Dr. David Deming has an interesting essay on the logical flaws in modern environmentalism that are rooted in a meme known as “The Noble Savage”.
Excerpt (with my bolded quote) below:
All of this would be of academic interest only, were it not the case that the modern environmental movement and many of our public policies are based implicitly on the myth of the Noble Savage. The fountainhead of modern environmentalism is Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. The first sentence in Silent Spring invoked the Noble Savage by claiming
“there was once a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings.”
But the town Carson described did not exist, and her polemic, Silent Spring, introduced us to environmental alarmism based on junk science. As the years passed, Rachel Carson was elevated to sainthood and the template laid for endless spasms of hysterical fear-mongering, from the population bomb, to nuclear winter, the Alar scare, and global warming.
Human beings have not, can not, and never will live in harmony with nature. Our prosperity and health depend on technology driven by energy. We exercise our intelligence to command nature, and were admonished by Francis Bacon to exercise our dominion with “sound reason and true religion.” When we are told that our primary energy source, oil, is “making us sick,” or that we are “addicted” to oil, these are only the latest examples of otherwise rational persons descending into gibberish after swooning to the lure of the Noble Savage. This ignorant exultation of the primitive can only lead us back to the Stone Age.
Read the entire essay here
The Noble Savage and Noble Cause Corruption seem to be familiar bedfellows.
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We would not have the standard of living we have today if it weren’t for oil, coal and gas.
By the way Rachel Carson’s book killed quite a few bird sheltering trees.
Now onto the matter at hand, here is an example of man living in harmony with nature all those hundreds of years ago. Ahhhh, those were the days.
Further references:
Mechanics of overkill in the extinction of New Zealand moas
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0305440389900629
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1466-822X.2004.00132.x/full
The term noble savage (French, bon sauvage),
No, Le sauvage noble
MarkW says:
February 14, 2012 at 10:17 am
Strangely enough, I find this account completely credible. Did the young man display any other overt signs of mental illness?
R. Gates says:
February 14, 2012 at 11:47 am
Living in harmony with nature means recognizing that nature is a web of relationships of which we are part, and living in such as way so as not to do anything inentionally to destroy that web to such as degree that the whole thing contracts in some significant way, as it can, and has, numerous times in Earth’s history
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Not a single living organism on Earth does so. No polar bear understands the web of natural relationships, no ant is trying to not destroy anything that might be valuable for other species. They just live and take whatever there is around them to make their lives better.
In history, many species became extinct just because they got eaten by some other species.
According to what you are saying, none of living organisms on Earth lives in harmony with nature. In such a case – why should we?
The real answer is: we don’t need to preserve nature. All we need is to preserve us. And for that, we need certain part of the nature, too. But I definitely don’t think we need to preserve whole nature. For instance, few people think that we definitely need to preserve e.g. tuberculosis spores or malaria. But in fact there’s far less of what we really need to preserve than many greens are trying to suggest. And being cute is not the best reason for a species to being protected – in fact, that only creates a new kind of evolutionary pressure which leads to Earth full of extremely cute but completely useless animals. Do we need that? No, we don’t.
Humans are the only species on this earth that have to work and pay to stay alive
rg
I’ve always seen the aims of CAGW as wanting to take us back, not to the Noble Savage, but to an agrarian society before the Industrial Revolution, when farming was done somewhat like the Amish do it. It is the age of coal and steam and oil that they seem to hate. Who is to say if they got us back that far that the Noble Savage would not then become the goal, but I’ve never seen any who want to take us ALL the way back.
Yet even just going back to the Pre-Industrial Age is bad enough. How in the world does the world – as it exists now – ever get there, without killing off 6.5 billion people? This is the question they don’t want anyone to ask them. The reason people went to work in Simon Legree’s dirty greasy factories was because there was not enough work on the farms. People were starving out in the rural areas. PEOPLE migrating to the cities drove the industrialization, not the other way around. The migrations drove the supply and demand. Even in 1900, 90% of workers in the U.S. worked on farms. And farms are very dangerous places to work. And to raise babies. I am sure women want all the infant mortality that existed prior to the 20th century.
Yes, they’ve come a long way, Baby. But so have men. What was the life expectancy in 1800? 35? Less? In 1900 it was about 47 – and only in the U.S. and a few industrial nations. We are somewhat fast approaching double that. Much of the civilized world has life expectancies in the 80s. In 1950 the life expectancy had only climbed to about 70, meaning, among other things, that the corporate pension plans only had to support a retiree about 5 years on average. Well, even with the crash of 2008, I hope to have a whole lot more retirement than five freaking years.
