Environmentalism and the Fringe

Re: “Environmentalism and the Fringe” by David Mountain (July/August 2021). One crucial and pragmatic solution to human-induced environmental degradation is to slow population growth through voluntary family planning. The UN projects world population will reach 9.4–10.1 billion in 2050—achieving the lower end of that range would help us preserve the natural world for future generations. One study found that slower population growth could achieve up to 41 percent of needed emissions reductions by 2050. Another determined that when combined with girls’ education, family planning could prevent 85 gigatons of CO₂ emissions by 2050.

While per capita emissions in more developed countries must decrease, emissions in less developed countries—many of which have high-fertility, rapid population growth, and high unmet need for family planning—must increase to raise living standards. The only sustainable way to increase per capita emissions in less developed countries—where 99.8 percent of population growth between now and 2050 is projected to occur—is to simultaneously enable people to have smaller families.

Expanding access to family planning options facilitates women’s empowerment and strengthens people’s ability to adapt to environmental changes. When people have affordable access to high-quality, reliable contraceptives—and the education to use them effectively—they tend to have fewer, healthier children. This is a boon to both people and the planet.

Marian Starkey, MSc
VP for Communications
Population Connection
Washington, D.C.

Some of the points David Mountain brought up were interesting and held some resonance for me as a fifty-year radical atheist ecologist. But I have several bones to pick as well. As a population activist that entire time, I’d like to think that I have a well-tuned radar for what I and others call “human supremacy” and “human population denial.”

Any talk of saving the planet, climate crisis, sustainability, alternative energy, etc., should begin and end with some dialog about the driving cause of all the problems—way too many apex techno predators on planet Earth, i.e., humans. Too much focus nowadays is on just climate change.

Let’s face it: the climate crisis is only one of many symptoms of now eight billion of us here (our numbers have more than tripled since I was born in the mid-1950s). I argue that runaway population growth is something we all should have addressed all along, and it should have been front and center since the advent of modern environmentalism. Ironically, as the population bomb has continued ticking into the sixth mass extinction (solely caused by humans), there is less and less population dialog. Starting in the mid-1970s and ramping up since then, human overpopulation has become a taboo subject. The general populace—whether left or right, science-based or religious-based—are commonly quite ignorant or at least quiet on the subject. Most science and environmental books and magazines ignore it (your sister magazine Free Inquiry being a refreshing exception).

As environmentalists, it’s our job to educate on the subject. It will require some science—and especially courage and passion.

Lyn Dessaux
Running Springs, California

Excellent article and well written. Whenever I read about environmental problems—global warming, pollution, extinctions, etc.—I want to shout that these are all just the symptoms of an underlying problem that is even worse. I mean, of course, overpopulation! Until that is solved, the others will never be. And yet this is rarely mentioned. It seems people are just trying to cure the symptoms, not the disease.

And there is a very simple cure: If everyone on the globe could agree that, by random lot, people would have only one child per every five couples, within about forty years or so, the world population would be reduced to 10 percent of what it is now. Imagine: one-tenth of CO₂, one-tenth of deforestation, and so on. Civilization would be saved. A goal of two children per couple worldwide would also work but much more slowly.

It is rare that an existential threat has so simple a solution. I am aware that getting everyone to agree would not be easy. But the collapse of civilization would be painful. I wish everyone would get behind that solution and keep pushing it.

Donald C. Dilworth
East Boothbay, Maine

On the whole, I liked David Mountain’s essay “Environmentalism and the Fringe” for its good service in helping to pull environmentalism away from the brink. No good can come of an environmental movement steeped in woozy mysticism. However, there is still much work ahead. Environmentalism still needs rescue from what I can only describe as the threat of ideological dogmatism. All too often its acolytes gush forth pronouncements laying claim to full and uncontestable knowledge of the entirety of the complex works of nature, climate in particular. And that being seasoned with a boast of full insight to the pounding in of the last nail of what redemption would look like. Looming up is the risk of a dangerous hubris, yet another incarnation of the fatal conceit in fact.

