By Kevin D. Williamson
Thursday, February 14, 2019 12:20 PM
For a summary of the vagueness, silliness, and posturing
being used to market the so-called Green New Deal — an advertising campaign
without a product — consider this from Jedediah Britton-Purdy, author of After Nature: A Politics for the
Anthropocene, in today’s New York
Times. Britton-Purdy’s argument is that because our environmental problems
result from features of our civilization, then it only makes sense that solving
these environmental problems requires transforming the nature of that
civilization itself. He is remarkably flip about this:
For every human being, there are
over 1,000 tons of built environment: roads, office buildings, power plants,
cars and trains and long-haul trucks. It is a technological exoskeleton for the
species. Everything most of us do, we do through it: calling our parents,
getting to work, moving for a job, taking the family on vacation, finding food
for the evening or staying warm in a polar vortex. Just being human in this
artificial world implies a definite carbon footprint — and for that matter, a
trail of footprints in water use, soil compaction, habitat degradation and
pesticide use. You cannot change the climate impact of Americans without
changing the built American landscape.
So the proposals to retrofit buildings,
retool transportation and build a clean-energy system are simply ways of
tackling the problem where it starts. They are public-works projects because
large capital projects — especially ones that, like highways, involve
widespread public benefit — have always required public money. They are jobs
programs, unless robots do the work, so the jobs might as well be good.
Might as well!
Mr. Britton-Purdy writes of “the Green New Deal’s
proposal to work with family farmers,” family
farmers being a favorite item of contradistinction to be set against the wicked
factory farms or industrial farms. In reality, no such distinction exists in
American agriculture, where many
family-owned farmers are gigantic operations: Some of the largest farm
operations in the country are family
farms. If Mr. Britton-Purdy means to indicate small farms, then he might as well say as much plainly, and then
consider the fact that the relatively small number of very large farms produce
the vast majority of the food. (The 4 percent of farms with sales exceeding $1
million annually produce about two-thirds of the food crops, according to the Wall Street Journal.) But the issue of family farms has nothing to do with
producing food and fiber; the main interest of progressives is in the moral
character of the farm’s organizational structure. The implicit moral judgment
is the only reason to insist on family
farms.
Likewise, Mr. Britton-Purdy writes, very curiously, that
“the soil is basically conscripted as a food factory.” Conscripted is a very interesting word to choose here. To be conscripted is to be pressed into
service against one’s will; to write
that soil may be conscripted is to
imply that soil has a will, choices, agency, and personality. It is to make a
moral person out of soil. The current delusional crusade among
environmentalists to confer “rights” upon animals and inanimate objects speaks
to that line of thinking.
Conservatives looking at the so-called Green New Deal
have noted, sometimes caustically, its mushiness and vagueness. Progressives
have countered that these features are desirable.
Which, from one point of view, they are — from the point of view that this is
not a technical question about how
best to produce food or energy but that this is a moral question about the character of our mode of living. (The
dispute is in reality an aesthetic
one, for the most part, not a moral one, but that’s another argument.) To argue
as Mr. Britton-Purdy that environmental, social, and economic questions form a
totality that must be responded to with a totalist philosophy is as near to a
textbook definition of totalitarianism
as one could hope to find, which is, of course, what all of this is really
about.
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