Radical Environmentalism: Should 25% of Land be Off Limits?

The anti humanism of radical environmentalism is sometimes explicit—and more often, implicit.  The panic du jour is species extinction—which we’ve discussed here at SHS before.  But the leading NGOs show their radical hands in an article in today’s Washington Post, which reports on plans that would put the developing world into permanent dependency and fully one quarter of the usable land off limits to substantial human development.  From the story:

While many industrialized countries have undertaken conservation efforts at home and helped fund this work overseas, “the reality is we’re still exporting degradation across the world” by taking food and other resources from the developing world, according to co-author Nicholas K. Dulvy.

Selling agricultural products allows poor people in developing countries to earn a living!  Add in the desire to keep them from developing their own resources—and somehow making up for it by redistributing wealth, as promoted by activists on this issue and global warming hysterics—would be to make the currently poor permanently destitute—and on international welfare instead of becoming self sufficient.

Worse, the environmental radicals wants to essentially close 25% of the land from significant development:

Environmental groups are pushing for a goal of protecting 25 percent of all land on earth and 15 percent of the sea by 2020. At the moment, roughly 14 percent of terrestrial areas and less than 1 percent of the ocean enjoy some degree of environmental safeguards.

And actually, even that estimate is too small, according to Conservation International, one of the major promotions of the environmental panic. From its Web site:

According to the analysis, protecting 25 percent of the lands and 15 percent of the oceans is still a preliminary and conservative estimate. It takes into account the needs to address only carbon storage, but when other important ecosystem services – like water supply, crop pollination and fisheries – are added, the numbers will be higher. Also, in regions highly impacted by environmental degradation, protected areas are likely to be the only intact natural environments that will remain.

The good news is that these UN conferences are mostly all talk.  The last convention wasn’t followed, and now they are even more ambitious in their goals.  And whatever nutty agreements come out of this conference, if any, it will be DOA—at least in the USA.

Yes, of course we should manage resources—including fauna and flora—and set aside areas to remain wild.  But putting 25% or more of the land under the aegis of radical environmentalists?  Not. A. Chance.  The answer to what ails the world isn’t more human poverty, but more human wealth.