J.A. Wroblewski
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

As an ideologically conservative skeptic, I’m disheartened by the ease with which the Marxist left is hijacking the skeptical movement in the same way it has hijacked others. I’m more disheartened by the weakness, cowardice, and fear of disapproval in skeptics themselves when facing woke thugs. I’m still more disheartened by the extreme difficulty leftist skeptics have in seeing their biases, let alone turning the tools of skepticism back on themselves. Thus, I’m encouraged to see two pieces in the July/August issue that confront aspects of leftist dogma: “Environmentalism and the Fringe” by David Mountain and “Ten Years of Fukushima Disinformation” by Amardeo Sarma and Anna Veronika Wendland.

The Alinskyite critical theory left, with its dismissal of logic and fact in favor of personal attack, is five orders of magnitude more of a threat to skepticism and civilization than Christianity or pseudoscience ever were. Which, by the way, makes me ask why we allocate so much effort and passion to a pathetic Christian remnant while we are all but mute about the far more present and vicious threat of militant Islam.

I do not share the authors’ ritual genuflection to the presumptive well-meaningness of leftist activists. I think they are power-lusting bullies.

Norman Carlson
Busti, New York

The way all ideologies operate is to find a few individuals on the fringe and then pronounce this fringe as “typical” of a much larger movement. That is what this article does.

First, the author admits: “Our planet is in serious trouble. If humanity is to survive this century with any semblance of the quality of life enjoyed today, all of us need to act quickly to limit and reverse anthropogenic climate change and environmental destruction.”

But then that dire message is buried, because the author’s sole focus is to dwell on examples he finds of overreactions from a very small wing on the extreme left throughout history.

My skepticism is: The problem of the planet’s ecosystem under attack did not result from the likes of far-left hippies but instead from the extreme right while a complacent (but less ideological) majority sat back and allowed it.

The misdirection of this article to look for scapegoats from the far-left hippies is very troubling for those looking for an honest evaluation of how we got here and any science solutions.

Here is your test: If every extreme environmentalist got “on board” with moderate solutions to global warming, do you think the past and/or future damage to the planet’s ecosystem would be materially less?

There wasn’t even any exploration of this topic by this author, but the answer is of course not. The left fringe is a very small group. On the other side, there was a lot of big money to be made damaging the environment. It was the far-right fringe that employed even scientists to disseminate misinformation that global warming was not real or else had not been proven. This in turn provided a curtain of cognitive dissonance so the majority could comfortably ignore warnings by scientists.

Patricia L. Pinney
Fairfax, Virginia

David Mountain replies:

I’m grateful to Marian Starkey, Lyn Dessaux, and Donald Dilworth for bringing the subject of population growth to the conversation. I agree that it’s a fundamental cause of so much of our environmental crisis, and I too am frustrated by the near-total silence on the subject by fellow environmentalists. I didn’t discuss it in the article only because the intention there wasn’t to identify the main causes of environmental destruction but to highlight the role that fringe thinking has played in environmentalism’s development.

On that point, the issue of politics should be addressed. Two letters—from Norman Carlson and Patricia Pinney—appear to make the assumption that fringe environmentalism and “far-left” ideology are synonymous. This is untrue, and the article mentioned (although perhaps too briefly) how various right-wing thinkers and groups in pre-war Europe laid the foundations for much of today’s environmental pseudoscience. Moreover, much of this contemporary pseudoscience, such as hostility toward GMOs, can be found among people of all political persuasions.

None of us are immune to unscientific thinking, regardless of our political preferences. Conversely, we should remember that people from across the political spectrum have worked to try and save our planet over the past century. If there is one issue that should rise above our political differences, the ongoing environmental crisis is surely it.

