The following remarks were given in at “God Is Great. Is God Green? A Conference on Evangelicals and the Environmental Task.” The conference took place in Washington, DC on November 14, 2008.
It is an honor and a privilege to be here—and to share ideas with people who are inspired by God and a commitment to care for what He has created: wildlife, our natural environment and the people who also inhabit our Earth, especially the poorest among us.
My topic is poverty and the environment. Not so much how environmental conditions can breed or prolong poverty—which is certainly true. But how misguided segments of the modern environmental activist movement are prolonging poverty … and what we can and must do to redress this injustice.
Like most of you, I grew up in the United States, amid comforts that many of us almost take for granted. In fact, we often don’t realize how truly blessed we are. I get all too easily aggravated by traffic lights, traffic jams, power outages, and services and technologies that are less speedy than a microwave. But I try to remind myself how lucky I am to have all of this – because I live in America, in this era of miraculous technologies.
Just two centuries ago, when the United States became a new nation in 1776, 95 out of every 100 people were farmers. Average life expectancy was less than 40, and life was often nasty, brutish and short.
My own ancestors were farmers, who came to Wisconsin from Germany and the Netherlands. My grandmother spent her youth hauling rocks from fields, hauling buckets water to the kitchen, and enduring hardship and disease.
By the time she was 20, just 40 of every 100 Americans were farmers. She moved to Appleton, Harry Houdini’s hometown— where you can still visit the first house in the world to be lit by hydroelectric power, in 1882. It’s ten miles from my own family home.
She used to tell me two things. She would never want to live again without electricity and safe running water. And the only good thing about the good old days is that they’re gone.
Today, fewer than two out of every 100 Americans are farmers. They grow far more food than ever before. And we live better than even the richest people did a century ago.
Back in Wisconsin’s Fox RiverValley, where I grew up, two enterprises still dominate the economy: farming and paper mills. Working in one of those mills put me through college. A dozen mills still provide thousands of jobs—and millions of dollars annually for families, communities, schools, roads and hospitals.
But when I was a kid, they also polluted the air and dumped chemicals into the river. There weren’t any eagles, and few people swam in the river or ate the fish.
That’s why I joined the environmental movement. We spoke out, changed people’s attitudes, got laws passed, and helped clean up the river.
Today, you can swim in the Fox River, and eat the fish, and a dozen eagles nest in trees along its riverbanks. Our cars are cleaner, too. So is our air. And our quality of life is better.
But now that we have attained this pinnacle, a lot of politicians, judges and environmentalists are telling poor people, especially in Third World countries, how they should live and even whether they should adopt modern technologies and build modern, industrialized economies.
All too often, poor countries listen to these activists, either because they feel they have little choice, or because they think green technology and limited development is the responsible thing to do. Instead, they ought to listen to the late economist Milton Friedman.
Poor nations, Friedman said, should not do what rich countries are doing now that they are rich. They should do what rich countries did to become rich.
That is the crux of what I want to talk about today: the need for poor countries to develop … provide abundant energy for their people … improve nutrition … and eradicate disease – and the way the modern environmental activist movement all too often makes it unconscionably harder for them to do so.
I just returned from Uganda. It is a land rich in natural beauty, water, wildlife and vibrant, delightful people. But 90 percent of its 30 million people rarely or never have electricity. Most farming practices are still antiquated. And 60 million cases of malaria resulted in 110,000 deaths in 2005.
Environmentalism and the Circle of Death
It makes me sad to say this, but I am convinced that the environmental activist movement has lost its moral compass.
Instead of working to balance often complex and competing needs and priorities of people and planet, it has evolved into a huge multinational, multi-billion dollar industry—with agendas that all too often put people far down on its list of priorities.
You’ve heard the terms that define and guide the movement: stakeholders, sustainable development, the precautionary principle, corporate social responsibility and catastrophic climate change. They sound logical and appealing—but all too often they help perpetuate poverty, disease and hopelessness in poor communities all around the world.
My friend Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore is equally blunt. He says the environmental activist movement is morally and intellectually bankrupt. He condemns it for having become anti-science, anti-technology and anti-people.
The vast majority of our Earth’s people enjoy very few of the blessings that we in wealthy countries sometimes view almost as our birthright—and few of us would ever give up willingly.
