Behind Obama's Green Agenda - Gun Control - U.S. Sovereignty - Wake Up America!

VIDEO: NAS ON FOX NEWS SPECIAL SUSTAINABILITY REPORT

Oct 10, 2012 | This Sunday Fox News aired a special report on the sustainability movement which featured NAS president Peter Wood, who talked about NAS's examination of the movement.

The report also included our friend organization FIRE, Danish author and professor Bjørn Lomborg, AEI scholar Steven Hayward, and the former president of Second Nature, Anthony Cortese.

http://youtu.be/I-QDEh4jf8w

Click on the image below to watch the 40-minute segment.

What do the AAAS, the Ecological Society of America (ESA), FOX News, the Sierra Club, and the National Association of Scholars have in common?

They all think that U.S. overpopulation either does not exist and/or has no relation to sustainability, or that if it does, that information should be suppressed.

Many of you are aware of how the AAAS shot itself in the foot many months ago by preventing, on the most disingenuous of pretexts, both Californians for Population Stabilization (CAPS) and the Population Institute of Canada (PIC) from operating exhibitor booths on population at the AAAS meetings in Vancouver this past February. If not, the tale is told here in an article by David Schindler et al. Special thanks to those of you who signed the letter to AAAS protesting that censorship by AAAS.

The ESA recently proved more open-minded and less paranoid than AAAS, and at their meeting in August 2012 in Portland we had both an exhibitor booth on population issues and a half-day session of talks on "Population, Environment and Sustainability Issues in the U.S.". These events are described in a just published article, "Population Camel Gets Its Nose into Ecologists' Tent: Hopes Are High That The Rest Will Follow," which also tweaks the ESA leadership (again) for pretending over the last 20 years that population has nothing to do with true sustainability and for suppressing, til now, the voices of those who think otherwise. Other organizations are tweaked as well, including:

The National Association of Scholars (NAS) has recently been critiquing, often on solid grounds, the degree to which the sustainability movement has been taken over by ideologues, charlatans, and the politically correct, and links to some of NAS's articles are given below. Some of these pieces, however, tend to throw the baby out with the bathwater, and are uninformed by the opinions of the few ecologists (e.g. myself, E.O. Wilson & ???) who are members of the NAS. Though some of the authors (e.g. Peter Wood) are good friends, I feel they are bit too much in the thrall of the Wall Street Journal and Cato Institute and the notion that free markets, advancing technology and God will prevent overpopulation from ever being a problem.

Not surprisingly the NAS message below also gives us a link to a 40-minute long
video from FOX News on sustainability and Obama's green agenda. No question about it, FOX, like NAS, found plenty of balloons of hot air/misbehavior worth pricking and exposing. But with Fox it's always a mixed bag, and their frequently anti-scientific, anti-environmental persona shines through. FOX pundits have always been quick to put down or smear any person or organization who proposes population stabilization. Too many, unlapsed Catholics (O'Reilly, Hannity, etc.) among their pundits is a big part of their problem.

Here in a nutshell is the best succinct characterization of what the sustainability movement has become (very different from what it started out as in the 1960s and 1970s)(see article by Glenn Ricketts provided by NAS below):

"Sustainability can put on different hats at different times, sounding as if it is sternly scientific at one moment, enchanted with mystical unities the next, and down in the street fighting for social justice and cut-rate mortgages the moment after that. Like most ideologies, it can be amorphous when it is tactically useful to its proponents to blur the issues." -Glenn Ricketts

The writing is on the wall: it is too late to save what was once a meaningful, useful word. It is now too frequently associated with cant, cliche, ideologues, and hidden agendas, with objective science only a secondary consideration. Further cant and chatter about sustainability in academia, government agencies and scientific and environmental organizations will justly raise further suspicions among the general citizenry, discredit institutions, and, ultimately, be damaging to society and the environment.

As usual, a picture is worth a thousand words: check out this image by Vermont cartoonist Tim Newcomb and the one following from blog xkcd. (If these don't come through, let me know and I'll send copies to you personally).

BTW, if you want to keep up to date on U.S. population-immigration-environment issues, you should know if you don't already that the mainline media, environmental organizations, and scientific organizations are of almost no help. Your best bet would be to subscribe to The Social Contract, and then to also get on the mailing lists of Californians for Population Stabilization, Negative Population Growth, ............, Population-Environment Balance and Center for Immigration Studies. You will be amazed to discover the abundance of important information and news on these topics that is simply not mentioned by mainline sources let alone reported on objectively by them.

Curmudgeonly yours, Stuart Hurlbert