Perhaps the CAGW people haven’t thought it all out. Perhaps they want to live to age 47, on average, to work till the day they die, harvesting grain with sickles and threshing rice by hand. But no one else does – and when it comes down to it, neither do they. My generation, the hippies, took all the Rousseau-ian ideas and tried to go live on farming communes. Hahahahaha. And where are the communes today? Right: Gone. Those people found out how bloody HARD it is, just to keep three meals a day on the table. Oh, it sounded grand – but it isn’t workable – and especially with the soft people we have all become.
There is NOTHING to recommend either the Pre-Industrial Age, with 9 out of 10 men a farmhand and 9 out of 10 women (pregnant until childbirth takes them) spending all day washing and cooking. Neither is there anything to recommend the Noble Savage, with his nomadic life style, and leaving their trail of garbage littering the countryside.
The Noble Savage is only possible when resources are lying around on the surface. We have no more resources on the surface, except trees. If we all overnight became hunter-gatherers, all the deer would be gone in 6 months, all the rabbits, coons, and possums not long after.
Not only that, anyone who thought the Americas were all about the Noble Savage should read the book 1491 and see how wrong that thinking was. When Columbus arrived, the Americas were citified up the ying yang, with some of the biggest cities on Earth. Even Hispaniola where he landed was wall-to-wall villages. Oh, and 90% of the people were farmers, just like up to 1900, only more so.
Thank GOD (name your poison) for Eli Whitney and Interchangeable Parts, the most important human invention of all time, with the possible exception of the wheel and the printing press. Thank the same GOD for our improved lifestyle because of high-energy-density fuels. And thank all the gods that Paul Ehrlich and all Malthusian thinking has been proven wrong by people trying to improve their lives by inventing so many ways of improving others’ lives.
Nature will remorselessly drown, crush, burn, infect, devour, starve, freeze, and/or suffocate you without in the least caring about you. Survival is always a struggle against nature.
timg56 says:
February 14, 2012 at 12:33 pm
Minor quibble, but if you’re trying to give a proper timeline, you have the order wrong. The .45-70 was a US Civil War rifle round which was common for years afterwards because surplus single-shot “trapdoor” Springfield rifles were widely available. .45 Long Colt (revolver) came later (1870’s I believe; it was adopted briefly as the US Army standard sidearm, but a more common cartridge for both revolvers and rifles was the .44-40 Winchester). .30-06 is a revision of the original .30-03 which was so named for its adoption year 1903. The cartridge design was revised in 1906 to use the new pointed (“spitzer”) bullets and the existing stock of M1903 Springfield rifles rechambered to accept it. Finally the .45 ACP was designed for the M1911 Colt Automatic Pistol which was accepted by the US Army in 1911.
Michael Palmer said @ur momisugly February 14, 2012 at 10:56 am
And your thinking here is a prime example. When top predators are eliminated, the prey species overgraze and deplete their food resources to the detriment of themselves; i.e. they starve to death or succumb to disease as their immune systems succumb to starvation diet. It’s not a pretty sight. Balance in Nature is not static — it’s dynamic. Humans are top predators and the Noble Savagers try to deny this simple fact of life.
Personally I thought David Deming’s essay bloody awful, especially as he is usually a much clearer thinker. “Human beings have not, can not, and never will live in harmony with nature” is complete bunkum. Harmony is a human value and tends to mean whatever an individual finds harmonious. The Git is a farmer who knows he relies on Nature for his food. There seems to be an awful lot of people who think that food is a product of factories, or something that magically appears in the shops. Good luck to you when that bolt of energy from the sun arrives and destroys the means of distribution.
To Walter H. Schneider at 10:42 AM, who calls to our attention a book, ““The Lies of Rachel Carson”
Thank you for the link, I’ve read it now. It doesn’t invalidate the thinning eggshell science I referenced in my post of 12:22. It does point out many cases where Rachel Carson exaggerated or overstated her case. The author also misstates the science. Two examples.
1. In his comment on pg. 21 of the book, the author says: “She does not consider the metabolism and breakdown of DDT in humans and other vertebrates, and their excretion in urine, and so on, which prevents the alleged “biological magnification” up food chains from actually occurring.”
According to Wikipedia, DDT and its breakdown product DEE does persist in the body, with half lives of for 6 to 10 years, AND DDT and its breakdown product DDE do biomagnify in the food chain (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDT ):
“Because of its lipophilic properties, DDT has a high potential to bioaccumulate, especially in predatory birds.[34] DDT, DDE, and DDD magnify through the food chain, with apex predators such as raptor birds concentrating more chemicals than other animals in the same environment. They are very lipophilic and are stored mainly in body fat. DDT and DDE are very resistant to metabolism; in humans, their half-lives are 6 and up to 10 years, respectively.”