And yet, all too many environmental activists think Uganda and other poor countries should give up their dreams for modern technologies and healthier, more prosperous futures. They think the world’s poor should limit themselves to wind and solar power, and should never become middle class.
If they become middle class, they would become consumers … and want more things … and that would mean more mines and power plants … which would disturb habitats and hurt the Earth.
These activists are certainly entitled to their beliefs. But they’re not entitled to impose those beliefs on the world’s poor.
Milton Friedman also used to say there is no free lunch. That’s true in economics, and it’s certainly true in environmental politics.
The only questions are: Who pays? How much do they pay? And who gets to decide?
I my view, it is unethical, and unsustainable, to impose the views and agendas of well-off Western activists on the world’s most impoverished people.
These poor people are too often forced to pay a high price for what I call ideological environmentalism, or Eco-Imperialism. The price is measured in reduced freedom, increased poverty, higher prices for basic essentials, human rights violations, and lost lives—literally millions of lives, every year.
It reflects the false ethics and eco-centric thinking that dominate debates about the environment, development and corporate social responsibility.
I’m not suggesting that radical environmentalism is the only problem facing these countries. That’s clearly not the case. And I certainly don’t think they should give up their vibrant cultures and customs. But I do believe African and other poor nations, communities, families and individuals should be free to chart their own destinies.
Free to select and use the policies and technologies that will help them achieve their goals—choosing from the best the world has to offer. Free to retain the best of their cultures and traditions—and modify what they wish, as they move forward—the same way we did, and continue to do.
The critical point is this. Poor nations should not be held back, or dictated to, by people I call neo-colonialists and eco-imperialists. People who think they know what is best for Uganda, Africa and Planet Earth. People who think they have a right to dictate how, when, how much or even if poor nations should develop.
Far too many environmentalists oppose electrical generation, economic development, biotechnology and pesticides, especially DDT. To get their way, they use sophisticated, hard-hitting, highly effective pressure campaigns against governments, aid agencies, banks, companies and countries. They employ lies, exaggeration, guilt and scary sounding disaster stories to pressure these targets into adopting their ideological agendas.
In the process, they deprive destitute people of the blessings wealthy nations enjoy – all too often while doing precious little to safeguard the environmental values we all cherish.
The Lion King theme song talks about the circle of life. To me that means, if people are to be healthy and prosperous, they need electricity, disease prevention, clean water, modern housing, and nutrition. All are essential, and all are inter-connected.
But just as there is a circle of life, there is also a circle ofdeath. It connects policies that perpetuate poverty, disease, malnutrition and early death—and will continue doing so for as long as radical environmentalists are allowed to dictate choices for the developing world.
Electricity
Energy is the “master resource”—the foundation for everything else. With abundant energy—especially electricity and transportation fuel – almost anything is possible. Without it, modern living standards, health, prosperity, and even environmental quality are found only in dreams.
Societies that rely on human and animal muscle, wood and animal dung for energy have a very fragile circle of life.
Those that have harnessed technology—to generate abundant, reliable, affordable energy from fossil fuels, nuclear and hydroelectric power—have given even their poorest citizens blessings beyond what even kings and queens enjoyed just a century ago.
Look around you. Imagine this hotel, this city, without dependable, affordable energy. For lights, transportation, computers, water treatment, heating and air-conditioning. For refrigerators to keep food and medicines from spoiling. For schools, hospitals, offices and shops.
For water purification and sewage treatment. For factories that create still more jobs—and make products that improve, safeguard and enrich our lives.
Hurricanes Isabel and Katrina gave millions of Americans a very rude, personal reminder of what life is like without electricity. Schools, offices, hospitals, factories, even water purification plants shut down—for days, weeks or sometimes months.
Lights, telephones, stoves and refrigerators were all out of commission. Millions of dollars worth of food got thrown out. We had no drinking water. No hot water for showers and baths. Worst of all, no television!
But in most cases these inconveniences only lasted a few days or weeks. That’s a huge difference from what life is like every day for 2 billion people—a third of the world’s population—who rarely or never have electricity.
Even in this era when the average European cow is subsidized to the tune of 250 dollars a year, these destitute people struggle to survive on less than a thousand dollars a year.