Fukushima and Nuclear Power

“Ten Years of Fukushima Disinformation” (July/August 2021) defends the choice of building nuclear power plants by describing the destruction caused as damage from a tsunami, not from a nuclear accident.

To combat global warming climate chaos, it is time to reduce using fossil fuels. I don’t care how the Fukushima deaths are classified (by tsunami or nuclear failure). I do care about how to pick the most helpful way to combat global warming.

Surely a list of “for” and “against” can help compare the effects of options. Nuclear power plants don’t seem to rank well as opposed to using sun, wind, or water power. These power sources already exist and are free.

Nuclear power plants (reasons against):

• most expensive to build and operate
• take longest time to construct
• create the most dangerous threats if damaged
• need huge amounts of water (a scarce resource) to cool
• discharge contaminated water back into the environment
• release constant small but dangerous contamination into the air
• vulnerable to harm from terrorists, earthquakes, and tsunamis
• cause long, severe environmental damage if they “fail”

These disadvantages (for nuclear power plants) are much greater than those of using wind, sun, or water power. Those power sources are far less destructive to the earth.

Martha E. Martin
Kahului, Hawaii

I’ve been following emailed information from the Nuclear Information and Resource Service (NIRS) since my daughters were working in Japan when the Fukushima earthquake struck. It provided the most and best information for me to understand what had happened and what the risks might have been for them. (Not too great, as it happened, because they were 250 miles south of Tokyo. Still, an unusual wind might have blown radioactive dust their way. We advised them that it would be okay to stay in Japan.)

Two risks of nuclear power keep me from supporting it:

1. The catastrophic consequences of a major malfunction, such as Fukushima almost was;
2. The problem of protecting generations and generations from the radioactive waste of nuclear power generation.

I have appreciated efforts SI has taken to report on this issue. We should all compare the costs and benefits fully and factually. And we should compare costs of one solution against the costs of the alternatives vs. some imaginary green-only baseline. I also think that articles should include how to use energy most efficiently and how we might do well enough with less energy. Not just “What’s the best way to jump?” but “Maybe we shouldn’t jump.”

John Orr
Fullerton, California

Amardeo Sarma and Anna Veronika Wendland reply:

Our article did not address the best energy mix for decarbonization. However, the IPCC Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C does. It is about using all low-carbon energy sources. Nuclear energy is a component of all four scenarios described to achieve this goal in the report besides wind, solar, hydro, CCS, and BECCS.

We addressed some of the “reasons against” in our piece. Much could be said about the other vastly exaggerated side effects. Viewed objectively as in https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy, nuclear energy is comparable with solar and wind concerning greenhouse emissions and safety and is better than hydropower.

We do not think that we have the luxury of omitting any low-emission energy source. The choice will depend on the country and regional conditions. Some countries with suitable conditions such as Iceland have chosen a mix of hydropower and geothermal energy for almost all their electricity production.

The worst possible choice is closing nuclear power plants that may still be operated for decades, such as those in Germany or a few U.S. states. Germany, often seen as an energy-transition example to follow, is likely to increase greenhouse emissions by 47m tons of carbon dioxide this year. Germany emits several times as much carbon dioxide as nuclear France for its electricity production. Also, Germans pay almost twice as much. Reality refutes the narrative of the clean and cheap transition to solar and wind.

Solar and wind are also not simpler from the system point of view. They require a highly complex backup storage system to compensate for their fluctuation, much of which is still a fossil fuel—namely gas. Setting up a list of for and against is an excellent idea, and we suspect many will be surprised by the result.

Fiction’s Top Science Characters

I truly enjoyed the article “Top Ten Pro-Science Fictional Characters” (July/August 2021). It brought back many enjoyable memories, particularly one from a superhero of mine not mentioned. I first learned about science in my childhood by watching the TV show Craig Kennedy: Criminologist in the early 1950s. The show starred an impassioned Donald Woods as a chemistry professor from a prominent university. Working with the local police, he found himself using chemistry and forensic science to help them solve crimes.

