While the central progressive or core values of the left might lie in human welfare, progress and freedom it cannot be denied that a similar care for the environment serves to support those values.

Arguing whether we are superior to, or at one with, nature is superfluous when we are over exploiting our resources - a situation that will eventually lead to the opposite of those core values - a decrease in human welfare, freedoms and progress. We are not better or worse than nature - we are part of it even if we evolved with a complex and intricate brain enabling us to use nature's resources to sustain societies, progress technologically and scientifically.

Ultimately being Green is to be mindful that we don't operate in a vacuum and that the natural cause and effect of our actions on the environment will affect us all regardless of whether you are left, right, psuedo-left (whatever that is) or calathumpian.

Pelican
I don’t disagree with you that we need to care for the environment, nor would the driest right-winger or reddest Marxist say that the environment doesn’t matter. The issue is one of relative priorities, and trust in human ingenuity.

Yes, we must look after the natural environment, because we cannot survive without it. We must be responsible stewards of natural resources, because our long-term welfare depends on it. We should care for nature, because it is valuable to us in many other ways besides these narrow utilitarian considerations. But to see nature as intrinsically good, capable of providing moral as well as pragmatic constraints on human activity that we should not try to overcome, opens the door to anti-humanist ideology.

You say that we are part of nature, and that is obviously true. It follows that what we do is natural - a city is no less natural than a wasps’ nest, a fish farm no less than a beaver’s dam. The romantics’ dichotomy between artifice and nature is false, there is no moral priority of the world unaltered by humans over the world we make – quite the reverse, if the latter provides a more congenial environment for humanity. I am no Marxist, in this I agree with Marx –the industrial revolution “rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life.”

And at notionally the opposite end of the political spectrum, I also agree with von Mises:

“The immense majority strives after a greater and better supply of food, clothes, homes, and other material amenities. In calling a rise in the masses' standard of living progress and improvement, economists do not espouse a mean materialism. They simply establish the fact that people are motivated by the urge to improve the material conditions of their existence. They judge policies from the point of view of the aims men want to attain. He who disdains the fall in infant mortality and the gradual disappearance of famines and plagues may cast the first stone upon the materialism of the economists.

Three cheers! At last a breath of fresh air amid the greens' ideological pollution and the Malthusian genocide it promises.

David Jackmanson is correct to point out that BA Santamaria was fairly open about the implicit fascist sympathies of his folksy "anti-modernity" rants. It's useful too to remember that the Nazis had much the same green romanticism with their "blood and soil" fantasies. But notice how the debates nearly always end up with some Malthusian squawking on about a presumed need for depopulation!

mil-observer,

With a few statistics from the CIA World Factbook and a scientific calculator, it is possible to show in about 3 minutes that with our present 1.6% population growth rate we will reach one person on every square meter in Australia in 800 years. It will take 400 years in the Solomon Islands, 10,000 years of even 1% growth would give (if it were physically possible) a solid ball of people with a radius bigger than the solar system. The same sorts of figures apply when you consider growth in consumption of energy or anything material. Don't take my word for it. Get a numerate friend to walk you through the calculations if you don't understand exponential functions. If you believe in unending growth, you have a problem with the laws of mathematics, not Malthus.

Personally, I don't want to worship nature or have depopulation for its own sake, just respect for a natural world that isn't perfectly understood and has limits that are clearly being exceeded. If we had the technology to make the interior of Australia green and fertile, I would have no problems with a bigger population, but it is incredibly stupid to have a quasi-religious faith that some technological solution will turn up for any problem.

Here's just one example of what can go wrong, despite human ingenuity. If your soil and climate are really suitable for potatoes, you can feed up to 4 times as many people to the hectare as with grain. In Ireland,the population grew from about 1.2 million people in 1600 to 8.5 million in 1848, all entirely dependent on two varieties of potato. Growth was especially fast because land was divided among all the sons on the farmer's death. However, both of these potato varieties were vulnerable to the late blight, which arrived in Europe from Mexico that year. A million people starved directly, and huge numbers were forced to emigrate. Yes, the British colonial masters made it worse, but hundreds of thousands of people starved in the rest of Europe as well.

Yeah, it's a pretty fast-growing religion this anti-population stuff. Seems to be the same source of mutterings over an abacus that brought us this totally dysfunctional monetarist system and the dark age we're entering due to such fanatical faith in said simpletons' system.

Divergence, your arithmetic is very simple - doubtless seductively so to many. But the actual fluctuations are what really matter in studying population growth.

Yet most important in that sense is the fact that privation creates "population volatility" (a more useful, less misanthropic and less presumptuous term than "overpopulation"). With volatility, we see high reproduction in poor and other very stressed areas, because people fear for the chances of survival among their offspring. The opposite trend is clear from the developed world where we see the other extreme of population degeneracy, forcing younger generations and migrants to feed and obey a ruling generation of baby-boomer dead wood.

Your example of the Irish Famine is similarly misguided and further misleading. It was the colonialism of Ireland from 1600 that actually spawned higher, less stable populations for such similar reasons of survival - brutal warfare, transportations for the same, migration intakes and local food shortages - but with the added stimulus of intensive commercial operations. Your reference to Irish traditions of property inheritance is presumptuous, if not condescending to Irish culture; you recognize no variations or flexibility in what was hardly a practice done by some different species.

Eugenicists and other simple-minded and arrogant psychos (often racist, or at least imperialist) may dream of the ages when only thousands of people showed them up for their actual inferiority. Technology has enabled us to reproduce and survive in such health and strength that now it is billions who reveal such feudal nasties for the dull misanthropes they are.

Divergence

Another of my favourite quotes is Stein’s law, which says: “if something cannot go on for ever, it will stop.”

You’re right about the mathematical inevitability of population growth at current rates eventually reaching clearly unsustainable levels. But who expects population growth of 1.6%pa for 800 years? Australia’s fertility rate is now below replacement rate, and global fertility is falling steadily. Most demographic models suggest the phase of relatively rapid growth will end around the middle of this century, then population will probably level off, and perhaps decline a little. We don’t need draconian neo-Malthusian fertility control or similar policies.

Similarly, we can’t grow consumption of individual natural resources exponentially for ever, so we won’t. Instead, we’ll do what we’ve always done – find newer, more efficient and therefore less resource-intensive ways of doing things (e.g. substituting silicon fibre for copper wire, and satellite telecommunications for landlines), and find more valuable ways of using the resource we have. Most economic growth is not about doing more and more of the same stuff, it’s about finding new and more productive ways of using the stuff we have.

That’s why I believe continuing economic growth is sustainable, in every sense of the word.