Their lives would be infinitely better if they simply had abundant, reliable, affordable electricity—to power the technologies that make modern life possible. If they could produce and transport as much energy as people need … to where it is needed … when it is needed.
Unfortunately, unless things change, the world’s poor are not likely to get electricity anytime soon, because wealthy, powerful environmental pressure groups have become very good at stopping energy projects all over the world.
Al Gore’s mansion uses 20 times more electricity than the average American home. The former vice president, Mr. Global Warming, personally uses more electricity in a week than 25 million Ugandans together use in a year. And yet he and other radical environmentalists continue to oppose real energy development in poor countries.
Greenpeace, Rainforest Action Network and other groups claim fossil fuel electricity generates carbon dioxide that they say will cause a climate change catastrophe. They oppose hydroelectric power, because it dams up rivers. They claim nuclear power plants are dangerous. They say developing countries should rely on wind and solar power. Just listen to a few of their comments.
Friends of the Earth president Brent Blackwelder: “It’s just not possible for people to have the material lifestyle of the average American. I’m proud that we’ve blocked over 300 hydroelectric projects in developing countries” like India, China and Uganda.
Earth Island Institute editor Gar Smith: “African villagers used to spend their days and evenings sewing clothing for their neighbors, on foot-peddle-powered sewing machines.
“Once they get electricity, they spend too much time watching television and listening to the radio. If there is going to be electricity, I’d like it to be decentralized, small and solar-powered.”
Actor Ed Begley, Jr: “I would promote solar and wind for power, not damming more rivers. It’s much cheaper for everybody in Africa to have electricity where they need it—on their huts.”
Little solar panels on huts – and huts forever. Keep the locals cute, indigenous, traditional—and impoverished—just like their ancestors, for another hundred years.
Instead of switching on a light or appliance, millions of mothers and daughters will continue spending hours every day collecting firewood—or squatting in mud reeking with animal feces and urine, to collect, dry and store manure for cooking and heating fires. When the sun goes down, their lives shut down.
Instead of turning a faucet handle, millions will continue spending countless more hours carrying water from distant rivers and lakes, often miles away, and often tainted with parasites and bacteria.
Instead of enjoying a modern kitchen, they will continue spending hours a day over primitive hearths, constantly breathing polluted smoke from their fires.
Instead of going to school, their children will continue washing the family laundry in the river, tending crops and cattle, weaving carpets or picking through trash, to help put food on the table.
The human health, economic and environmental impacts are horrendous.
Four million infants, children and mothers die every year from lung infections—caused by breathing the smoke, dust, bacteria and pollutants that are a constant fixture in their homes and villages.
Two million more perish every year from dysentery and other intestinal diseases, caused by unsafe water and spoiled food.
Few are lucky enough even to get cancer, much less die from it. They simply don’t live long enough for that.
And still, groups like Rainforest Action, Sierra Club, Greenpeace and NRDC claim that they are “stakeholders.” They live thousands of miles away … in San Francisco, Washington or Brussels. But they insist that they have a right to make decisions that affect poor people’s lives—by determining what is in “the public interest” … or insisting that development should be curtailed to protect wildlife and “traditional lifestyles.”
They insist that ‘renewable energy’ and sustainable development must be the future for Third World countries, says India’s Barun Mitra. But their focus on distant, conjectural risks like global warming shows little regard for the very real, immediate, life-threatening risks that the world’s poor face every day.
It shows little regard for the wishes of African, Asian and Latin American families that simply want better lives—and a chance to see their children grow into adulthood.
“Cute, indigenous customs aren’t so charming when they make up one’s day-to-day existence,” says Kenya’s Akinyi Arunga. “Then they mean indigenous poverty, indigenous malnutrition, indigenous disease and childhood death. I don’t wish this on my worst enemy, and I wish our so-called friends would stop imposing it on us.”
Opposition to these energy projects is “a crime against humanity,” a man in Gujarat, India angrily told a television news crew. “We don’t want to be encased like a museum,” a Gujarati woman told the crew, in primitive lifestyles so romanticized by Hollywood and radical Greens.
The simple reality is that blocking the construction of centralized power projects, as not being “appropriate” or “sustainable,” condemns billions of people to sustained poverty and disease—and millions to premature death.
