AUX BARRICADES!

Group warns of earth's dwindling resources (Jonathan Fowler, Boston Globe, October 22nd, 2004)

Humanity's reliance on fossil fuels, the spread of cities, the destruction of natural habitat for farmland, and exploitation of the oceans are destroying earth's ability to sustain life, the environmental group World Wildlife Fund warned yesterday.

The biggest consumers of nonrenewable natural resources are the United Arab Emirates, the United States, Kuwait, Australia, and Sweden, who leave the biggest "ecological footprint," the group said in a report. Humans currently consume 20 percent more natural resources than the planet can produce, the report said.

"We are spending nature's capital faster than it can regenerate," said WWF chief Claude Martin, releasing the 40-page study.

"We are running up an ecological debt which we won't be able to pay off unless governments restore the balance between our consumption of natural resources and the earth's ability to renew them," he said.

But Fred Smith, president of the Washington-based Competitive Enterprise Institute and an official of the US Environmental Protection Agency during the Nixon and Ford administrations, said he was skeptical. In a telephone interview, Smith said the WWF view is "static" and fails to take into account the benefits many people get from resource use.[...]

The study, the World Wildlife Fund's fifth since 1998, examined the "ecological footprint" of the planet's entire population.

Most of a person's footprint is caused by the space needed to absorb the waste from energy consumption, including carbon dioxide. WWF also measured the total area of cities, roads, and other infrastructure and the space required to produce food and fiber -- for clothing, for example.

"We don't just live on local resources," so the footprint is not confined to the country where consumers live, said Mathis Wackernagel, head of the Global Footprint Network, which includes WWF.

For example, Western demand for Asia's palm oil and South America's soybeans has wrecked natural habitats in those regions, so the destruction is considered part of the footprint of importing nations. The same applies to Arab oil consumed in the United States.

Here is a great example of how worthwhile charitable and activist efforts so often become corrupted by ideology. The WWF started out as a prestigious, somewhat stuffy group with a concrete mission to save wildlife and habitats. Nothing wrong with that---indeed, much right about that. Although never without controversy, it used it’s high-powered connections and influence to lobby for parks and preserves, halt the destruction of wildlife by poaching and wanton development, especially in Africa, and bring scientific rigour to wildlife management. It was a much respected organization of accomplishment.

Then came the eighties and the advent of environmental studies as a formal discipline. The concrete was out, the abstract in. Conservation became ecology. Mountains and deserts became eco-systems. Herds and schools became species and everybody sat around fretting about “spaceship earth” and how everything was related to everything else. Frightening warnings that we were losing species at a shocking rate issued without letting on they were little icky things no one knew about or had any use for. Pretty soon real environmentalists didn’t want to waste time protecting caribou and elephants. With Greenpeace on their fund-raising heels and the Club of Rome capturing the intellectual high ground, they began to preach the statist, "screw the wogs and blame the West" anti-progress creed of the new barbarians.

By 1986, according to its website “WWF had come to realize that its name no longer reflected the scope of its activities. WWF changed its name from World Wildlife Fund to the "World Wide Fund For Nature. The United States and Canada, however, retained the old name." This was presumably to justify spending millions donated by pensioners worried about eagles and rhinos on wanking about global warming, environmental footprints, unpayable ecological debts and how we are all going to die if we don’t turn our furnaces off.

Conservatives learned the hard way that conceding leadership to the left on issues that resonate widely with the general public’s sense of moral duty, like racism and child poverty, can take decades to reverse. It is time to start the slow climb back on conservation.