Environment

There is the need to distinguish between two types of “environmentalism”.

1. “Humanist” environmentalism, i.e. environmentalism for humans’ sake.
2. Cleaning rivers
3. Planting trees in cities
4. Covering up loose soil with lawns to reduce dust
5. Limiting pollutants from vehicles, banning old vehicles
6. Building railways and metros to reduce vehicle pollution
7. Banning stubble burning
8. Cleaning up cities
9. Sprinkling water to improve AQI
10. Building nuclear, solar and wind energy
11. Most of all: Supplying LPG to reduce usage of unclean cooking fuels
12. “Leftist” environmentalism, i.e. environmentalism for environmentalism’s sake.
13. Shutting down industries and mines to protect “the natural environment”
14. Limiting economic growth, keeping Indians poor to minimize impact to the environment
15. Blocking dams and roads and other infrastructural projects
16. Reserving vast swathes of land as ineligible for development
17. Reducing electricity consumption to prevent “climate change”
18. Preventing development in order to preserve “ecosystem balance”

All too often, Leftists intentionally conflate the two to gain support for their regressive, anti-human ideology (2) by cloaking it in the appeal of (1). They will gain supporters by talking about AQI (an actual issue that affects humans) and then rally them to block development and shut down the industries lifting hundreds of millions of Indians out of poverty.

We need to be very clear about this: there is nothing moral about preserving nature for its own sake. The only value of nature is in what utility it provides to sentient beings, i.e. humans.

“Nature” is simply the world as it exists in its raw, natural state unfit for human prosperity: hunger and disease, poisonous plants and snakes and lions, water filled with various parasites. No shelter, no food security, living completely at the mercy of the elements. Most women die at childbirth, most children get eaten by animals, and everyone starves anyway.

ALL—literally ALL—human progress relies on “exploiting” the environment, i.e. transforming its stuff into things that are useful for humans. Turning stone into tools and trees into fire. Turning forests into farms and dirt into homes and buildings. Exterminating the animals and pests that threaten us and breeding the ones we want. Mining the earth for metals and burning more forests to process them. This is not some regrettable cost we pay or something that needs to be “balanced” against environmentalist ideals—it IS EXACTLY WHAT PROGRESS IS: turning the little resources we are endowed with into more and more valuable things that improve human life.

None of this has any harmful side-effect to humans. No, we will not “run out of resources due to overuse” (economics is literally the science of allocating scarce resources). No, “disruption to ecosystems” won’t hurt us: we have our crops and livestock, and we know how to protect them, it doesn’t matter if some mosquito population goes extinct. No, CO2 is not a pollutant (it is responsible for global warming, which has nothing to do with air quality; the pollutants are things like dust and CO). Through all of this “exploitation” of resources, there are far fewer climate deaths today than ever before—the environment is far safer today than it has ever been in history … for humans.

What matters is humans. Whether this means greater industrial and energy production to serve the needs and desires of humans and liberate a billion people from poverty, or cleaning up rivers and fixing urban infrastructure to improve air quality. But we cannot sacrifice the needs and desires of humans, to service the Leftists’ entirely religious worship of the environment for its own sake.