Ron Bailey over at Reason has another nice piece on DDT. His previous article on the ESA can be found here. The money quote from the 12/31 piece is this:

Although environmentalists try to suggest that saving endangered species protects humanity, too, the fact is that species preservation is really important only on aesthetic and moral grounds. See, for example, a review article, “Prospects for Biodiversity” in the November 14 issue of Science. The article notes, “In truth, ecologists and conservationists have struggled to demonstrate the increased material benefits to humans of ‘intact’ wild systems over largely anthropogenic ones [like farms]… Where increased benefits of natural systems have been shown, they are usually marginal and local.”

In this case marginal means “not very important, small” not “on the margin.” Don’t get my wrong, I like a nice woodland park and other such things to be around, but only for those said same aesthetic reasons. All the birds in Laos (for example) can take a flying leap as far as I’m concerned, because there are people dying of malaria. If the environmental lobby, especially its more radical elements (Greenpeace, I’m looking at you) would learn to value human life more than some aesthetically pleasing ecosystem, there might be some room for real progress on the environmental front. But, as long as the environmental lobby insists on its current path and refuses to concede any points for economic or realistic concerns, it will continue to meet with resistance and failure. Rightly so, I might add.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 7th, 2004 at 15:07 by Timothy and is filed under Miscellaneous. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.