Fred Reiss
Winchester, California

I was disappointed that Brian Dunning did not include Christopher, the protagonist and narrator of the best-selling prize-winning novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (Doubleday, 2003), in his list of “top-ten pro-science fictional characters.” Sherlock Holmes (who does appear on Dunning’s list) is the teenager’s hero.

During the novel, Christopher, who has Asperger’s syndrome, uses logic and the scientific method to unravel the twin mysteries of who killed the titular dog and what happened to his allegedly dead mother. Unlike some of the works involving the other characters on Dunning’s list, this is not just a vehicle for an admirable pro-science character but a brilliant work of literature in its own right. I commend it to any SI readers who have not yet encountered it.

Ian Robinson
President Emeritus
Rationalist Society of Australia

My wife and I would like to add our voices to the cacophony we are sure you’ve heard nominating Mark Watney (from Andy Weir’s The Martian played by Matt Damon in the movie) to the list of top ten pro-science fictional characters. His omission by Brian Dunning is remarkable! While Roy Hinkley (The Professor) stays stuck on a remote island with coconuts, water, fruit, and six other castaways, Mark Watney has to survive on Mars for months after his crew left him for dead.

Not only does Mark Watney have to use science to survive, but he also has use his science and engineering skills to establish communications with NASA, drive to a supply spaceship hundreds of kilometers from his location, and then use that spaceship to rejoin his crew, all while subsisting on home grown potatoes!

Bill Monroe
Reno, Nevada

Lynn Margulis

Stanley Rice’s article “Lynn Margulis and the Great Convergence that Didn’t Happen” (July/August 2021) deserves commendation. Its blend of personal reminiscence with the story and science of Lynn Margulis was very compelling and very well written. Just a treat of an article! Reading it, I felt like I was in the classroom of a master lecturer. Although I’d heard of symbiogenesis before, I had never heard of Margulis, and Rice’s words made her research and personality come alive.

David Mihalyfy
Chicago, Illinois

A Bastion of Ideas

I wanted to take the time to thank Professor Lorence Collins for writing the article “A Christian Geologist Explains Why the Earth Cannot Be 6,000 Years Old” (July/August 2021). One of the reasons I am quite thankful for this magazine is that it remains a bastion where people of different beliefs can get together in the continued search for truth to freely discuss ideas, and I applaud the professor for writing to an audience that some would perceive as potentially hostile to his beliefs. Thank you for the article, Professor; it’s a breath of fresh air to hear skeptical ideas and science-based thinking from a different background.

Jonathan Michael
Raleigh, North Carolina

Infant Simulator Dolls

As a former nonprofessional board member of several agencies dealing with early childhood issues, I recognize a question about the infant simulator doll studies that was apparently not asked—or at least not reported in Stephen Hupp’s article “Teens These Days: Sex, Drugs, and Malarkey” (SI July/August 2021).

Accepting the evidence that the programs using infant simulator dolls are ineffective in discouraging teen pregnancy, I wonder if students taught to “care” for a doll subsequently become better parents when they have their own children. With child neglect and abuse an ongoing tragedy in our country, it would be useful to know if practice can make performance if not perfect, at least better.

Fred Eaton
Chandler, Arizona

Stephen Hupp replies:

It is reasonable to wonder if infant simulator dolls might have benefits beyond their original purpose. A large body of research shows that parenting behaviors can be changed through behavioral skills training that uses: 1) instructions about parenting skills, 2) modeling of skills, 3) live practice of skills, and 4) immediate expert feedback during the practice (this is also used as part of behavioral parent training). Infant simulator dolls are typically not used in this way. They especially don’t involve immediate expert feedback. Even if they did, the instructional period would be occurring long before the desired parenting behaviors would be needed, making it unlikely that working with these dolls would promote behavior change down the road. Lastly, it’s also reasonable to wonder if the use of infant simulator dolls could help teens develop neglectful parenting habits, as the consequences of neglecting the doll are fairly minimal.

