Green Grinches
Jim Carrey wasn’t the only Grinch to terrorize us this Christmas season. America’s holiday rituals were besieged by another sort of misanthrope – this one a little less furry, but every bit as green. Unlike Dr. Seuss’ Grinch, however, the environmentalists have yet to learn the error of their ways.
Everyone remembers “The Grinch Who Stole Christmas.” His heart three sizes too small, the Grinch hates anything and everything to do with Christmas. He decides to wreak revenge on his Christmas-loving neighbors, the happy Whos of Whoville. Dressed in his Santa suit, the Grinch robs the slumbering Whos of all of the “trimmings” and “trappings” of Christmas. Much to his distaste, the Whos celebrate Christmas anyway. The Grinch has an epiphany: “Maybe … Christmas doesn’t come from a store,” he muses. Finally infected with the holiday spirit, the Grinch joins the Whos in song and gets to carve the roast beast at their Christmas dinner.
Today’s grinches would never inflict such cruelty on their brother beasts. Nor would they admit that Christmas is anything more than crass commercialism and, as they put it, “conspicuous consumption.” Rather, they believe that greedy credit card companies and multinational corporations have devised Christmas as a means to sell plastic wreaths, tinsel, and non-free range turkeys. The manufacture of such “junk,” and the energy required to do so, needlessly contributes to the earth’s ever-growing scarcity of resources. Christmas, they believe, does come from a store, and it is destroying the earth.
One group of such grinches, the anti-consumerist Adbusters, sponsored “Buy Nothing Day” on the busiest shopping day of the holiday season to protest the excesses of capitalist societies. (Their more radical counterparts sponsored “Steal Something Day.”) Earth Day Network publication The Daily Grist echoes this sentiment, alleging that Americans’ “Santa envy,” or use of Christmas lights, “results in about 885,000 tons of CO2, 4,800 tons of SO2, and 2,800 tons of smog: Merry Christmas!” Those who celebrate Christmas, they contend, are indirectly responsible for causing global warming and air pollution, amidst a host of other environmental plagues.
Of course, these grinches’ real targets are nor just the “trimmings” and “trappings” of Christmas, but those of capitalism itself. Christmas is just one more illustration of capitalism’s decadence – the production of needless conveniences and frivolous goods at the expense of the earth’s scarce resources. Their solution? Limit production, discourage producers, and take one giant technological leap backward.
Of course, your average environmentalist lives in an insulated house and uses a microwave and a dishwasher and toilet paper. He uses a computer and a cellular phone and electricity. You may even catch him drinking a mocha frappuccino on the sly. While he may call for a return to a agricultural subsistence, his own lifestyle seems to be immune to this standard.
The fact is that no matter where people live, they desire material comfort, health, safety from the elements, mobility, and freedom from backbreaking labor. Fulfilling these basic needs is instrumental in freeing up our lives for more meaningful pursuits – social, intellectual, and religious.
The environmentalists of the developed world seem to take for granted the material wealth and freedom from adversity that have made possible their own social crusade. They have long forgotten the toilsome and burdensome lifestyles of their ancestors. For example, Vandana Shiva, a “third world” opponent of modern agriculture, argues that nutritionally augmented foods (in particular, “golden” rice, bioengineered to include vitamin A) will undermine biological diversity. Thousands of children, however, go blind every year from a deficiency of vitamin A. Ms. Shiva and her ilk demand that the world return to so-called “traditional” agricultural methods that do not utilize pesticides, herbicides, insecticides, or gene-spliced plants, and that rely on human labor instead of mechanization. But such an undertaking would require massive conversions of land and a tremendous increase in manpower. The cost would be a dramatic decrease in the health and welfare of the world’s populations.
Pretending to speak for the developing world and for the world’s disadvantaged people, grinches like Ms. Shiva also reject agricultural technologies such as gene splicing and “genetic modification,” which would help to alleviate both nutritional and environmental problems. More robust plants with higher yields promise to free up land for other uses and will ensure that less food is wasted due to pest damage.
In spite of Ms. Shiva’s romanticized agrarianism, the world’s poor do not choose to live in poverty. Hardly able to fulfill their material needs, they will only be able to improve their quality of life by consuming more resources and more energy. For the grinches, however, an impoverished lifestyle of subsistence agriculture – free of technology and energy consumption (as well as proper sanitation, shelter, and medical resources) – is the only environmentally “sustainable” lifestyle.
In truth, resources do not exist naturally in a finite quantity. Human creativity, as the late economist Julian Simon demonstrated, is what enables us to make use of the world’s natural resources and to tread more lightly on the planet. By consuming energy and resources, we free up other resources (our time, for instance) that allow us to discover better ways to care for ourselves and our environment. Restraining productivity and consumption, on the other hand, not only reduces the quality of human life, it damages the world around us.
But then, the greens’ agenda often seems to be little more than a justification for their own grinchy attitudes – their inability to get beyond the “trimmings” and “trappings” of a free market. Rather than seeking to integrate human creativity with protection of the environment, they call for a separation of man from nature and a willful abandon of material prosperity. Yet the poor have nothing to lose but their poverty, and the environment stands only to gain from a humanity liberated to protect it. It is high time that the greens have a change of heart.