Environmentalism: Bad Faith (McElhinney)

8/6/2019 Environmentalism: Bad Faith (McElhinney)

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Ten years ago I believed that

environmentalists were genuinely

good and kind and caring. They were

concerned about nature, the animals, and

keeping the world clean and unpolluted.

They were doing this work for all of the

rest of us, and I was grateful because I

was too lazy to do anything to save the

whales myself.

This all changed when, as a journalist,

I was sent to cover the story of a

Canadian mining company who wanted

to open Europes largest gold mine inTransylvania, Romania. According to

the media (who quoted Greenpeace), the

mining companys project, located near

the small Romanian village of Rosia

Montana, was going to ruin a pristine

environment, forcibly and illegally

remove poor villagers from their homes,

and use a massive football eld-sized

swimming pool of cyanide to extract the

gold.

For a country recovering from a brutal communist dictatorship where

forced evictions were commonplace and

devastating, this was a human rights

abuse that needed maximum exposure,

and I was the perfect journalist to help

with that effort.

As the train snaked its way up to Rosia

Montana, I sat happily contemplating

my storyline. I loved this work! At its

best, journalism is all about stories that

give a voice to people being trampled

upon by wealthy corporations. It

unconscionable that these downtrod

people, who had just gotten rid

tyrannical political dictator, would

the tyranny of greedy Canadians.

story was writing itself.

There was just one problem: Non

it was true.

Rosia Montana had been m

for 2000 years, most recently by

communists who had zero concern

the environment. I saw rst hand

the villages environment was anyt

but pristine. In fact, the river ran

because of the former dictators r

environmental record. The Cana

companys plan to mine using the m

sophisticated methods would clean up

mess others had left behind and actu

improve the local environment.

I learned that, rather than forc

resettling villagers, the Canadians w

offering villagers very, very attrac

prices for their property and their odilapidated houses, two-thirds of w

had no running water. The villagers w

more than happy to sell. For them

mine was a godsend after years of li

in penury, and it meant they had a

chance of a decent standard of living

The swimming pool of arsenic

simply out-of-date ction; the fo

illegal evictions still more ction.

repeated requests to Greenpeace for

Clare Boothe Luce Policy Institute

112 Elden Street, Suite P

Herndon, Virginia 20170

P (888) 891-4288 F (703) 318-8867

www.cblpi.org

policyexpressNo. 11-1 2

Irish-born Ann McElhinneyhas worked as a journalist andflmmaker in the U.S., Canada,

Romania, Bulgaria, Chile,Indonesia, Cambodia, Vietnam,

China, Ghana and Uganda,producing documentaries or

the British Broadcasting System,Canadian Broadcasting System,and Irelands National Television

and Radio Broadcasting Network.

Ann co-produced and directedwith Phelim McAleer two

documentary flms, Mine YourOwn Business and Not Evil

Just Wrong, which challengeenvironmentalists claims.

About the Author

O the hundreds o environmental stories I have investigated, most

marked by exaggeration, untruths and propaganda driven by the i

that economic development is always bad.

Environmentalism: Bad Faith


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names of the illegally evicted families

were met with silence. Such families

simply did not exist.

PROPAGANDA

The Romanian experience was a

remarkable revelation for me. My vision

of environmentalists as pure and good was

utterly shattered, and it set my journalistic

quest on a new course.

In the years since Romania, I have

investigated hundreds of similar stories.

The stories are almost always the same:

exaggeration, untruths and propaganda

driven by a naive idea that things were

better in the past and that economic

development is always bad.

I discovered that the good guys

were not good guys, and the bad guys

were really good. Greenpeace lied, and

the big mining company didnt. To make

matters worse, the media seem to suspend

all normal investigative rigor when it

comes to environmentalists. Whatever

Greenpeace says is reported as

unquestioned truth, and the mining

company is always treated as a lying

pariah.

The product of my journalistic

quest is a lm documentary shot on

three continents that exposes Big

Environments efforts to stop mining

developments in poor countries.The lm reveals a very tragic tale of

dashed hopes and shattered dreams as

poor people become the victims of an

environmentalist ideology that believes

poverty is a natural state and, worse,

something to be envied.

One of the most telling moments in

the lm is an interview with Mark Fenn,

the country manager of the World Wide

Fund for Nature in Madagascar. George

Lucian, an unemployed Romanian m

asks Fenn about all the poor people

are desperate for a job in Madaga

Fenn replies:

How do we perceive whos rich, w

poor I could put you with a faand you count how many times

day that family smiles Then I

you with a family well off, in New

or London, and you count how m

times people smile and measure s

Then you tell me who is rich

who is poor.

Fenns appalling attitude

that dismisses basic economic n

and human realitiesis widesprea

environmentalism.EMOTIONAL FERVOR

One story that deserves to be repe

often is the story of DDT, if only bec

it is instructive and serves as a war

of the price humanity pays for allow

radical environmentalism to dictate

decision making.

DDT was used as a pesticid

the United States

decades, and m

older Americans ha distinct memory

playing in the fo

the DDT truck a

bellowed out its loa

neighborhoods across the country. In

no country in the world used more D

than the US.

In 1948, Swiss chemist Paul M

received the Nobel Prize for his disco

that the pesticide DDT could be use

eradicate mosquitoes and effecticontrol the spread of malaria. This mir

discovery meant the world nally

an answer to the planets greatest k

Sri Lanka reported 2.8 million ma

victims in 1948, for example, but by

it had only 17.

The celebrations were short l

however. In 1962 American ma

biologist Rachel Carsonsom

called the mother of the mo

I discovered that the bad guys were really good.Greenpeace lied, and big mining companies didnt.