It may reflect the activists’ “passion for the environment.” But it hardly reflects concern for the poor. It’s hardly moral, ethical or socially responsible. It’s eco-imperialism—a violation of people’s most basic human rights … to make their own decisions, have access to modern technologies, and enjoy longer, healthier, happier lives.
Ironically, anti-energy policies also harm the environment. “People cut down our trees, because they don’t have electricity,” Uganda’s Gordon Mwesigye has pointed out, “and our country loses its wildlife habitats, and the health and economic benefits that abundant electricity brings.”
Moreover, these so-called renewable, sustainable alternatives are simply not viable substitutes for centralized power projects. Solar panels and wind turbine farms simply cannot produce as much electricity as gas, coal, hydroelectric or nuclear generating plants—enough for a modern society.
Nor is renewable energy ecologically preferable to fossil fuel plants. A single 550-megawatt gas-fired power plant in California generates more electricity in a year than do all 13,000 of that state’s first generation wind turbines.
The gas-fired plant uses 15 acres. The 300-foot-tall windmills impact 106,000 acres, destroy scenic vistas, and kill thousands of birds and bats every year—to provide expensive, intermittent, insufficient energy. And you still need gas-fired power plants, as backup every time the wind stops blowing—or homes, hospitals, offices, schools and factories just shut down.
South Africa’s Leon Louw accurately sums up the reaction of many poor people to these anti-electricity policies: “Telling destitute people they must never aspire to living standards much better than they have now – because it wouldn’t be ‘sustainable’ – is just one example of the hypocrisy we have had thrust in our faces, in an era when we can and should grow fast enough to become fully developed in a single generation. We’re fed up with it.”
Unfortunately, depriving people of all the benefits that electricity brings is not the only human rights violation committed in the name of preserving the environment.
Biotechnology
Millions of people face starvation in southern Africa. Worldwide, 800 million are chronically undernourished. Over 200 million children suffer from Vitamin A Deficiency—and up to 500,000 of them go blind from it every year.
Half a billion people go to bed every night on empty stomachs—and thousands die every day from malnutrition, starvation and diseases they would likely survive, if they weren’t so malnourished and had so little vitamin A in their bodies.
Biotechnology could be an important tool in the battle to end malnutrition, control plant diseases and improve agriculture in poor countries. It’s not a magic bullet—there is no such thing—and it’s not appropriate everywhere, all the time or for everyone. But it could play a huge role, especially in combination with other modern farming practices.
Once again, it ought to be a decision for Uganda, Africa, Brazil, Vietnam and individual farmers to make—without lies and pressure from outside agitators, and without threats of trade sanctions by countries and consumers who already have plenty to eat.
Biotechnology could fortify plants with vitamins, to reduce malnutrition and blindness. Genetically engineered Golden Rice is rich in beta-carotene, which humans can convert to vitamin A, to prevent blindness and save lives. Just 2 ounces a day will suffice—not the 4 pounds a day that anti-biotech radicals claim they would need.
Genetic engineering can also produce plants that can grow better in saline and nutrient-poor soils … fight off insects and viruses … replace crops devastated by disease and drought … eliminate allergens … produce vaccines … and reduce soil erosion, by allowing farmers to use herbicide-resistant plants and no-till farming methods.
Biotechnology can also reduce food spoilage (even without refrigeration) … and eliminate dangerous fungal contamination, like fumonisin and aflatoxin, two of the most potent carcinogens known to man.
By increasing crop yields, gene-spliced plants can help farmers in developing countries earn a decent living, build a real house … compete better with heavily subsidized European and American farmers—and grow more nutritious food, to feed their hungry people.
“With Bt maize, I don’t have to buy many chemicals,” says South Africa’s Richard Sithole. “With the old maize, I got 100 bags from my 40 acres. With Bt maize I get 1,000 bags.”
The new maize (what we Americans call corn) has enabled South African farmers to cut their pesticide use up to 75%, triple their profits, increase maize yields tenfold, and save 35-50 days per season working in fields—mostly spraying pesticides by hand.
A genetically engineered (GE) cassava plant being tested in Kenya is completely resistant to the mosaic virus that has destroyed this vital crop. Once approved, it will be provided free to farmers.
Biotechnology also saves wildlife habitats. According to Dr. Norman Borlaug, Nobel Prize winning father of the first Green Revolution: If we had tried to produce as much food as we actually did in 2006—but using organic farming or the agricultural technologies of the 1960s—we would have had to double the amount of land under cultivation.
