are not based in reality.

John Semmens of Arizona’s Laissez Faire Institute points out that Earth Day misses an important point. In the April issue of The Freeman magazine, Semmens says the environmental movement overlooks how hospitable the earth has become—thanks to technology. “The environmental alarmists have it backwards. If anything imperils the earth it is ignorant obstruction of science and progress. ... That technology provides the best option for serving human wants and conserving the environment should be evident in the progress made in environmental improvement in the United States. Virtually every measure shows that pollution is headed downward and that nature is making a comeback.” (Carbon dioxide excepted, if it is really a pollutant.)

Semmens describes his visit to historic Lexington and Concord in Massachusetts, an area “lush with trees and greenery.” It wasn’t always that way. In 1775, the land was cleared so it could be farmed. Today, technology makes farmers so efficient that only a fraction of the land is needed to produce much more food. As a result, “Massachusetts farmland has been allowed to revert back to forest.”

Human ingenuity and technology not only raised living standards, but also restored environmental amenities. How about a day to celebrate that?

Yet, Semmens writes, the environmental movement is skeptical about technology and is attracted to three dubious principles: sustainable development, the precautionary principle, and stakeholder participation.

Earth day is being used as a tool to empower more Marxist type measures to limit and curtail technological development and capitalism. Read the article and you’ll see what those terms mean and why they are bogus.

We live at the most prosperous time in human history. And these people would try to turn back the clock to some 19th century pre-industrial world. A world that was incredibly harsh and life expectancy was much lower.

The resources of the earth, as far as we’re concerned, are far from finite at this point. More importantly, technology provides us with the means to do things cleaner and more efficiently as technology improves. We are a long way from the 1940s, 50s and 60s technology. As a computer person, I can tell you how far computers have come since the 80s. We’re making constant progress. What these people want is regression. They are not progressive at all.

We need took forward, not back. As Bjorn Lomborg once said, “We didn’t leave the stone age from lack of stones.” The real progress in society will come largely from science. And those who would stand in the way, are not real friends of the earth. As we improve our technology it will have less and less impact on nature and will do more to make the world a better place for every living thing. 

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