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  Lorna Salzman on Jul 19, 2010

  Back in the 1970s we invited an Italian composer, Luciano Berio, to visit us on eastern LI via his own power boat. So one day he and his very young daughter set out from Weehawken NJ, rounded the tip of northern Manhattan into Hell’s Gate and then into LI Sound and then headed northeast around Montauk Point and into the Atlantic Ocean, going south and eventually steering into our small creek off a south shore bay.

  In order to cook us his special Genoese seafood dinner, Luciano had put out a very large dragger net behind his boat. After he arrived, he unhooked the net, hung it up between two trees, and proceeded to pick that evening’s dinner out of the net. There were indeed a few decently sized edible fish,but most of the net was hung with immeasurable numbers and unidentifiable species of sea creatures, most of which had to be discarded. Later Luciano threw everything that appeared edible into a big pot and boiled the bejeesus out of the whole thing, creating a barely edible soup of some fish, lots of scales and mostly bones.

  The article below reminds me of nothing so much as this scaley bony fish soup; into this pot the author, clearly a leftist of significant proportions, has thrown just about every name he came across in Google that had any connection at any time to anyone who was ever involved in any environmental cause or group. He has indeed netted a few edibles alongside some innocent, marginal or useless hangers-on. For Barker, the Six Degrees of Separation has ballooned into Six to the Sixth Power Degrees, wherein apparently anyone whoever held a cocktail party conversation or shared a beer with someone who herself shared a cup of coffee with someone else who once was at a meeting with someone else who had some aura of villainy about him is automatically guilty by association.

  I knew many of these individuals, some of them personally, some professionally, and I worked for the most illustrious one who, though beyond any taint, manages to get some mud thrown on him by Barker, namely Dave Brower, founder of Friends of the Earth, for whom I worked for over a decade starting in the early 1970s. Here is what Barker says about Brower, this country’s most principled, committed, informed and inspiring environmental leader:

  “While for many progressive activists the environmental career of the late David Brower (1912-2000) is beyond criticism, it is worrisome that like his deep ecologist counterparts he apparently became fixated on Malthusian analyses that blame procreation, not capitalism, for environmental devastation. I say this because Brower was a former member of the advisory board for a controversial group called Californians for Population Stabilization.”

  In classic marxist fashion, the fashion that has allowed the left to not only ignore and denigrate environmentalism but smear the whole movement, Barker attempts to diminish Brower for his being one of the few people at that time who had the insight and foresight to understand the unfolding disaster of overpopulation. First, let’s be clear about Malthus. What he theorized was that unchecked population would eventually outrun resources, all other things being equal.

  DUH. Every scientist since then, Darwin included, knows, as a result of evolution and natural selection, that unchecked breeding will outstrip food supply. The only reason that the world has been able to reach the unsustainable 6 billion in numbers today has been advances in nutrition, health and, to a lesser extent, birth control. There is a clear and indisputable connection between the fact that western societies and cultures have achieved the highest standard of living in the world and the fact that they have successfully lowered their birth rate in the past century.

  In the rest of the world, due to religion (Islam, the Roman Catholic church, orthodox Judaism), patriarchy, machismo, the lack of women’s reproductive and economic rights, tribal superstition, ignorance, and lack of access to and interest in birth control, the birth rates continue to soar. In Africa and under Islam polygamy means anywhere from ten to thirty children. Even under monogamy, one woman seldom bears less than six children, and health and nutrition programs from abroad have helped most of them survive, despite the persistence of diseases like malaria.

  A recent article on the poverty in Gaza, meant to evoke sympathy from the reader, showed a woman and her drugged husband living in a ruined house, and said that she had eight children. EIGHT CHILDREN! How on earth does anyone have the brains, much less the right, to have eight children? And yet in western Europe, loose immigration standards and an overgenerous welfare system are now allowing entry to large families, who will continue to breed like flies in their new country. And the same goes for the USA, where Latino Catholics routinely have three or more children.

  So the same screechy marxist theme that dismisses overpopulation – a condition that will punish the poor, not the rich, in any case – fingers capitalism alone as the greatest destroyer of the environment. Yes, indeed, capitalism and its push for overproduction and overconsumption and endless economic growth leading to greater profits, is at the root of the ecological crisis and the global warming crisis.

  But that crisis is made far greater because tens of millions of more people have been born across the world, all of whom will eventually suffer the most when sea level inundates their cropland, destroys their fresh water supplies, brings insect-borne disease to new areas, and leashes massive wildfires, floods, and droughts of an unmitigated intensity. Where will these millions go when they become refugees? Actually, it is the marxists who will cause their deaths by starvation and disease, simply by pretending that overpopulation isn’t important.

  But let’s back up a little. Let’s go back to the 1970s, when many of the people Barker fingers as today’s evil doers were first getting involved. One would look in vain for even ONE LEFTIST OR MARXIST or leftist journal or organization that acknowledged the validity or importance of the environment. NOT ONE. The whole decade of the seventies, if you listened to the left, was one in which the left itself promoted THE EXACT SAME POLICIES AS CAPITALISTS!!! That is, economic growth.

  Yes, indeed. Technology and growth were the joint mantra of the left. The only difference between capitalists and marxists was with regard to ownership of the means of production and central planning. Many hours of my time as a professional environmental activist, lecturer and writer were spent arguing with marxists and the left about the issues of growth, pollution, overexploitation of resources, and on their ecological and social implications. But to no avail. The left unfailingly attacked environmentalism as an issue of concern only to the white middle class that was protecting its back yard. THE LEFT DIDN’T GIVE A DAMN, and for the most part it still doesn’t. Nor is it interested in learning.

  So here you have a leftist who has gotten religion, or so it appears.
  Capitalism is now, finally, forty years later, been recognized as the main culprit. But the left still doesn’t get it. Capitalism relies on
  ECONOMIC GROWTH. How come the left, and this author, have nothing to say about this subject? (And I am not even addressing loss of biodiversity, another victim of overpopulation and overdevelopment, as is the collapse of ocean fisheries).

  How come this author can spend so much time on naming the small fry in the big net? This is a new kind of name-dropping, where you throw out enough names and hope that by creating an association of these people (deserved or not), you have created an important social critique. So Dave Brower, the most important leader this country ever had, becomes suspect because he was on an advisory council to a group concerned (quite justifiably) about overpopulation. This is nothing more than a marxist gossip column.

  I can’t believe that I am sitting here, forty years later, having to rebut the tired, bearded irrelevant left which has the good fortune of unlimited access to the internet to spread its frivolities and nonsense.”Render capitalists extinct”, says Barker. Brave words, brave new world, but he has no alternative, nor has the left ever had one that didn’t resemble capitalism closely. The Loony Left, like death and taxes, is always with us. But global warming moves on. And Nature Bats Last.

  Lorna Salzman