Posted: 01 Aug 2013 05:22 AM PDT
Early in the morning, while most are still sleeping, groups of
elderly Chinese women spread out across city streets. They tear open trash
bags, pick through the litter and sort out bottles and cans that come with a
deposit. And then they bring them to the local supermarket to a machine that
scans and evaluates each can, accepting and rejecting them one by one, and
finally printing out a receipt.
The
interaction between the elderly immigrant who speaks broken English or the
homeless man who is barely holding it together... and the machine is a stark
contrast between what the new smart clean green economy is pretends to be and
what it actually is. The machine, like so much else that we design, is
impressive, but its existence depends on someone digging through the trash
with their hands for much less than minimum wage to extract a generally
useless item.
The entire bottle economy, which has more than a passing resemblance to the
trash sorting operations in the Third World carried out by despised and
persecuted minorities, like the Zabbaleen in Egypt, is artificial. The United
States is not so poor that it actually needs to recycle. It recycles not
under the impulse of economic imperatives, but of government mandates.
The elderly Chinese women dig through the trash because politicians decided
to impose a tax on us and an incentive for them in the form of a deposit. All
those useless 1980s laws created a strange underground economy of
marginalized people digging through the trash.
Every time politicians celebrate a recycling target met and show off some
shiny new machine, hiding behind the curtain are the dirty weary people
dragging through the streets at the crack of dawn, donning rubber gloves and
tearing apart trash bags. They are the unglamorous low-tech reality of
environmentalism.
These are the Green Jobs that aren't much talked about. They pay below
minimum wage and have no workplace safety regulations. They are the Third
World reality behind the First World ecology tripe. It's not that the people
who plan and run the system don't know about them. But they don't like to
talk about them because they come too close to revealing the unsavory truth
about where environmentalism is really going.
Environmentalism, like every liberal notion, is sold to the masses as modern
and progressive. It's the exact opposite. It's every bit as modern and
progressive as those sacks of cans being hauled by hand through the streets
to the machine.
Prince Charles, that avid idiot and environmentalist, visited a Mumbai slum a
few years ago and said that it had some lessons to teach the West.
“When you enter what looks from the outside like an immense mound of plastic
and rubbish, you immediately come upon an intricate network of streets with
miniature shops, houses and workshops, each one made out of any material that
comes to hand,” Prince Charles wrote in his book, Harmony.
The Prince of Wales is quite the author. In addition to Harmony: A New Way of
Looking at Our World, he has written Shelter: Human Habitats from Around the
World, The Prince's Speech: On the Future of Food and The Illustrated Guide
to Chickens: How to Choose Them, How to Keep Them.
One might be forgiven for assuming that the royal brain twitching behind
those watery eyes is preparing for some sort of apocalypse. And it is. The
apocalypse is environmentalism. Or from the point of view of the
environmentalists, who spare some time from their public appearances and
their mansions to pen tomes on the future of food and how to choose chickens,
the apocalypse is prosperity.
People of that sort think that instead of getting the slum dwellers of Mumbai
into apartments, we ought to be figuring out how to build shelters out of
random garbage. Think of it as the recycling can solution as applied to your
entire life.
“The people of Dharavi manage to separate all their waste at home and it gets
recycled without any official collection facilities at all," a marveling
Charles, who probably never took out the trash once in his life, wrote. It's
easy to get people to recycle without any mandates or collection facilities
at all. All it takes is grinding poverty so miserable that you either make
the most of every last thing you can get your hands on or you die.
That is the sort of lifestyle that environmentalists think of as sustainable.
Or as Hobbes put it, "In such condition, there is no place for Industry;
because the fruit thereof is uncertain; and consequently no Culture of the
Earth... no commodious Building; no Instruments of moving, and removing such
things as require much force; no Knowledge of the face of the Earth; no
account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society." That is the natural
state to which environmentalists would return us to.
More
recently another deep thinker, Peter Buffett, Warren Buffett's son, took to
the editorial pages of the New York Times to denounce Third World
philanthropy.
"Microlending and financial literacy — what is this really about?"
Buffett asks. "People will certainly learn how to integrate into our
system of debt and repayment with interest. People will rise above making $2
a day to enter our world of goods and services so they can buy more. But
doesn’t all this just feed the beast?"
To the slum dwellers, the beast isn't capitalism, it's that gnawing feeling
in your stomach when you haven't eaten for a day. But Peter Buffett, who
lives a life almost as privileged as Prince Charles, bemoans the idea of
getting people to the point where they aren't worried about where their next
meal is coming from because it just turns them into capitalists and
consumers. And before you know it, they're buying big screen televisions and
writing op-eds in the New York Times on the futility of philanthropy.