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Policy Express No.

nvironmental movementwrote Silent

Spring, a book that demonized DDT and

argued that its use was harmful to animals

and humans. The book was so popularized

hat DDT was ofcially banned in the US

n 1972 and effectively banned world-wide.

In 2006, the World Health

Organization (WHO) announced a change

n policy. DDT, it said,

was in fact the best way

o prevent malarial deaths,

and WHO again supported

ts use. In the intervening

ears, however, 30

million people had died

unnecessarily from the disease, and most

of the dead were children.

Yet environmentalists persist in their

anti-DDT cause, and today many of them

hampion bed nets as an alternative to

DDT. Campaigns to push bed nets on

ulnerable populations are an insulta

deadly insult.

I often cite this quote from National

Geographic to students to explain why

bed nets are not the answer:

When it comes to malaria, only onething is guaranteed: Every evening

in the rainy season across much of

the world, Anopheles mosquitoes

will take wing, alert to the odors and

warmth of living bodies. A female

Anopheles needs to drink blood every

three days. In a single feeding, which

lasts as long as ten minutes, she can

ingest about two and a half times her

pre-meal weightin human terms, the

equivalent of downing a bathtub-size

milk shake.

If she happens to feed on a person

infected with malaria, parasites will

accompany the blood. Two weeks later,

when the mosquito ies through the

open window of a mud hut, seeking

her next meal, shell be loaded.

Inside the hut, a child is sleeping with

her sister and parents on a blanket

spread over the oor. The family is

aware of the malaria threat; they know

of the rainy seasons dangers. Theyve

hung a bed net from the ceiling. But

its a steamy night, and the child has

tossed and turned a few times before

dropping back to sleep. Her foot issticking out of the net. The mosquito

senses it, and dips down for a silent

landing.1

Without any scientic evidence,

environmentalists have blamed DDT

for cancer, the decline in the bald eagle

population, and myriad other ills. The

fact that people ate DDT off a spoon for

years without ill effect does not impress

environmentalists. The fact that the US

used more DDT than any other country,

has record life expectancy, and has had no

spike in cancers does not impress them.

The fact that the bald eagle population

was declining before DDT was used

does not impress them. Why? Becauseultimately environmentalism is a religion

to the faithful.

HYPOCRISY

Environmentalists objections to

mining, DDT, chemicals generally, and

countless other modern innovations and

technologies are neither rational nor

scientic. Instead their objections are

based on a fundamentally anti-

development ideology: nature is good;

interfering with nature is bad; and thehuman instinct to improve on nature

is hubris.

Their love affair with all things

natural and organicthe so-called

simple lifeis wholly superstitious

and irrational. Natural is not necessarily

good. Cancer is natural, for example,

as is anthrax and tuberculosis. None of

these is good, and the eradication of all is

something to be aggressively pursued.

30 million people died unnecessarily from malaria

during the intervening years of the DDT ban,

and most were children.

1. Stopping a Global Killer,

National Geographic, July 2007


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RESOURCES

Poor people forced into the simple

life through lack of choice often live

lives of quiet desperation, clinging to life

and subject to the whim of nature. We

dont need to look far to examine these

simple lives.In Africa, that organic, subsistence

life often dies young or watches its own

young die. It is not to be wished for or

celebrated, and only the cruelest person

would force it on another.

It is the ultimate hypocrisy that

environmentalists, who enjoy so much of

the worlds riches and resources, devote

their careers to denying people in poverty

any opportunity to acquire even the most

basic economic resources.

Anti-mining environmentalists use

cell phones, iPads, laptops, airplanes,

bicycles, dishwashers, and many other

modern conveniences that rely on

components mined out of the ground.

Bizarrely, many of these conveniences

are the same tools that enable

environmentalists to spread their false

campaigns against mining.

If anti-chemical environmentalists or

their family members become seriously

ill, they use every weapon in the medical

armory to stay alive, including all kinds

of chemicals. Yet they crusade against

life-saving chemicals for others.

CHALLENGING BAD FAITH

Exposing stories like these is

job. I have made two documentaries

expose radical environmentalistsM

Your Own Business and Not Evil

Wrong. Both lms should be requviewing on campuses across Americ

bring some balance to the steady g

ideology diet that students are consta

force fed in schools.

The resp

from g

activists to

lms has b

equally irrati

They have b

compared to N propaganda

pornography, and 80 non-govern

organizations signed a petition to h

Mine Your Own Business banned. I h

even received death threats.

While environmentalists have acc

me of all kinds of things, they have n

found inaccuracies in my work. So

anger will not dissuade me, and

accusations will not deter me.

In fact, no rational person toshould be dissuaded or deterred f

seriously questioning any and all cla

made by environmentalists.

The world needs policies based

good science and rational evidence,

faith and emotion, developed by ho

thinkers, not hypocrites. Poor peop

both the developed and developing w

deserve nothing less.

It is the ultimate hypocrisy that rich

environmentalists devote their careers to denying

impoverished people even the most basic economic

resources.

Mine Your Own Businessthe documentary lm can be previewed and obt

at www.mineyourownbusiness.org.

Not Evil, Just Wrongthe feature-length documentary lm can be obtain

www.noteviljustwrong.org, along with Lesson Plans reviewed by curriculum wr

educators and scientists for use in classrooms and small groups.

To follow the work of the author, visit www.youtube.org/user/noteviljustw

which also posts short videos on environmental hypocrites.

Documents

Environmentalism: Bad Faith (McElhinney)