Eco-Colonialism
Why the Green Rape of the Lesser Developed World Is Okay: Because It’s $o Green
On the Subject of Eco-Colonialism Being Pushed on the Poor of Africa by the Communist Chinese and the Rent-seeking Green EU Fraudsters Ensconced in Belgium and Their Swampy Deep State Enablers in the US Congress
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Maybe eight years ago someone told me his high school teacher had given them an assignment to write a paper on “The Dangers of Technology.”
I told him the topic seemed typical of something given by teachers who don't have the first clue about science, technology, culture, civilization, and the connection of all those to human health, longevity, and liberty.
I told him something along these lines:
Think of this:
Man's truly natural environment is the one he makes for himself by using his creativity and intelligence to turn mindless substances into things of value and worth that enable him to live better, longer, healthier, and freer under a wider variety of climatic conditions than any other species.
That, along with language (which also includes religion and government), is what distinguishes him from animals. Sure, certain birds can drop clams against rocks to smash them open to get at the gooey goodness inside and some apes can peel a banana, but are you going to use the first to shell your nuts or trust the second to do a circumcision?
I don't think so.
This human environment is the transubstantiation of the creations of the human mind into physical objects and their systems of use. And the means by which man accomplishes this is technology.
People who talk about the evils of technology and the wonders of the natural world and how we would all be better off in the latter rather than the former are, quite literally, either fools or insane or Leftist ideologues, who are basically the first two in a tofu wrap.
Tell your teacher that you want him to take part in an experiment.
You will take four groups and drop them naked into a rain forest.
Two of the groups will have extensive knowledge of tropical habitats and survival skills.
Two will have the average knowledge typical of the first year high school teacher.
To one of each pair of groups will be given a Swiss Army knife and a magnifying glass.
To the other will be given nothing but a hearty slap on the back and well wishes for their upcoming eight-week experience of becoming one with nature without the evils of technology.
You will come back in two months and see which group is better able to survive in the "natural" environment:
1) those who are naked of technology and knowledge and have no advantage over nature but who must learn to be one with it (most probably as decomposing corpses);
2) those who possess knowledge but no technology;
3) those who possess technology but no knowledge, or
4) those who possess both knowledge as well as technology.
I predict that those best able to survive in good health will be those who possess both knowledge and technology. Those least able to cope will be those with neither knowledge nor technology, like your teacher.
And this leads directly to what the environmentalists are really up to:
A Conversation Between an Economic Realist and an Eco-Freak Technophobe Meeting in an African Village Somewhere Way Out in the Bush
Eco-Freak Technophobe (EFT), hoping that no one will push him to make the distinction, who claims: “Oh, but I wasn't referring to ALL technology, just inappropriate technology.”
Realist: "You mean like Gandhi who didn't want the inappropriate non-Indian, Western medical technology when his wife lay dying of pneumonia but changed his mind when he needed it to treat his malaria or to operate on his diseased, Indian appendix?"
EFT: "No, of course not. That's life-saving technology. I'm talking about technologies that pollute and harm our natural environment, like those that use coal or petroleum or introduce harmful chemicals like DDT into the environment."
Realist: “Do you mean like the DDT that had almost eradicated malaria from many parts of Africa until the head of the EPA in the early 1970s completely ignored the results of extensive investigations of DDT by many EPA scientists and, without reading the results of his own agency’s research or even the summary of the results that concluded that DDT was one of the most essential chemicals for human health, unilaterally banned it, leading to the sickness and deaths by the year 2000 of over 100 million people by malaria and other insect-borne diseases, many of them infants and young children?
That guy who then went on from the EPA to bigger and better things, such as a position on the board of one of the leading environmentalist groups of which he had been a member that had been urging him to substitute his authority for knowledge and ban DDT, the deadly results of which were praised by another environmentalist as a better outcome than all those people in Africa "riotously reproducing"?"
EFT: “Uh, well, I believe in the use of sustainable technology."
Realist: "You mean like giving these people living in the bush in Africa solar panels for electricity and solar mirrors to cook with instead of large scale electrification?"
