A LIBERAL SOLUTION TO THE

"OVERPOPULATION PROBLEM"

The other day, I was discussing the environment with a liberal friend when we got to a lull in the conversation and he said all the actions we were talking about, restoring rangelands, saving endangered species, revitalizing watersheds, were better than doing nothing, of course, but they were all futile because in the end there are just too many people on the Earth. For that reason, he continued, the only thing that could really make a dent in the Earth’s environmental problems would be for about half of the people to disappear. Actually (after acknowledging that what he was going to say wasn’t “politically correct”) he said that the entire planet would be better off if about half of the people now living would be killed in a nuclear war or a plague or something equally as horrible.

As happens frequently in situations that make me uncomfortable, I couldn’t think of a clever and appropriately devastating rejoinder to make on the spot, so I just grunted and acted disinterested and hoped he would change the subject.

Later on it occurred to me that I should have called him on what was a totally cruel, tasteless, stupid, and completely empty comment—I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t want to be responsible (by wishing it) for the death of a couple of billion people, but when it comes to liberals, I’m not so sure anymore.

A good retort to his comment, it occurred to me, would have been to say, “Knowing how you feel about peace and love and all that I’m sure you would never condemn anyone else to be nuked or plagued or to committ suicide. Nor would you ask them to do it in your stead. So, I assume what you just said means you, and the other people who think like you, are volunteering to remove yourselves from the planet in order to save it from overpopulation and all the problems that it causes. I want to commend you for that because it is so courageous and self sacrificing, I’m totally in awe. When do you plan to do this? And is there anything you’d like me to do for you after you’re gone?”

While I was kicking myself for not having said the above, another thought came to mind that was much more of an awakening and absolutely chilling. It occurred to me that liberals really are removing themselves from the earth, and that they really are committing mass suicide, and they are doing it at a really startling rate. Shades of Hale-Bopp and Jonestown!

At that point I remembered a couple of environmentalists I knew, and a couple more I’m aware of, who killed themselves because they thought they were “part of the problem.” I thought of a woman in England whom I had heard had herself sterilized so she couldn’t increase her carbon footprint by producing other humans. I thought of myself and my wife who had essentially done the same thing—We didn’t have kids at least partially because we swallowed the “Earth is overpopulated” propaganda, too.

I also thought of an article by Mark Steyn called “It’s the Demography, Stupid”). In this article Steyn pointed out that in the U. S. there are only 2.07 births per woman. In Ireland 1.87. In New Zealand 1.79, Australia 1.76, and in Canada 1.5, which is well below replacement rate. Germany and Austria come in at 1.3. Russia and Italy at 1.2; and Spain is at 1.1, which is only about half replacement rate. This means, Steyn points out, that “Spain’s population is halving every generation. By 2050, Italy’s population will have fallen by 22%, Bulgaria’s by 36%, Estonia’s by 52%.”

In America, demographic trends suggest that the majority of this attrition by far is happening among liberals. Steyn notes that, “In the 2004 election, John Kerry won the 16 states with the lowest birthrates; George W. Bush took 25 of the 26 states with the highest.” By 2050, the 100 million more Americans who will be alive will be mostly red-staters.

The next time you talk to a liberal tell him or her goodbye, thank them for their sacrifice, and ask them if you can have their Prius or, better yet, their wine collection.

Ed Abbey, guru of modern radical environmentalism, promised his followers that they would live to “piss on the graves of their enemies.” It appears that he may have had it backwards.

But before you start thinking that liberalism and liberal environmentalism contain the seeds of their own suicide, you should consider the fact that this movement is a very, very good recruiter.

Conservative environmentalism needs a good recruiter and that’s what we’re trying to do with this blog.

PUT UP OR SHUT UP

This is a reprint of an article I wrote about 15 years ago and published in a number of media. No one has yet taken me up on the challenge

TIME FOR A SHOWDOWN ON THE WESTERN RANGE

Some arguments can’t be resolved with words. They have to be settled mano a mano out in the real world where success and failure are a matter of results not rhetoric. You can argue forever about whose horse is the fastest, but the only way to find out is to race them. One place where we need a good horse race these days is in the interminable argument over whether or not to remove grazing from the public rangelands of the American West.

Most of you, I’m sure, are wondering what’s to argue about. Everyone knows what’s wrong with those lands—that they’re overgrazed, overtrampled, and polluted with cow splats. And everybody knows who’s to blame—all those filthy-rich welfare ranchers and their ravenous cows and sheep. Some scientists claim that livestock have wreaked more havoc on the West than all bulldozers and chainsaws combined. Some even say that the damage they have created is so severe it may never heal.

So, what’s the hold up? The way to save the range is getimoff and lockitup, right! Remove the cows and the ranchers and everything will return to nature. Well, if that’s what you believe, I’ve got a challenge for you.

What would you do if I offered to bet you that, if we took two identical pieces of Western rangeland side by side, and you used the getimoff and lockemup approach on your side, and I put cows on my side, lots of em, and left them there until they had eaten just about everything, and then I took them off until the plants grew back and did that over and over again, that my side would be healthier than yours?

Would you break your fingers trying to get me to “shake on it” before I changed my mind? Would you put your life savings on the line? Would you tell all your friends that you had found a sucker so dumb that you were already spending your winnings?

Before you start counting, there’s a couple of things I ought to tell you.

First, I ought to tell you that there has been a change in the way some ranchers manage their animals. Some ranchers have begun emulating the way natural grazers graze, concentrating their animals by means of temporary fences, herders, or tasty enticements and moving them about the land in the manner of a herd of bison pursued by wolves or Native American hunters and drawn by the lure of fresh pasture and the next waterhole. Grazing in this way, natural ungulates don’t overgraze, but they do mow, de-thatch, reseed, and fertilize, performing the same functions you and I perform to keep our own grasslands, our yards, green and healthy.

These methods have been used to restore grasslands to health on lands damaged by mining, off road vehicle damage, roadbuilding, and catastrophic wildfire. They have been used to cover piles of toxic mine waste with green and growing plants. Last but not least, livestock have even been used to revegetate land damaged by overgrazing.

Anti-grazing activists dismiss these successes as self-serving rancher hogwash, but when I first made my challenge four years ago in a magazine that was distributed nationally (Range), no one took me up on it. Because that magazine was read mostly by ranchers, I made the offer again, more recently, in the newsletter of the Arizona chapter of the Sierra Club, one of the groups that has been most critical of grazing. Again, no takers. This past December (2000) I made the challenge again at The First National Conference on Grazing Lands. Still no takers.

The reason I’m doing this is not to whitewash the damage grazing has done and is still doing. It is to make a point. What better way to let you, the American Public, know that ranching (livestock grazing) can be the most effective tool we have to restore health to certain ecosystems of the West than by having the opposition back down from a challenge like this. Or to have them take the challenge and lose out in the open for all to see.

I say it’s the most effective tool because, in most of the successes I listed above, the getimoff and lockitup alternative had been tried and failed. In other words the showdown has already happened, and they lost.