If you read this site, it won't surprise you to see me write that some people feel like the environment is more important than their fellow man.  I am not saying they all want to kill their fellow man, though some advocate forced birth control, while others just want us to "live small" - but by that they don't mean lower your carbon footprint they mean literally make your footprint smaller by genetically forcing people to be shorter.   

Maybe there's something to that.  Have you been to Holland?  Even the women are my size over there.  They have to be the tallest people on the planet but they're not implicated in global warming very much at all, because activists see windmills in tourist post cards or something.

A short while ago I wrote about a Science Cafe talk given by microbiologist Dr. Alex Berezow on Genetic Modification And Its Benefits.   I wrote him an email about it and noted " I think you were able to handle the questions pretty well including when you said if you had to choose between the environment and saving lives you'd choose lives because, of course, that was politically incorrect in that audience" and the murmur when he said that was tangible, even on a YouTube video.  He was not saying genetic modification was bad for the environment, he was instead making the point that mankind has always impacted the environment - but they didn't like hearing it.

The experience stuck out for him as well.  Writing in Forbes, he referenced that talk and the questions he got after his statement.   To wit: "Aren't we just artificially increasing the carrying capacity of the world?" and "feeding a monster" as she put it.  The monster being humanity.

Of course we are talking about increasing the 'carrying capacity' of the world.   Seattle environmentalists faced with a hungry tribe that had outgrown its ability to hunt game and forage would have started talking about overpopulation and manufacturing prehistoric condoms.   Prehistoric scientists instead came up with domesticating livestock and creating agriculture so more people could.    Who are we going to tell they can't have as many children as they want in a liberal society?

Instead of encouraging people to optimize our resources and technology, some think humans are parasites.    Sure, those are probably people in the humanities, you are thinking, but I have seen rational people write the same thing.   Yet we continue to feed more people with less impact, despite environmentalist claims.   In fact, farming is leading the way in "dematerialization" - using less input for more output.   Crop yields went up 57 percent from 1980 to 2005, which would have required additional land equivalent to 6X current U.S. cropland had we stayed at 1980 levels of technology and not thought about making lives better for people.

In a world run by that Seattle audience, only the rich and powerful would get to eat.   In a world where we recognize that nature is a resource that needs to be protected and so therefore our usage optimized, everyone in the world can be obese, rich and poor alike.   I'm not saying that is the optimum either, but making that choice possible has always been the goal of humanity.     That's freedom and it used to be called progress.   Now progressives seem to want to go back in time.