EFT: "Exactly, because they don't have the infrastructure to sustain such technology and, besides, their traditional lifestyle doesn't really require any significant amount of electricity."
Realist: "But what will they use to power their televisions and recharge their cell phones and run their refrigerators and air conditioners?"
EFT: "You mean the encroachment of decadent, materialist Western gadgetry that threatens their traditional cultures that have uniquely evolved over the millennia to enable them to live sustainably in their environment without the need for the environment-raping advanced technologies of Western culture that has forgotten its roots in a caring and sharing community that honors the wisdom of the village elders--oh, by the way, have you seen them?”
Realist: “What, the missing roots of Western culture or the wisdom of tribal elders?”
EFT: “No, the village elders, because I really need to secure the mineral rights to the tungsten, titanium, bauxite, molybdenum, cobalt, gold, petroleum, iron, lithium, and diamonds, since they really have no need of these in their traditional, sustainable technology."
Realist: "You mean their lifestyle that was like that of most of the United States and the rest of the West in the early 1800's and before?"
EFT: "Exactly! The warmth and communitarian values of The Little House on the Prairie! We must stand with indigenous peoples everywhere against the deadly assault by the West with its insatiable greed for more and more and help to protect their traditional ways of life, their simple and sustainable lifestyles."
Realist: "So, you're telling me that you also would like a return to a six day work week with twelve hour days of backbreaking physical labor--"
EFT: "We of the West really get too little exercise.”
Realist: "—and a protein-poor diet and most of the food sold unwrapped in the open marketplace--"
EFT: "We eat too much in the West and excessive packaging and processing of ready-to-eat foods promotes obesity; besides, the rusticity of the open market with its numerous individual entrepreneurs is a refreshing change from the soulless gargantua of corporate farms whose eye is ever on profitability and the bottom line, not on the more important matters like community values and the interdependence of villagers going out together to work the fields to produce their own daily bread."
Realist: "So you would like to shuck off your shoes and pants right now and go out there with them into the Guinea worm-infested waters to plant rice?"
EFT: "Oh, hell, no! I'm just here for the mineral rights and to take photos for a spread in Mother Jones magazine to demonstrate the necessity of protecting their culture from the perversion that is Western society. Besides, I've got a nonstop back to LA tomorrow and a board meeting with Al Gore to discuss the role of sustainable technology in the limitation of dangerous greenhouse gases."
Realist: "Hey, could you mention to Al that there's a way Africans can use native minerals to help reduce carbon dioxide pollution caused by burning sticks or dung or coal for cooking and they would never have to use coal or petroleum or natural gas to generate electricity or even produce any greenhouse gases at all and, by doing so, reduce their carbon footprint to the size of those left by Lucy, the small hominid, in the Olduvai Gorge those millions of years ago, because, you know, everybody loves Lucy?"
EFT: "That sounds interesting! A native mineral that can replace coal or petroleum or natural gas and that has no carbon footprint? That sounds like a truly sustainable and culturally appropriate technology! How does it compare to coal in cost and pollution?"
Realist: "Well, it's mined like coal but it has an energy density that is up to twenty times that of coal, it's not much good for anything else and, once purified, it can be used to change other closely-related but otherwise useless minerals into the same energy source.
“Compared to the millions of tons of chemical waste produced by a typical coal-fired electrical utility in one year, the wastes produced by the use of this mineral over the course of a year can be confined to a space the size of that under a card table. And there is enough of this and associated minerals to produce virtually unlimited amounts of electricity for thousands of years."
EFT: "That sounds fantastic! A relatively nonpolluting mineral that will enable the complete elimination of coal as a fuel source. What's it called?"
Realist: "It's an actinide."
EFT: "Actin? Like Sean Penn?"
Realist: "No, it's a heavy metal, but not like Metallica, though it could more cheaply power their amps than anything else."
EFT: "Sounds fascinating. What's it called?”
Realist: "It's uranium."