This Pains Me

As a longtime science fiction fan, I always used to roll my eyes whenever Scottie would resolve an engineering problem on the Enterprise by recalibrating the warp drives. It told me the screenwriters didn’t have a clue about the meaning of calibrate.

I was reminded of that by Harriet Hall’s perplexity at the medical 0–10 pain scale: “I never know what to say,” she writes (July/August 2021, p. 21). Neither does the faculty at the University of Wisconsin Medical School, where I serve as a standardized patient, simulating a wide variety of conditions so medical students can practice their interviewing skills on me. Half of them (parroting, I’m sure, what their professors have told them) use what I call the Alpha approach (I won’t dignify it by calling it a standard), in which a 10 is “the worst pain you’ve ever experienced.” In my case, having led a charmed life, that’s no worse than a dislocated pinky finger, a nuisance but hardly a screamer. The other half use the Omega approach, where a 10 is “the worst pain you can imagine.” Did I mention that I was a science fiction fan—an imaginative one? Compared to that Omega, nobody in all human history has gotten as high as a 1.

Of course, when playing my roles, I faithfully repeat the number I’ve been told to use, but I can’t help thinking that, long term, this lack of consistency is a bad idea. Suppose a nurse takes a patient history using the Alpha approach and tells the doctor that the patient, with acute constipation, reports a pain of 8 or 9. The doctor, trained under Omega, tells a crash cart to stand by while she prepares a massive dose of morphine. And the reverse, resulting in under-treating somebody in excruciating agony, would be even worse. As George Bernard Shaw observed, “The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.”

I wish the medical community would get its act together and standardize the calibration of its pain scale.

Richard S. Russell
Madison, Wisconsin

Venezuelan Antiscience

If Gabriel Andrade in his July/August 2021 article “The ‘Miraculous Drops of José Gregorio Hernández’ in Venezuela” was correct about his antiscience claims against the government of Venezuela, we would see a different sequence of events. The Venezuelan president’s Carvativir announcement was three months before his rejection of accepting the AstraZeneca vaccine. (Besides the blood clotting concerns, there were issues at a vaccine manufacturing plant, so fears were not completely irrational.) Andrade claims Venezuela rejects Western medical research methods, but I read about phase trials and in vitro, mice, and clinical trials for Carvativir in 2020 and that Venezuela participated in vaccine trials for the Russian vaccine Sputnik V. Two days after media pushback on Maduro’s exaggerated claims, he backtracked and said Carvativir was only a “complementary antiviral.” When on April 6 the Biden administration said we would not donate vaccines to them, the Venezuelan government protested. President Maduro announced May 31 that the WHO will send the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. Although the U.S. Treasury Financial Sanctions allow sale of medicine, they have had a severe impact on Venezuela’s commerce. For example, in June their payments to COVAX for the Johnson & Johnson and Novavax vaccines were temporarily blocked. It seems that Venezuela’s use of vaccines from Russia, China, and Cuba is more because of ease of access and finances than a lack of critical thinking or nationalistic prejudices.

Loren Hintz
Chapel Hill, North Carolina

 

Gabriel Andrade, MD, replies:

In his letter, Mr. Hintz claims that “besides the blood clotting concerns [from the AstraZeneca vaccine] there were issues at a vaccine manufacturing plant, so fears were not completely irrational.” In my original article, I acknowledged that these concerns were legitimate but that further evidence proved that it was still unreasonable to outright and indefinitely reject the AstraZeneca vaccine, as the Venezuelan government did. In fact, whereas most European nations quickly lifted the moratorium on AstraZeneca, Venezuela has not done so.

