In 2015 resolve to reduce your impact on the earth. So reads the title of an op-ed by Michele Byers for The Hunterdon County Democrat. Byers is the executive director of the New Jersey Conservation Foundation. She writes:
It’s that time again, when the slate is wiped clean and we resolve to do things better in the new year.
So how about resolving to reduce your impact on the earth? It’s clear that major changes are needed worldwide in the way we use energy and natural resources.
Bringing about sweeping changes may sound overwhelming, but individuals can and do make a difference! Never underestimate the impact one person can make by changing habits and committing to a greener footprint.
Here are some simple things you can do in 2015.
What follows is a list of suggestions, like lowering your heat when you’re away from home or buy energy efficient electronics.
I left these comments:
Leaving aside this specific list of suggestions—some of which make sense—we should resolve to reject the so-called “Green” agenda. The premise behind Green is non-impact on the Earth as the standard of value. Instead, we should go anti-Green—adopt human life as the standard of value.
On a pro-human life standard, impact on the Earth is mostly good and should be encouraged with more freedom. Human beings survive and thrive precisely by impacting—altering—the Earth. Human flourishing depends on turning raw materials, like previously technologically unreachable shale oil and gas, into exploitable resources, as the fracking revolution has done; then turning those resources into material goods that improve human life—e.g., cheaper, more plentiful reliable energy, which then fuels industrial improvements in all other economic areas. There are no “natural resources.” There are only natural raw materials, with no practical limit on how much of it can be turned into resources by human ingenuity. History bears this out. The wealthier we get, the more resources we have.
The only impacts we should reduce are negative side effects harmful to people, such as pollution, where much progress has been made over the course of the industrialization of the planet. But only as technology makes feasable, not at the expense of prosperity and human flourishing.
The Green agenda is fundamentally anti-life. The long-term logical consequences of the “non-impact” Green ideology is a progressively resource-poor, progressively impoverished human existence for us and future generations—just the opposite of the trend of the past 300 years. Reject the “major changes . . . in the way we use energy and natural resources” peddled by the Greens. By all means, be frugal when it makes sense for you. (My frugality borders on an obsession.) But reject the Green Agenda in 2015. It’s an anti-industrial Trojan Horse. Embrace a Humanist Agenda of expanding high-impact resource creation and industrial progress. Our lives and well-being—and those of our children and grandchildren—depend on it.
Return of the Primitive—Ayn Rand
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