EFT: "But that's used to make bombs that are inappropriate uses of technology and could cause a runaway nuclear war that would result in nuclear winter and the death of billions. It's inappropriate and socially irresponsible no matter what other uses it could have because the legacy of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and US war-mongering have forever tainted anything having to do with it."
Realist: "And how many people died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki?"
EFT: "Probably as many as 246,000 in the space of two days! A quarter million innocent people going about their daily business only to be vaporized or burned to death or terminally irradiated by this technology of death. Because of their sacrifice we should forever eschew the technology that made it possible."
Realist: "Hmmm, really? So I guess for that same reason you'll be giving up your elective surgery to replace that knee you've wrecked by jerking it around so much."
EFT: "What do you mean?"
Realist: "You say we shouldn't benefit ourselves by using the technology that produced the atomic weapons that killed a quarter of a million people because it’s inappropriate technology."
EFT: "Yes, nuclear energy is a blight on the face of Gaia, our earth mother."
Realist: "Yet you will use surgical technology even though that technology is responsible for about 48 million deaths a year of innocent people quietly going about their everyday business. That comes out to about 263,000 every two days which should make it at least as inappropriate as nuclear technology because of those two atomic bombs.
“And since there were only two bombs and since the other goes on continuously, making the 48 million per year 191 times more deadly, and the billion and a half deaths over the past 50 years making it 6097 times more deadly, then this technology should be immediately shunned by everyone out of conscience's sake. Right?"
EFT: "Well, uh, I guess, maybe. But how does surgical technology cause so many deaths of innocent people"
Realist: "Abortion."
EFT: "But that's a woman's right to choose and there's nothing more sacred than the right to choose!"
Realist: "You mean, unless it's an African choosing to build a modern industrialized society?
“You mean, unless it's a citizen of the "lesser developed world" choosing to have abundant and cheap electricity that will cool his home in the dry seasons and keep his home dry in the rainy seasons and refrigerate his food in order to cut down on the incidence of food-borne disease and power his machinery so he won't have to engage in backbreaking manual labor?
“You mean, unless it's the dusky native with bones in his nose or plates in his lips or his dick in a gourd surrounded by his toothless National Geographic wives with boobs hanging halfway to their cowry shell-encircled waists chewing roots and spitting the mess into a hollowed-out log to make their traditional beer choosing the kind of energy technology to enable his kids to attend air conditioned schools and so that business in his region of the world will have the power to produce goods more cheaply and compete in the global market place and be able to develop better paying jobs that will provide more money for better food and clothes and education and health care and longer lives to enjoy his children and grandchildren?
“Unless, of course, you just slip them contraceptives on the sly with vacvines or you encourage his wife to use medical technology to abort his children and grandchildren by telling her it's the only sure way to prosperity in their traditional culture which is not diversified enough to support a larger industrialized population, which, of course, would be in need of more of those same minerals that you need to run YOUR technological civilization which they, of course, should NOT want, seeing that it will obliterate their old and time-honored ways of life that have been handed down since time immemorial.
“In other words, for the poor in the world you advocate the same approach to technology as you do for the powerless in the womb:
“You choose comfort and convenience and they lose their lives."
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https://wattsupwiththat.com/2022/10/01/colonialism-reappears-in-africa-with-a-woke-new-spin/?fbclid=IwAR1Cn6ilH-qvhQFOUSN7jHBt9GKR0tLqojXl3QRZmlNa6dNsL_h8P9Pi4z8
Love your style and thinking. However, I cringe when I see points like this...
"Realist: "Hey, could you mention to Al that there's a way Africans can use native minerals to help reduce carbon dioxide pollution caused by burning sticks or dung or coal for cooking and they would never have to use coal or petroleum or natural gas to generate electricity or even produce any greenhouse gases at all and, by doing so, reduce their carbon footprint...".
Hard to tell if being ironic or if you buy the climate CO2 nonsense?
Just like those pointing out the carbon hypocrisy of the Davos jet set. It ain't the CO2 at issue.
Industrial Pollution I get, but CO2 uscthe gas ofvlife