Misguided Environmental Activism

Environmental activism can delay or even stop development projects in developing countries. Not all of it is wrong, but more and more of it is, especially concerning hydrocarbon-based power plants and food in developing countries. India, with a population of 1.3 billion and nearly 300 million living in poverty, has been facing constant challenges to its energy goals. Hydrocarbon projects in particular face hurdles from well-organized environmental activists backed by Western funders.

India's HydroCarbon Projects

A number of recent projects in India are currently on hold despite clearance given by the country's Green Tribunal, an Indian equivalent of the US Environmental Protection Agency. One such case is a hydrocarbon project at Neduvasal, other projects include: titanium dioxide, nuclear power, particle physics research, copper manufacturing, and gas exploration. Some of these were given a go-ahead by India's Supreme Court and considered safe by technical experts, yet there were delayed or remain on hold because of protests, reports Vijay Jayaraj. ¹ The saddest thing about this is that the impact of these economic hurdles is much more significant in developing countries where they can impact the poor and those very close to the poverty line. A few months of COVID-19 lockdown in India sent millions back into extreme poverty, in which they cannot even afford three meals a day. No substitutes can make up for the lost energy from fossil fuels. Renewables are more expensive and less reliable. For the 300 million poor in India, the environmental groups—funded by radical elements in the United State sand Europe—are the biggest obstacle to becoming middle-class households, healthy, prosperous, and long-lived. ¹

GMO crops in Africa

Genetically modified crops have yet to penetrate deep into the African agricultural sector due to opposition from anti-GMO lobbies and radical environmentalists. In the summer of 2002, when famine gripped Africa, the US sent massive amounts of corn to several countries, including about 17,000 tons to Zambia. But there it rotted. It turns out the Zambian government had been told by environmentalist groups such as Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth that the food was 'poison.' ² The late Dennis Avery reported, “Thus Greenpeace and Friends say that starving Africans should drop foodstuffs that most of those organizations' American members have been eating for the past decade with no ill effects, so that Western greens can make a political point. Never mind that this was the same pest resistant corn that had been approved for safety by three different US government agencies, and eaten daily since 1995 by millions of Americans in such forms as corn flakes, corn flour, and through livestock feed, hamburgers and ice cream. Biotech foods have undergone more testing than any foods in history, with no danger found.” ³

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Greenpeace Crop Destroyers

Greenpeace vandals have destroyed crops, wiping out millions of dollars in research to develop food plants that require fewer pesticides, are more nutritious, reduce dangerous mold toxins withstand floods and drought, and increase crop yields. The people who would benefit most from this research are the poorest, most malnourished on Earth. They could improve their lives, simply by planting different, better corn, cotton, or soybean seeds. ⁴ Paul Watson, a co-founder of Greenpeace has written that human population is a “virus killing our host the planet Earth, and so the number of people living in the world should be slashed by 85 percent.” “No human community in the world should be larger than 20,000 people,” Watson writes. “We need to radically and intelligently reduce human populations to fewer than one billion.” He describes mankind as “the AIDS of the Earth” and call for an end to cars, planes, and all ships save those powered by sail.” ⁵ Greenpeace also claimed that there was a 'zero benefit' from modified plants such as Golden Rice, a variety with added pro-vitamin A. Golden Rice was developed by Swiss scientist, Ingo Potrykus to help address the severe problem of micro-nutrient deficiencies in developing countries diets- a problem that results in half a million cases of childhood blindness and millions of deaths each year. As Patrick Moore, a Greenpeace co-founder, now an outspoken critic of the group days, “Let someone come forward and state that the possibility of saving 500,000 children form blindness is a zero benefit.” ⁶

Unnecessary, Misguided Help

“Westerners want to save developing countries from the problems that they might encounter in the future, rather than help them to deal with the problems they are actually facing today. There have actually been seat-belt campaigns in parts of Africa where the only vehicle for a hundred miles are aid-agency Land Rovers,” report Lorraine Mooney and Roger Bate. ⁷ In East Pakistan, one agency distributed heavy woolen blankets, apparently not realizing that this location was in the tropics with a median annual temperature in the high seventies. Another handed out cans of pork and beans to the hungry, unaware that the refugees had no way of opening the cans, no way of heating the cans, and that neither Muslims nor Hindus ate pork. ⁸

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Toilets in Somalia

Robert Desowitz provides another example. Health advisers from a western nation decided to use their government's aid funds for a pilot project that would provide simple water-seal toilets to a selected village in Somalia. In due course, several hundred of the cast concrete devices were placed over soak-away pits that had been laboriously dug to the prescribed dimensions. The advisors then returned to their office in the capital, satisfied that they had propelled these people onto the road to modern sanitation and did not return until a year later. To their surprise they found the toilets to be horrible messes. Each one was stuffed with a pile of stones and made useless. When they asked why anyone would dump stones into a toilet, their respondent was surprised. They were told that Somalis distract themselves when defecating by clicking two stones together and when finished they drop the stones into the most convenient receptacle, in the case of the new toilets, the water toilet seat. ⁹ These examples reveal some of the problems that can arise when countries in the first world try to help countries in transition areas. The western desire to 'fix' things often falls on deaf ears or comes up against unforeseen obstacles. Without a true understanding of the culture of the folks being 'helped' and trying to provide help from afar, things can go awry. It would be nice to see the 'do-gooders' concentrate on the issues of disease and sanitation which are the real killers while maintaining an active presence rather than supervising from afar and worrying about future issues like global warming.

References

1. Vijay Jayaraj, “Environmental activism as carbon imperialism: nightmare for the poor,” cornwallalliance.org, March 27, 2021
2. Michael Fumento, Bio Evolution: How Biotechnology is Changing Our World, (San Francisco, CA, Encounter Books, 2003)
3. Dennis T. Avery, “Environmentalists turn to terrorism,”, Hudson Institute, September 26, 2002
4. Paul Driessen, “Not exactly Mother Teresa,” CFACT News, January 17, 2010
5. Jeff Jacoby, “A world full of good news,” boston.com/news, May 13,2007
6. C. S. Prakash, “Greenpeace founder supports biotechnology,” agbioworld.org, 2011
7. Environmental Health: Third World Problems—First World Preoccupations, Lorraine Mooney and Roger Bate, Editors, (Oxford, Butterworth-Heinemann, 1999) 224
8. Scott Anderson, The Man Who Tried To Save The World, (New York, Anchor Books, 1999), 72
9. Robert S. Desowitz, New Guinea Tapeworms and Jewish Grandmothers, Tales of Parasites and People, (New York, W W. Norton & Co., 1987) 187