Sunday, March 13, 2005

Green Death

Hard to put it any better than Denis Boyles on NRO:
Someday maybe history will hold environmentalists to account for the genocide their wholly sentimental, hardly scientific campaign to ban DDT has inflicted on the 's poorest people. The latest count of those at risk of dying from malaria: 2.2 billion, according to a report on the BBC. That's one out of three people on the planet, as the Times points out, that number puts AIDS in the shade. Of course, almost none of these suffering souls are from Europe or North America, where Greenpeace, the World Wildlife Fund/ World Wide Fund for Nature, the Environmental Defense Fund, Physicians for Social Responsibility, and more than 200 other green groups who have campaigned against DDT raise money for their cockamamie enviro-frights. On the other hand, we saved some birds. Now on to Kyoto - and let's save some whales on the way!
Update:

If you can't kill 'em with malaria, maybe you can at least starve them to death.
As Grandmother Driessen used to say, the only good thing about the good old days is that they're gone. Kenya's Akinye Arunga puts it this way: "Cute indigenous lifestyles simply mean indigenous poverty, indigenous malnutrition, indigenous disease and childhood death. I don't wish this on my worst enemy, and I wish our so-called friends would stop imposing it on us."

Unfortunately, radical activists are doing exactly that. They are preventing poor Africans from acquiring modern farming methods, adequate electricity, and pesticides to control malaria. Their callous ideology is certainly an efficient form of "all-natural" population control. But it violates Third World people's basic human rights to nutrition, and life itself.