Underestimating Humanity

A central tenet of modern environmentalism is that, like Icarus, humanity has overreached, and that the only way forward is go backward. You'll see this in various forms. NeoMalthusians complain that there are too many people on the planet (but never off themselves to save it, of course). Progressive scolds yell (sometimes literally) at people who have 'too many' babies. Locavores pride themselves on buying their food from nearby craft farms, no matter the relative inefficiency of those farms. Finite-resource fools argue that, because petroleum is not infinite, we must cease using it now. Environutters throw paint at old masterpieces and glue themselves to streets in order to convince the rest of us that we have to regress our living standards in order to save the planet.

That their depopulating demands are genocidally anti-human doesn't enter their consciousness. That most of them grew up with the fruits of human progress is an irony they don't understand. That their green fantasies mean human misery on a global scale, in pursuit of a goal that is both technologically and geopolitically unworkable is an irrelevance.

But, if all we do is criticize them, we risk becoming like them. Thus, I try whenever I deride the greens to offer an alternative to their WASABI delusions. Nuclear power, geo-engineering research, and golden rice are three of my favorites. All offer benefit even if global warming isn't the catastrophic threat we are told it is. All represent steps forward, rather than backward. All benefit humanity instead of treating it like a plague on the planet.

I don't presume, however, to think that my proffered remedies are the only ones out there. Human ingenuity has a long history of outperforming every new challenge. The opening photo of this bit offers four examples of human achievement. Luddites, Malthusians, contrarians, and other miserable people will decry urban density - while also denouncing urban sprawl - but they ignore the realities of human life before such progress. The richest people in the world a century ago could not buy that which we take for granted today. Medicine casually cures things that used to kill us. Air conditioning saves countless lives every year.

All the gadgets in this picture have been replaced by a flat slab you can hold in one hand.

Not only been replaced, but been wildly surpassed. That picture you took of your toes while lounging on a beach chair contains a thousand times more data than the Apollo 11 computer's capacity.

All this progress, yet people still reject the idea that progress will continue. That what's forecast as a problem a century from now must be solved with today's technology. That we won't be able to overcome whatever perils global warming actually produces, or that we won't be able to continue feeding ourselves. That human population is expected to plateau in a couple decades, then decline naturally, without the intervention of the Best-and-Brightest, doesn't matter to their desire to control and subjugate. That we have gotten so good at growing food that we are retiring farmland is an inconvenient fact best ignored. That forest cover in the US has nearly quadrupled in the past 100 years (that this datum is a surprise to many is a sad tell-tale of misery over celebration). That interventions by those Best-and-Brightest are often the source of our woes, crises, inefficiencies, and other problems is a lesson that continues to go unheeded.

I trust in humanity's ability to improve itself. I reject depopulation as the monstrously callous hatred of people it is. I find the idea of deindustrialization to be an equally human-hating farce. I don't need to have every answer, or to demand that others answer everything today, or to insist that only through the heavy handed intervention of government's answer-proclaimers can things advance and improve. Quite the opposite, and history has proven me right, time and again.