Comments Jeremy Carl has made

The Author Responds. . . .

OK, I appreciate all of the comments--particularly the supportive ones (and the respectful critics)--I'll chime in with a few thoughts of my own here.

First, I'm not suggesting the environmental movement has been universally wrong (far from it, else I would not be an environmentalist) nor that the Democratic party is bad.  . I'm just starting with a premise, talking to a Grist audience, that I don't need to remind everyone of our successes.  We know what they are.  I'm interesting in fixing the ways we fall short.

I'm fascinated with the Manichean nature of some of the more hostile postings.  There is more complexity to the world than forces of light vs. forces of darkness.   Just as silly is the notion, that I am a Republican plant or spy or something similar.  All of this Karl Rove and "neo-con" stuff--It's just absurd, and I hope it sounds ridiculous to the majority of Grist readers as it does to me.  

I've said nothing about my politics in any of my posts other than that they are not liberal and that I am libertarian-leaning (but not a libertarian).  The notion that Karl Rove is getting on a plane to New Delhi to hold secret meetings with me whenever I'm putting a flowerpot out on my windowsill is laughable.

I approached Grist under no one's initiative but my own and for no other reason than that I wanted to get some ideas out in the public space that I thought were important.  And I thought Grist, which has always seemed more thoughtful to me than a lot of other environmental publications out there, was an ideal place.  And frankly, I also don't need lectures about how immoral or greedy I must be.  My wife, who was an extremely well-paid physician, and I, who have a lot of excellent professional experience and could have chosen to work for a very comfortable salary stateside, decided on our own to come to India and to work essentially for free.

As for Jeff's posts in response to both of my articles I think we just have a genuine disagreement on principle about many aspects of the society we'd like to see.  I'm fine with having disagreements on principle, but I suspect that, for better or worse, few people would want to embrace the pre-agricultural lifestyles that you have advocated in your postings.

Odograph, I am thrilled that you brought up Adam Werbach, because he is exactly the sort of person I am talking about.  Breathtakingly arrogant enough to think he was qualified to run the Sierra Club at age 23 and to write "Act Now, Apologize Later." He's followed this up with overheated rhetoric like the paragraph excerpted in your posting.  It's enviroliberalism at its worst.

To the posters writing Re: Tora Bora, point duly noted and correct with respect to specifics but an utterly irrelevant concerning the underlying point, which is totally valid. And since I've been challenged on the particular point, yes, I have a friend who was heading one of the teams searching for Bin Laden.  His priest gave him last rites before each mission.  So I understand that war is no joke.

Bart, your post is thoughtful, and your quote from Watson fairly well summarizes my own philosophy, but again, you are making unwarranted assumptions about me and my politics.  Trust me, working at an environmental think tank in India that is run by R.K. Pachauri, who is head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) I am most certainly not surrounded by conservative ideologues.  Quite the opposite:  In dealing with the government and NGO sector here, I am surrounded by liberal ideologues, many of whom have influenced the government to pursue policies that have been, in my view, unbelievably destructive and damaging to the Indian people.  

But I was most interested in Bart's post below:

"At a certain point, an honest conservative idealist realizes the truth that the (conservative) Italian economist/philosopher Pareto enunciated, that in any political system, power tends to concentrate among the "ruthless and the efficient." When you discover how you are being used, how your ideals are merely window dressing for the ruthless pursuit of wealth and power, how will you react?"  

Though I believe you had the opposite intention, I'm not sure I could have argued my own point any better.  I've had the opportunity to work with and around a fair number of powerful people and I can assure you that regardless of their professed ideology, they were usually fairly unpleasant human beings whose ideals were mere covers for their own pursuit of "wealth and/or power"

It seems to me that conservatism (or a strand of it at least) fundamentally understands this which is why it opposes the encroachment of the state on people's pocketbooks, freedoms, and lives whereas liberalism wants to hand more power over to the state, and further concentrate it in the hands of the "ruthless and efficient" whose rule you correctly decry.

To close, I am pro-wilderness, anti-global warming, for clean water, clean air and sustainable lifestyles.  I also balance these concerns with concerns about human needs that spring directly from spending time in India and other desperately poor developing countries where you learn that much basic development has an environmental cost.  I'm also not a doomsayer who thinks we need to move backwards toward some fictional and idealized age of low-resource-use life. And I'm not comfortable in trusting my environmental future to the dishonest and venal people whom, regardless of professed ideology, run most governments.

That's why I'm an environmentalist, but not an enviroliberal.
On Environmentalism and liberalism shouldn't be joined at the hip. posted 4 years, 5 months ago 61 Responses