It’s difficult at best, and often impossible, to have a reasoned exchange of ideas and perspectives about nearly any issue these days. So many folks are so inextricably bound up with a particular belief system that any rational argument or statement of fact that conflicts or contradicts those beliefs is met with a reactionary fury that impugns the intelligence or morality of the presenter.
While it is all too easy to relegate this phenomenon to the hard right of the political spectrum, the hard left is just as guilty. Closed-mindedness is a disability that does not discriminate by ideology.
Take the issue of global warming. As prolonged high temperatures set new records around the world, and massive, devastating wildfires become more frequent than tornadoes, the issue of global warming is impossible to ignore.
The human causes of global warming are disputed by the hard right which believes that anything threatening to impede commerce and the acquisition of money must be suppressed or discredited. Pollution is the price of profit, and measures to ease this equation threaten the economy and peoples’ jobs. Not even the planet is more important than the economy.
As more of the world industrializes and embraces the affluent lifestyle of advanced nations, the negative impact on the common environment is unavoidable. Advanced industrialized nations are by far the greatest contributors to environmental degradation.
Until recently, the United States with its 300 million people was the world’s primary polluter, but industrialized China with its 1.4 billion people now has that dubious distinction. Rapidly industrializing India with its 1.3 billion population is not far behind.
Add in Europe, Japan, and other advanced nations, and more than half the earth’s population are avid consumers in industrialized economies.
Anyone who denies the science that human activity is the primary cause of unnatural rapid global warming, and of virtually all environmental damage, is foolishly whistling past the planet’s graveyard. Anyone who rejects the equation that more people generate more of that activity is struggling with basic math — or choosing to ignore it.
Because they are so loudly strident in their rejection of human-caused environmental degradation, the hard right gets the most attention for obstinate adherence to ideology. Not so obvious, but just as blindly devoted to doctrine, the hard left, cleaving to ideals of racial equality and economic justice, overlooks the realities of the population-pollution equation.
The greater the populations of advanced industrialized nations, the greater the negative impact on the earth. Nearly all the population increase in the United States over the past several decades is due to immigration and the prolific procreation of immigrants. The more people allowed into our pollution machine, the more stress on the planet.
But, admitting that fact returns charges of racism, xenophobia and selfish economic privilege from the hard left that prefers to blame environmental degradation on insufficiently regulated human activity, especially corporate greed, rather than on the number of humans involved.
They believe that more regulation and technological wizardry will find ways to accommodate more population while decreasing its negative consequences. Meanwhile, the world’s economically underprivileged and politically oppressed people pressing to get in here should be welcomed because it is our moral duty — and eminently politically correct — to do so.
Magical thinking on the left is no less delusional than it is on the right. Unless the earth is actually increasing its girth along with all essential life-sustaining resources, the population of any species has inevitable limits — humans included.
While efforts to reduce the negative impacts of human activity are commendable, banning plastic bags and straws will do little to reduce the floating islands of discarded plastic, twice the size of Texas, littering the oceans.
Electric cars and clean energy struggle to offset the impact of increasing population in places like Los Angeles where, after a brief respite, air pollution is once again rising. And, of course, air pollution in China’s megalopolises darken daylight and spreads around the globe.
Ocean life that has provided so much food for the human population is being decimated by pollution and over-fishing. In efforts to feed increasing human populations, oceans, rivers and lakes are being poisoned by chemical fertilizer runoff.
Wildfires and expanded farming are rapidly reducing forest cover around the earth. Coastal cities like Miami are already experiencing frequent unprecedented flooding from climate change. Prolonged drought combined with increasing population has created chronic water shortages throughout the Southwest United States. Tundra is thawing and releasing its captive methane into an already contaminated atmosphere.
Clearly, human ingenuity cannot keep up with burgeoning human population. If there is any technological magic left to deploy it is too late to prevent the damage already occurring and is likely to be overwhelmed by unrelenting population growth.
Imposing ever more restrictive regulations and bans on human activity in an effort to combat environmental stress and conserve dwindling resources increases the police state as much if not more than it decreases environmental damage. The greater the human population, the greater the threat to personal freedom as well as to the environment.
Those ideologically isolated from these realities are unlikely to correct the course we are on. Unless enough people understand that any feasible effort to change course requires sharply reducing birthrates and letting the population fall to environmentally sustainable levels, all the Paris Accords and environmental regulations will be futile.
— Randy Alcorn is a Santa Barbara political observer. Contact him at randyaalcorn@gmail.com, or click here to read previous columns. The opinions expressed are his own.