Freedom's Fidelity

Tuesday, December 16, 2003

Enviro-blogging!

I have yet to really blog on any environmental issues, but a friend sent me an article recently from Rolling Stone that has inspired me to do so.... just not yet. I did come across the text of this speech by famed author Michael Crichton:

There is no Eden. There never was. What was that Eden of the wonderful mythic past? Is it the time when infant mortality was 80%, when four children in five died of disease before the age of five? When one woman in six died in childbirth? When the average lifespan was 40, as it was in America a century ago. When plagues swept across the planet, killing millions in a stroke. Was it when millions starved to death? Is that when it was Eden?

And what about indigenous peoples, living in a state of harmony with the Eden-like environment? Well, they never did. On this continent, the newly arrived people who crossed the land bridge almost immediately set about wiping out hundreds of species of large animals, and they did this several thousand years before the white man showed up, to accelerate the process. And what was the condition of life? Loving, peaceful, harmonious? Hardly: the early peoples of the New World lived in a state of constant warfare. Generations of hatred, tribal hatreds, constant battles. The warlike tribes of this continent are famous: the Comanche, Sioux, Apache, Mohawk, Aztecs, Toltec, Incas. Some of them practiced infanticide, and human sacrifice. And those tribes that were not fiercely warlike were exterminated, or learned to build their villages high in the cliffs to attain some measure of safety.

The Eden he is referring to is the mythical world that environmentalists think we would be living in if we could only rid ourselves of corporations (and Bush of course). A direct rebuttal to Rousseau's romanticized idea of the noble savage I think. Read the rest, it's very insightful.

(Hat tip toInstaPundit for the link)

posted by Paul  permalink | |