To do that, farmers would have had to turn millions of acres of forests, grasslands and scenic areas into new farm land.
Meanwhile, millions of starving people would have been forced to hunt and cook virtually anything that swims, runs, crawls or flies. The impacts on biodiversity would have been horrendous.
Modern biotech methods are precise, predictable refinements of plant breeding techniques that have been used for centuries. They’re safe for people and planet.
In fact, Americans have collectively consumed well over a TRILLION servings of food containing gene-spliced ingredients—without a single injury to a person or ecosystem. By contrast, six Americans died from organic food they ate in 2007, because it was infected with deadly bacteria.
But none of this seems to matter to radical greens.
Greenpeace claims gene-spliced organisms “pose unacceptable risks to ecosystems and have the potential to threaten biodiversity, wildlife and sustainable forms of agriculture.”
Professional agitator Jeremy Rifkin rants that biotechnology threatens “a form of annihilation every bit as deadly as nuclear holocaust.”
Sierra Club wants a moratorium on all GE crops—“including those already approved.”
People are starving and dying, and these organizations are talking about far-fetched, hypothetical, Hollywood-disaster-movie risks to the environment—and then claiming they’re moral and ethical for doing so.
“I appreciate ethical concerns,” Kenyan plant biologist Florence Wambugu remarks. “But anything that doesn’t help feed our children is unethical.”
We wouldn’t stop using penicillin just because it causes allergic reactions in a few people, she points out. We wouldn’t stop driving our cars or crossing the street, despite the obvious risks. We wouldn’t ban electricity, just because it causes occasional fires and electrocutions.
These are real risks—that actually injure and kill people. But we value the enormous benefits that these technologies provide —and do all we can to use them more safely.
By contrast, the safety concerns that vocal activists raise are often truly bizarre. Look at how they fomented fear about food aid several years ago, on the ground that some of the grain might have been genetically modified.
The United States had sent Zambia 26,000 tons of maize. Some of it was undoubtedly genetically modified, because most of our maize is now the Bt variety. Radical Greens spread rumors that it was poisonous, and might cause cancer, or even AIDS.
President Levy Mwanawasa locked it up in warehouses, while children starved—until desperate people broke into the warehouses, and simply took the corn. A man was asked, wasn’t he concerned that the maize might make him sick?
Reflecting the lies he’d been hearing, he told the news crew: “If I eat the maize, maybe I’ll get sick and die in a few years. But if I don’t eat it, I will die tomorrow.”
Even when starving people want to plant disease-resistant GM bananas, maize and sweet potatoes only to feed themselves, anti-biotech zealots shriek “Frankenfoods” and “genetic pollution.”
Meanwhile, well-fed European bureaucrats threaten to ban the import of crops from any nation that dares to defy their anti-biotech edicts.
Hassan Adamu is right: “To deny desperate, hungry people the means to control their future, by presuming to know what is best for them, is not only paternalistic. It is morally wrong. Without the help of agricultural biotechnology, many will not live.”
Activists claim the malnutrition, disease and death isn’t their intent. However, it is the result—and the result is certainly predictable. They simply ignore, or deny, the very real consequences, and do absolutely nothing to alter their anti-biotech campaigns.
In fact, according to the Wall Street Journal, they spent nearly $700 million battling biotech foods between 1995 and 2006—courtesy of “socially responsible” foundations, governments and organic food companies.
They haven’t spent a dime helping countries reduce malnutrition or develop disease and drought resistant crops. But they are happy to spend $700 million—and more—attacking biotechnology.
Dr. Wilberforce Tushemereirwe, director of Uganda’s banana research program, has been blunt in his outrage. The Europeans and environmentalists “have the luxury to delay,” he said. “They have enough to eat. But we Africans don’t.”
Dr. Borlaug puts it this way: “There are 6 billion people on the planet today. With organic farming, we could only feed 4 billion of them. Which 2 billion would volunteer to die?”
A more accurate question might be: Which 2 billion would Greenpeace and Sierra Club—and foundations like Pew, Ford, MacArthur and Packard—“volunteer” to die?
Malaria
This brings us to an even worse human rights violation: policies that make millions of poor people get sick and die every year from malaria.
