Mark Lynas has converted from being an eco-alarmist to a pro-growth rationalist. But he still doesn’t get the problem with green thinking.

by Ben Pile - Friday 29 July 2011

Since becoming an advocate of genetic modification (GM) and nuclear power, Mark Lynas has drawn increasingly hostile criticism from his erstwhile comrades in the green movement. In turn, he has sharpened his criticism of environmentalists for their hostility to technological and economic development. In his new book, The God Species: How the Planet Can Survive the Age of Humans, he attempts to reformulate environmentalism to overcome the excesses that have so far prevented it from saving the planet. This book will no doubt provoke debate, but what is this transformation really about, and is it really based on new ideas or merely the revision of old ones?

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Radical greens who encourage Prince Charles to butt into politics are setting history back hundreds of years.

Neil Davenport - 15 July 2009

The real scandal to emerge from the MPs expenses debacle is the demand for even less representative democracy. For certain commentators it seems the best way to restore the British state’s integrity is to reinstate the divine rule of those who ‘know best’ – the aristocracy and the House of Windsor.

Monarchists have leapt upon the expenses scandal in an attempt to rehabilitate the power of the undemocratic sovereign of Britain. For instance, in the Daily Telegraph Simon Heffer argued that the Queen should have a ‘role to play in steadying the ship’ of a battered parliament and that she ‘has the authority to act’ if the legitimacy crisis deepens (1).

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by Michael Barker

(Swans - May 4, 2009)   In March 2008, Sustainable Population Australia celebrated their 20th anniversary by organizing a two-day conference titled “Population, Peak Oil, Climate Change: their impact on the Millennium Development Goals.” For most concerned citizens it is commonsensical that all three of the issues examined at this conference — population, peak oil, and climate change — are intimately linked: however, as I demonstrated within a recent Monthly Review Zine article, the longstanding focus on the population question by leading environmentalists is severely problematic.

To summarize my argument: simply put the modern-day birth of the environmental movement in the United States (and elsewhere) evolved in large part from the success of an increasingly powerful population control movement. With massive financial and technical support from ostensibly progressive liberal philanthropists, like the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, by the late 1950s the population issue was adopted by the military-industrial complex, creating what has been referred to as the population-national security theory, a dubious theory that Professor Eric Ross notes, causally linked “overpopulation, resource exhaustion, hunger, political instability, communist insurrection, and danger to vital American interests.” Here it is noteworthy that these same liberal philanthropists also played a key role in promoting the population control movements’ predecessor; that is, eugenics.

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