Wikipedia can be wrong on occasion — if there is evidence that Wikipedia’s sources on this are in error, I would very much like to see them, but my reading up to this point is that bioaccumulation of DDT and DDE in humans and birds is real because it accumulates in fat and is thus stored in the body for long periods.
2. Regarding whether raptors who ingested DDT in the eastern US had considerably less breeding success, the author says:
“Carson spends two pages discussing the Hawk Mountain, Pennsylvania, counts of migrating raptorial birds. Table 2 summarizes the actual total counts of raptors made there during the years before and during the greatest usage of DDT in North America. Obviously, very few of them decreased in numbers during those years. The numbers of migrating hawks (and eagles) increased from 9,29l in 1946 to 16,163 in 1963, but with considerable fluctuation in intervening years.”
Numbers of migrating hawks and eagles did increase from the early 1940s (and probably from the late 1930s) at Hawk Mountain. That is because people gradually stopped shooting them for sport, starting in the mid-1930s. These facts don’t negate DDT’s effects in preventing breeding success.
Hawks were customarily shot at Hawk Mountain and elsewhere, mainly for sport, in the first third of the previous century, but in 1934, when hawk numbers were very low and opinion was turning against shooting hawks for sport, conservationists purchased Hawk Mountain. Shooting of migrating hawks decreased from that time, which certainly increased the number of reproducing hawks, in particular those who nested in the forests of eastern and northern Canada, not much affected by DDT. The welcome development of reducing shooting of hawks, however, had nothing to do with the adverse effects on breeding hawks in areas near widespread DDT use, which included virtually all the eastern US, where Bald Eagles and Peregrine Falcons nested. Peregrines in Canada survived, but they were completely extirpated in the eastern US by the 1960s, because of DDT effects on eggshells.
“…Bacon was the first person to unambiguously and explicitly advocate the practical application of scientific knowledge to human needs. “The true and lawful goal of the sciences,” he explained, “is that human life be endowed with new discoveries and powers.” Writing in the early seventeenth century, Francis Bacon predicted lasers, genetic engineering, airplanes, and submarines…..”
Umm. A Bacon did this, but NOT the Francis Bacon of the 1600s. In fact it was ROGER Bacon, of the 1200s – a Bacon as far away from Francis in time as Francis is from us. Here is the first quotes page I googled – http://www.todayinsci.com/B/Bacon_Roger/BaconRoger-Quotations.htm which illustrates him proposing the application of science to human needs in 1266.
But he is well worth delving into more deeply – there is a point in his De Multiplicatione Specierum where he invents, purely for the sake of argument, the luminiferous ether of the 19th C, then, a few sentences later, throws the notion out in favour of an Einsteinean metrical frame, casually skipping over Galilean relativity and the inertial frames of Newton…
To Walter H. Schneider at 10:42 AM, who calls to our attention a book, ““The Lies of Rachel Carson” (continued)
One reason that the author of this book, and others (including me) were upset with the handling of the banning of DDT is that DDT unquestionably saved many lives from malaria in tropical areas of the world when in widespread use in the 1960s. Malaria deaths went up right after DDT use stopped.
The problem was that DDT’s ban was treated as all or nothing. In the few countries that use it now, it is used inside the home, and malarial mosquitos will not enter. It doesn’t have to be sprayed far and wide, just applied locally. Used in this manner, DDT could save millions of lives even today, without harming wildlife. Very few countries aside from South Africa use it, however, because of fear that monies from environmental groups and EU countries will stop flowing if they use it.
If there had been some common sense, tens of millions of lives would have been saved. In retrospect, it would have been far better for humanity to have carved out an exception for limited use to combat malaria. The environmental community, to the best of my knowledge, is still against such a compromise, because they are afraid that a limited use exemption that receives their blessing will turn into far wider use, e.g., illegal diversion.
Another issue is the effect on human health. In Carson’s time, there was virtually no evidence that DDT caused fatal human disease. The author of “The Lies of Rachel Carson” excoriates her for implying that DDT might cause significant illnesses in people. For a long time, scientists studying DDT in humans didn’t find such a link; for instance, no link was found between women exposed to DDT and breast cancer for decades.