Probably nothing impacts Africa the way malaria does. Not dysentery, tuberculosis or malnutrition. Maybe not even AIDS. And malaria ought to be the easiest of these killer diseases to reduce or even eradicate.
“I’ve suffered high fevers for days, vomited until I thought I had no stomach left,” my dear friend Fifi Kobusingye told me. “It’s left me dehydrated, thirsty and weak. Sometimes I couldn’t even tell day from night.”
“My friend’s little child hasn’t been able to walk for months because of malaria,” Fifi said. “She crawls around on the floor. Her eyes bulge out like a chameleon, her hair is dried up, and her stomach is all swollen because the parasites have taken over her liver. Her family doesn’t have the money to help her, and neither does the Ugandan government. All they can do is take care of her the best they can, and wait for her to die.”
And she did die. The horror of this tragedy is incomprehensible.
Malaria infects up to 500 million people a year—more people than live in the entire United States, Canada and Mexico combined. It kills up to 2 million people a year—the population of Houston.
The vast majority are in sub-Saharan Africa, and nearly 90 percent of them are children and pregnant women. Uganda lost 60 million man-hours of labor last year, because of the disease.
Those victims the disease does not kill, it leaves so weak that they cannot work, go to school, care for their families or cultivate their fields—often for weeks on end. Malaria leaves other people with permanent brain damage—or makes them so weak that they die of AIDS, dysentery and other killer diseases. It depletes scarce healthcare resources that countries need to fight these other diseases.
It’s no wonder that central Africa, where malaria is most prevalent, is also the most destitute region on this needlessly poor continent. In almost every case, the places with the most malaria are also the ones with the worst poverty.
How is this possible, in this age of pesticides and wonder drugs? It happens in large part because those same environmental extremists for three decades were telling desperate countries that they had to rely on bed nets and drug therapies, and must never use pesticides, especially DDT.
For decades, the World Health Organization, UNICEF and U.S. Agency for International Development said the same thing. UNICEF still does, at the same time it hands out chloroquine and other drugs that no longer work.
But the WHO and USAID finally changed their policies—in response to efforts by Fifi, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and thousands of other concerned people, who said anti-pesticide policies violate basic human rights: the right to life, and the right to safeguard human life, by all means necessary.
Yes, the US Environmental Protection Agency banned DDT in 1972. But it did so primarily for political reasons, in response to Rachel Carson’s disingenuous book Silent Spring, and an unrelenting campaign by Environmental Defense, Sierra Club, Natural Resources Defense Council and other environmental groups.
Moreover, EPA did so only after we had used DDT to eliminate malaria in the United States, Canada and Europe. So today, American and European activists can afford to oppose DDT.
They live in wealthy, malaria-free societies—where we still use pesticides to protect people against diseases like West Nile virus, which kills about 100 Americans a year—a third of what Uganda loses to malaria every day.
But their inhumane anti-pesticide policies against poor countries mean hundreds of thousands of children and parents die every year who would live, if their countries used DDT and other pesticides, along with bed nets.
In fact, since 1972, tens of millions people have died from malaria. Heaven knows how many might have lived, if their countries had been able to use DDT—how many might have become the next Nelson Mandela, Florence Wambugu or George Washington Carver.
Sprayed in tiny amounts on walls of homes, this inexpensive miracle pesticide repels mosquitoes for six months or more. It kills any that land on the walls, and irritates those it does not kill or repel, so they leave the house without biting anyone. No other pesticide—at any price—has this triple action feature. In fact, DDT is the strongest and longest lasting repellant in existence.
Where DDT and other insecticides are used, malaria cases and deaths plummet. Where they are not used, disease and death skyrocket. South Africa learned this the hard way.
After using DDT for years to control malaria disease and death rates, the country got complacent. It bowed to environmentalist pressure, and stopped using DDT. Within just a couple years, malaria shot from a few thousand cases a year to nearly 70,000!
So South Africa reintroduced DDT, for indoor residual spraying. In just 18 months, malaria rates plummeted by 80 percent!
It then added the ACT drug Coartem, to treat a much smaller number of serious malaria cases. In just three years, it cut malaria rates by over 90 percent! Hundreds of people lived, who probably would have died.
