Hot on the heels of Alissa Quart’s assault on American Individualism comes Rebecca Solnit’s assault on the consequence of that individualism, prosperity.
What if climate change meant not doom — but abundance? By Rebecca Solnit
The article is long on high-minded cliches but devoid of concrete substance. But Solnit’s guilt-drenched, nihilistic message comes through loud and clear.
Solnit wants us to believe that material and spiritual enrichment are opposites—that it is either-or.
But the creation of material abundance requires spiritual virtues like rationality, learning, inventiveness, entrepreneurship, perseverance, cooperation, and hard work. Material and spiritual abundance compliment and build on each other. Today, thanks to freedom and abundant, economical, reliable energy, mainly fossil fuels, we live amazingly prosperous lives, with an amazingly bright future of greater prosperity.
So why the doom and despair? Because of the manufactured climate “crisis.” The climate crisis-mongers have infected too many people with a wholly unwarranted doom and gloom. This is especially true of the young, who are victims of mental abuse at a time they should be looking ahead with eager anticipation. Today is the best time in human history in which to be a teenager, the inheritors of unprecedented opportunities for building flourishing lives. The despair and anxiety so many of them feel is real. But it is the climate crisis-mongers who inflicted it. This is not just educational malpractice. It is child abuse.
Solnit’s premise is not new. The environmentalists’ anti-human goal is the same. She just reframes prosperity as poverty, and poverty as “abundance.” This is just a new version of Christianity’s Dark Age glorification of poverty. She speaks of “building stronger societies and being better citizens, on caring for the people,” and then glorifies disasters as paths to joy and “moral beauty.”
This, the glorification of disaster, is where Solnit’s true colors come through. The Great Enrichment of the past 250 years, the era of Capitalism, freedom, and fossil fuels, has made us safer than ever from climate dangers, and much better able to mitigate the damage of such disasters—with promises of more safety to come. Solnit proposes to abandon the material prosperity that makes this climate mastery possible, and once again make humanity at the full mercy of nature’s fury. That is what Solnit means by her new form of “abundance”—rather than an abundance of money and stuff, an abundance of misery. This is what she terms “spiritual abundance.”
We should be grateful to fossil fuels for the wonderful lives we have today, celebrating the abundance of fossil fuels needed to power further progress in the decades ahead, and advocating to preserve the freedom necessary for the innovation that will eventually lead to better energy sources that can not only grow our economies but make us ever more resilient to future climate dangers.
Having been lecturing us for years about how our industrial flourishing is destroying the planet, we are now being told that the unprecedentedly enriched lives we enjoy is bad for us. Reject Solnit’s bleak call for a future of scarcity and phony spiritual “enrichment.” It’s just repackaged climate hysteria. Instead, embrace human flourishing. Reason’s Ronald Bailey presents a better vision, as does Alex Epstein.
Related Ruling:
The End of Doom: Environmental Renewal in the Twenty-first Century by Ronald Bailey
Fossil Future: Why Global Human Flourishing Requires More Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas--Not Less by Alex Epstein
The Anti-human Tyrade of an Ungrateful 16-Year-old
We Owe Our Children a More Technologically Advanced Society, Not 'Preserved' Nature
The Collectivist Left Media Launches Major ‘Climate Crisis’ Propaganda Campaign
CLIMATE VULNERABILITY AND THE INDISPENSABLE VALUE OF INDUSTRIAL CAPITALISM—Kieth H. Lockitch
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