Evidence has now come, however, that DDT exposure to YOUNG women under 14 IS associated with increased breast cancer. This is what Wikipedia says (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDT ):
“For the subset of women born more than 14 years before agricultural use, there was no association between DDT and breast cancer. However, for younger women—exposed earlier in life—the third who were exposed most to p,p’-DDT had a fivefold increase in breast cancer incidence over the least exposed third, after correcting for the protective effect of o,p’-DDT.[45][80][81] These results are supported by animal studies.[35]”
Neither Carson or the author of “The Lies of Rachel Carson” knew enough at the time, they were both operating in ignorance. Carson overstated what she thought she knew, and the author correctly pointed out that she didn’t have evidence of cancer causation at the time.
As before, Wikipedia is not always accurate. If there is contrary evidence about breast cancer and DDT, I will be interested in reading it, I don’t take Wikipedia as gospel.
Apparently the ‘noble savages’ were ruining the planet 3500 years ago according to Scientific American. Bad lads!
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2012/02/10/farmers-may-have-kicked-off-local-climate-change-3500-years-ago/
@John
“Peregrines in Canada survived, but they were completely extirpated in the eastern US by the 1960s, because of DDT effects on eggshells.”
Was that really the direct effect of DDT or that predatory birds tend to eat insect eaters who was starving due to a lack of fat and juicy insects?
R. Gates says (February 14, 2012 at 8:44 am): “This is the biggest lie one could possibly spread. First of all, we are not separate from nature, so to suggest the humans can’t live in harmony with nature creates a false dichotomy. Of course nature lives in harmony with itself! When the lion eats the gazelle, that is harmony! It guarantees the continuation of both!”
For awhile, anyway. I’m sure saber tooth cats lived in harmony with their prey, too–for about 42 million years. Since humans are still young compared to saber tooth cats, it remains to be seen if intelligence is a viable survival strategy. 🙂
R.Gates speaks much of “harmony” yet all the while
“Nature, red in tooth and claw with ravine, shriek[s] against his creed”
R.Gates, your religion is showing and you are the only one who doesn’t see it.
I respect your freedom to have your religious/philosophical beliefs but don’t assume every one shares them.
And of course I forgot the reference. Apologies, Shifu Willis.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saber-toothed_cat
Mister R Gates is profoundly corrupted by the literary images of the “Noble Savage” and the falsities of Utopian Socialism propaganda. Itis clear h ehas never had to produce for himself.
If anyone merits the treatment that Tom Clancy’s malfactors in “Rainbow Six” were induced to take, it is such as he.
Its too late to dream about being hunter/gatherers again. For one thing, there are 7 billion of us now and 7 billion hunter/gatherers would wipe out the planet in pretty short order.
So, effectively, by growing all our own food now (plants and animals), and using fossil fuels rather than firewood, we are protecting Mother Nature to the maximum extent possible (on the assumption we will indeed allow 7 billion of us to live on the planet).
Of course, we should be careful with our technology and not allow any unintended consequences to do damage. But environmentalists don’t analyze problems carefully enough to full understand them. They immediately jump to an emotional reaction.
Lions, Gazelles, Harmony Of Nature according to R. Gates…
So when Northern environmentalists stop indigenous people of the Amazons from developing their country or exploiting / maintaining the natural resources around them, this must be Harmony Of Nature as well, for we are nature, right?
What a wonderful philosophy… do you have that from Bono, R.Gates?
Gary Hladik says:
“For awhile, anyway. I’m sure saber tooth cats lived in harmony with their prey, too–for about 42 million years. Since humans are still young compared to saber tooth cats, it remains to be seen if intelligence is a viable survival strategy. :-)”
A Vonnegut fan? 😛
Terry Pratchett has a line he’s used in several of his books that I’m rather fond of.
“There is a reason why they call Nature a mother.”
I wonder what irreducible slice of “nature” humans would bring to a space habitat. I’m guessing “nature” would be a lot less diverse there than on our planet.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_Three
PaulH says:
February 14, 2012 at 2:11 pm
Nature will remorselessly drown, crush, burn, infect, devour, starve, freeze, and/or suffocate you without in the least caring about you. Survival is always a struggle against nature.
_____
Odd how that same “nature” has given you a brain and the means to defend yourself if this “nature” doesn’t care about you. Odd how this same “nature” gave the lion the sharp claws and teeth, but gave gazelles the ability to run very very fast and the strength of the herd.
“Nature” cares about the web of life, as that is exactly what “nature” is…simply a web of mutual dependences. But this notion of dependency really bothers certain mindsets, as they see themselves as the “rugged individualist” and as “me against the cold cruel world”. The fact that no person is truly ever independent of the rest of the world, and no one is an island unto themselves (except in their own imagination) really bothers some personality types. I find this fascinating…
The natural order of our environment is extinction as demonstrated by 99.99% of all species known as of today.