Hintz believes the Venezuelan government’s decision to reject the AstraZeneca vaccine has nothing to do with nationalism. But President Maduro’s own language in addressing this issue suggests otherwise. When announcing his decision to reject the AstraZeneca vaccine, Maduro continuously appealed to “vaccine sovereignty.” I should clarify that “vaccine sovereignty” is a worthy goal if that implies locally producing effective vaccines; unfortunately, in Maduro’s case, “vaccine sovereignty” rather implies rejecting effective vaccines simply because they come from nations that he perceives as imperialist.

Hintz also claims that “when on April 6 the Biden administration said [the United States] would not donate vaccines to them, the Venezuelan government protested,” implying that the Venezuelan government is open to receiving aid and is therefore not motivated by nationalism. But Hintz fails to understand the political game that the Venezuelan government plays. Maduro’s protests come only when he knows that the aid will not be delivered, so as to gain leverage in the international scene as an anti-imperialist crusader. When aid is actually offered, Maduro typically appeals to nationalism and rejects it. This is exactly what happened in 2019, when a coalition formed by Colombia, Brazil, the United States, and the Netherlands tried to deliver a convoy of humanitarian aid, and Maduro’s government stopped it at the border. Maduro’s own political mentor—the late Hugo Chávez—did a similar deed in 1999: in the midst of Venezuela’s worst natural catastrophe in its history (the Vargas mudslide), Chávez rejected much-needed American humanitarian aid, also appealing to nationalist rhetoric.

Hintz refuses to believe that the Venezuelan government rejects Western medical research methods, because he “read about phase trials and in vitro, mice, and clinical trials for Carvativir.” Contrary to what Hintz believes, if Venezuela were fully compliant with the rigors of scientific methodology, Carvativir would have never been promoted, not even as a “complementary antiviral,” because evidence for its efficacy is nonexistent. Homeopathy and acupuncture enthusiasts can also appeal to mice and in vitro equipment, but that in no way guarantees the proper commitment to scientific methods.

Hintz should be made aware that Venezuela’s socialist government has a long history of rejection of conventional scientific protocols. Hugo Chávez publicly embraced Argentinian mathematician Oscar Varsavsky’s ideas that conventional science is driven by bourgeois interests and for that reason, revolutionary left-wing governments must pursue a science driven by proletarian ideology—which effectively amounts to rejecting the principles of Western medical research. Additionally, as part of this revolutionary crusade, Maduro’s government dismantled the Venezuelan Institute of Scientific Research, an internationally hailed institution.

Finally, Hintz argues that “Venezuela’s use of vaccines from Russia, China, and Cuba is more because of ease of access and finances than a lack of critical thinking or nationalistic prejudices.” This may very well be true. But again, it is important not to lose sight of the larger political context. Russia, China, and Cuba have been continuously trumpeted over the years by the Maduro regime as key allies in his anti-imperialist stance. In any case, the acceptance of Russian, Chinese, or Cuban vaccines is not objectionable per se. The truly objectionable deed is to unreasonably reject the AstraZeneca vaccine and promote alternative medicine and magical thinking. While we may never know the real motivations for these decisions by the Venezuelan government, the larger context suggests that nationalism plays a big part.

A Matter of Fact

Surely ground is conceded to “alternative fact” merchants if those troubled by them unthinkingly allow the solecism “if a fact is true or not”? (“Government without Facts,” a review of A Lot of People Are Saying, July/August 2021).

If something is not true, it is not a fact; an untrue fact is an oxymoron. While the prefix oxy may apply to those who utter one in jest, if it is used with no sense of irony then its suffix moron may color one’s perception of the writer. I am astonished that the reviewer let this pass without comment.

If we wish to enlighten those who side with that proto-Trump character Humpty Dumpty in their endeavor to be the master and make words mean what they choose them to mean, then we ought not carelessly make words mean so many different things. Perhaps the erosion in the concept of facts feared by the authors is aided when we thoughtlessly conflate the meanings of fact and untruth?

Chris Oldman
Cheltenham, England