Despite vocal claims to the contrary, DDT is not carcinogenic or harmful to humans. In fact, right after World War II, health officials sprayed millions of people—right on their bodies—to stop a typhus epidemic. Not one person ever got sick from the DDT.
Poor nations can afford it. Used properly, it’s perfectly safe for the environment—and will raise no trade or other problems with the European Union.
Malaria-carrying mosquitoes are far less likely to build immunities to DDT than to other pesticides, which are still used heavily in agriculture. And mosquitoes have never become resistant to DDT’s repellant and irritant effects. That’s why more and more people are demonstrating in support of DDT and other weapons to combat malaria and disease-carrying mosquitoes.
Some environmental groups, like Greenpeace and Environmental Defense, have become less critical of DDT—at least in public. But Pesticide Action Network, Physicians for Social Responsibility, the Goldman Foundation and other radicals still oppose DDT. Mention DDT, and all they want to talk about is traces of DDT in mother’s breast milk, and theoretical harm to birds.
They spend millions of dollars every year battling DDT and insecticides. But they have never spent one dollar battling malaria, or sponsoring research to create equally effective substitutes for DDT and mosquito-killing insecticides.
Fifi has a simple answer for them: “I lost my son, two sisters and three nephews to malaria. Don’t talk to me about birds. And don’t tell me a little DDT in our bodies is worse than the risk of losing more children to this disease. African mothers would be overjoyed if DDT in our bodies were their biggest worry. DDT doesn’t hurt us. Malaria does.”
What drives these anti-pesticide policies? Never having to worry about getting malaria is certainly one factor. Putting environmental values ahead of everything else is another. A third is fear of chemicals that sometimes borders on the pathological.
But you’ll have to forgive me if I suspect that another, darker motive may also be at work: a callous belief that the world has too many people—or that Third World lives just aren’t as valuable as First World lives.
Developing countries would be better off, one aid worker said in 1972, if people were “sick with malaria and spread the job opportunities around. In fact, people in the Third World would be much better off dead than alive, and riotously reproducing.”
53. Maybe banning DDT would cause a lot of deaths, Environmental Defense scientist Charles Wurster once remarked. “So what? People are the cause of all the problems. We have too many of them, and banning DDT is as good a way to get rid of some of them as any.”
“To stabilize world populations,” Jacques Cousteau told a French magazine in 1991, “we must eliminate 350,000 people a day.”
And Club of Rome founder Alexander King wrote: “In hindsight, my chief quarrel with DDT is that it greatly added to the world’s population problem.”
To their everlasting credit, many other people repeatedly took a far more humanitarian and ethical position.
A New York Times editorial said: The developed world “has been unconscionably stingy in financing the fight against malaria or research into alternatives to DDT. Until one is found, wealthy nations should be helping poor countries with all available means – including DDT.”
“There is no charitable way to put it,” said the Washington Times. “Children are dying, while Westerners worry about fictitious environmental effects. Aid agencies need to drop their opposition to the use of DDT in Africa and encourage the countries now considering using it, to do so.”
Jurassic Park author (and physician) Michael Crichton is even more blunt: “Banning DDT is one of the most disgraceful episodes in the twentieth century history of America. We knew better, and we did it anyway, and we let people around the world die, and we didn’t give a damn.”
DDT is certainly not some magical potion that—all by itself—can wipe out malaria, and bring health and prosperity to Africa and other countries where this killer disease is still epidemic. There is no such potion or magic bullet.
But it is a vital weapon in the war against a disease that is constantly mutating, is carried by many species of mosquitoes, and exists under varied conditions in different countries and even different regions of the same country.
As Uganda Health Services Director Dr. Sam Zaramba wrote in the Wall Street Journal earlier this year, Africa needs every possible weapon – from education, bednets, ACT drugs and environmental management … to modern clinics and houses … to larvacides, insecticides and DDT. For anyone to force people to suffer and die—by telling them they must never use these life-saving chemical weapons—is a moral outrage … a serious human rights violation … that can no longer be tolerated.
That’s why “Africa is determined to take charge of its future,” Dr. Zaramba concluded, “and rise above the contemporary colonialism that helps keep us diseased and impoverished.”