"There are people working hard at showing examples of other ways to live
in a functioning society that truly creates greater prosperity for all (and I
don’t mean more people getting to have more stuff)," Peter Buffett
wrote, probably unaware that he was sniffing down the same trail that a
thousand communes had gone. But the experimental farm is old hat. The new
model is the Third World.
Instead of helping the Third World live like us, the perverse children of the
rich dream of making us live like the Third World.
Those working hard to make our society function like Charlie's favorite slum
aren't moving to their own collective farms. Instead they are transforming
our society into the collective farm while pretending that their calculated
destruction of our prosperity is smart and modern.
The Soviet Union pretended that its plans for the country were a modern step
forward. In reality, the Commissars took the farmers back to feudalism and
then turned much of the country into peasants, coping with harvest labor
problems by forcing urban populations to come and pick the crops. And those
were the good times. In the bad times, highways and other large projects were
built through mass slave labor no different than the way that ancient Egypt
built the pyramids.
Communist modernism was a Potemkin village, a cheap tacky curtain and behind
it, the sweating slave and the stench of Babylon. The modernism of the
progressive the same facade covered in sociology textbooks, New York Times
op-eds and teleprompter speeches. Behind it lie the ruins of Detroit, tribal
violence in the slums of every major city and an economy in which there is no
more room for the middle class except as clerks in the government bureaucracy.
And it doesn't end there.
The elderly Chinese woman picking through the trash in search of empty beer
bottles isn't the past. She's the future. Recycling is big business because
the government and its affiliated liberal elites decided it should be. It's
just one example of an artificial economy and it's small stuff compared to
the coming carbon crackdown in which every human activity will be monetized
and taxed somewhere down the road according to its carbon footprint.
The ultimate dream of the sort of people who can't sleep at night because
they worry that children in India might be able to grow up making more than
two dollars a day, is to take away our prosperity for our own good through
the total regulation of every area of our lives under the pretext of an
imminent environmental crisis.
The Global Warming hysteria is about absolute power over every man, woman and
child on earth.
"I strongly believe that the West has much to learn from societies and
places which, while sometimes poorer in material terms are infinitely richer
in the ways in which they live and organize themselves as communities,"
Prince Charles said.
It goes without saying that the Prince of Wales is not about to take personal
advantage of these infinite spiritual riches of living in a house made of
garbage, drinking contaminated water and dying before thirty. What he is
saying is that while he personally is a little too attached to his lifestyle,
he thinks that we as a society would be better off giving up on the
materialism of living on more than two dollars a day and embracing the
infinite social and spiritual riches that rich people imagine are accessible
only to impoverished Third Worlders.
Environmentalism is wealth redistribution on a global scale. The goal isn't
even to lift all boats, but to stop the tide of materialism from making too
many people too comfortable.
The liberal billionaire who clamors about sustainability likes progress. What
he dislikes is the middle class with its mass produced cars and homes, cheap
restaurants full of fatty foods and television sets and daily deliveries of
cardboard boxes full of stuff and shopping malls. He thinks, in all
sincerity, that they would be happier and more spiritually fulfilled as
peasants. It's not an original idea.
The Industrial Revolution had hardly begun revolving when the 'Back to
Nature' crowd began insisting that it was time to learn a more harmonious way
of life by going back to the farm. Centuries later the only new idea that
they have come up with is threatening an environmental apocalypse if the
middle class doesn't change its mass producing ways. Even its adoration of
the Noble Savage is older than the American Revolution.
The modern environmentalism jettisons the idea of moving to a dilapidated
farmhouse to spend time being bored while trying to make artisanal rocking
chairs to sell to someone, It's done its time searching for the noble savage
within through drugs and degradation decades ago. Now it's our turn to tap
into the infinity of spiritual riches that comes from just barely getting by.
While
the tabloid front pages can't get enough of Weiner, both of the Democratic
front runners to
replace Mayor Bloomberg, Quinn and De Blasio, have embraced his mandatory
composting plan for the city. New York City is not currently experiencing a
compost shortage. There is no reason to force millions of urban residents to
hoard rotting garbage except for the moral one. The sustainable logic of the
slum that makes us better people by making us more miserable.
The Soviet idea of progress was feudalism dressed up in Socialist red.
Environmentalism dresses up feudalism in Green. It seeks to reverse all the
progress that we have made in the name of progress. Environmentalism is as
sophisticated as a Soviet collective farm, as modern as the homeless people
dragging bags of cans along on sticks to feed the machine and as smart as a
slum made of trash.
Beneath all the empty chatter about social riches and sustainability is that
need to impose progressive misery. Beneath the glossy surface of
environmentalism is a vision of the American middle class learning to dig
through bags of garbage, the detritus of their consumerism for which they
must be punished, to become better people.
Daniel Greenfield is a New York City based writer and blogger
and a Shillman Journalism Fellow of the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
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