Solutions
Environmental activists who’ve never known starvation, never had to live without electricity, never had to watch their children die of malaria or dysentery—have no right … and must no longer be allowed … to put their ideologies, anxieties and agendas ahead of the desperate pleas, basic needs and human rights of destitute people who are only trying to improve their lives, and save their children’s lives.
Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore is right. “The environmental movement has lost its objectivity, morality and humanity. The pain and suffering it is inflicting on families in developing countries must no longer be tolerated.”
Families all over the world must be allowed, encouraged and helped to take their rightful places among the Earth’s healthy and prosperous people. They need sustained development—not “sustainable development.”
They need a precautionary principle that safeguards them from real, immediate, life-threatening risks—instead of condemning them to poverty, misery and premature death, to prevent risks associated with conjectural, or concocted, eco-catastrophes.
Simply put, opposition to energy development, biotechnology, pesticides and prosperity is callous Eco-Imperialism.
It’s unnecessary, because most of the supposed environmental “crises” are minor, hypothetical or even imaginary. It certainly is not ethical, socially responsible or compassionate. Worst of all, it’s lethal. It’s callous eco-manslaughter, at the hands of environmental pressure groups.
Niger Innis, national spokesman for the Congress of Racial Equality, puts it this way: “We all want to protect the environment. But we must stop trying to protect it from distant or imaginary threats. We must stop trying to protect it on the backs, and the graves, of the world’s most powerless and destitute people.”
Put another way, because electricity, biotechnology and insecticides improve living standards, prevent disease, sustain life and secure other fundamental liberties—access to these modern technologies is a basic human right.
Not free energy, free insecticides, free biotechnology. But freedom to build generating plants and use these other technologies. Freedom from pressure and sanctions imposed by anti-development activists.
What else do countries need to become healthier and more prosperous—and provide greater choices and opportunities for their people? As I see it, they can take several steps.
They should implement legal and economic systems that minimize corruption and burdensome regulations. They should remove obstacles to property ownership, foreign and domestic investment, and starting new businesses.
In other words, lay the foundations for vibrant free market economies. For all its shortcomings—real, exaggerated or imaginary—capitalism works.
There is still no better way to generate health and prosperity than to foster free enterprise, capitalism and property ownership … under legal and economic systems that reward hard work and success, control excesses and punish wrongdoing. Nothing else will do as much to unleash the vast stores of pent-up energy, creative power and financial capital of people, families and communities.
Rich and poor countries alike should also revise regulations and policies to make them reflect actual risks—instead of speculative risks. They should recognize that poor nations still face life-threatening problems that rich nations conquered decades ago.
Generating health and prosperity also means ensuring that risks to people’s lives and livelihoods – from doing or not doing something—are considered just as carefully as risks to environmental values. It means demanding clear evidence that certain technologies are dangerous and should not be used—because the risks of using those technologies are clearly greater than the benefits the technologies will bring.
It means insisting that “environmental ethics,” “environmental justice” and “corporate social responsibility” reflect the needs and concerns—not of self-proclaimed stakeholders—but of people who actually have to live with the consequences of these political decisions.
Headlines, slogans and Hollywood movies are not evidence. Speculative connections between technologies and exaggerated risks are not proof. Computer models and worst-case scenarios do not prove that increasing carbon dioxide levels cause climate change catastrophes—or might cause worse floods, droughts or disease outbreaks than what Nature has visited on Africa and every other continent since the dawn of time.
Vigorous discussion of these issues is especially important when assertions about climate chaos, chemicals or biotechnology are being used to prevent energy and economic development, malaria control, agricultural improvements and business competition.
What this really comes down to, then, is changing the terms of the debate.
We must make it clear that people are also part of the environment, and rightful inhabitants of the Earth that God created.
We must insist that it is the RIGHT of poor nations and people – a right endowed by God – to improve, modernize and grow their economies … to use any modern technologies they wish … to take their places among the Earth’s healthy, productive and prosperous people.
The vast majority of poor nations are rich beyond measure. They have mineral, timber and water resources. They have energy—the master resource.
And they have the ultimate resource—the brain power, creativity and amazing work ethic of their people.
If they can harness these resources, and unleash the power of free enterprise – under sound legal, regulatory, economic and property rights systems—they will generate previously unimaginable health and prosperity for their people.
Mr. Driessen is Senior Policy Advisor of the Congress of Racial Equality.
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