My ten year old son isn't very fond of climate alarmists. One of his pet hates are the never ending parade of memes that depict humans as harmful for the environment. The world with humans is depicted as a horrible sewer. A world with no humans, on the other hand, is depicted as an Eden. If we could just hurry up and die, things would be wonderful.
My son has correctly identified climate alarmism as a death cult, and he's not very impressed. Not least because his personal experience is quite the opposite of what the cult claims. We have a vibrant balcony, full of life. We have flowers, and we have insects. We have micro-composts brimming with bugs and worms. None of this would exist without our attention. Without our stewardship, our balcony would be a desert.
By extension, my son understands that farm animals exist only because we tend to them. I've also told him about the forest that I tended back in Norway. It was horribly overgrown, and there was very little bio-diversity as a consequence. There were rodents, and there were mosquitos, but not much beyond that. As for vegetation, it was homogenous as well. One type of trees, two types of bushes and a few types of weeds. That was all.
It wasn't before I cut away the lower branches of trees, cleared away large numbers of bushes, and cut down weeds to let other plants grow that the place became livable. The mosquitos disappeared. Rodents became less plentiful. Birds started nesting. Hares appeared. What had been an overgrown mess, became a meadow with a canopy of green from well trimmed trees. The thicket became a garden.
This proves that human activity has the potential to increase bio-diversity, and the only reason this wouldn't happen spontaneously is if property is unprotected, or concentrated into few hands. With few owners, we get mega farms and mega plantations. Without property being protected by law, we get a rush to take out resources, followed by inactivity. I wouldn't have bothered to clear out the forest had I not known that it would remain with my family.
The importance of strong property rights in protecting bio-diversity is vividly on display on the island of Hispaniola, which is divided into Haiti to the west and the Dominican Republic to the east. The difference can be seen from space.
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| Haiti deforestation |
By NASA - http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a000000/a002600/a002640/, Public Domain, Link
Most sources explain the deforestation of Haiti as something related to local differences in culture. Sometimes there's the insinuation that the deforestation is a result of capitalism gone mad. However, the true cause of the disaster can be found by looking up relative strength of property rights in the Caribbean.
The Dominican Republic has much stronger property rights than Haiti. As a consequence, there's been a rush to take out resources from forests in Haiti, without a corresponding rush in the Dominican Republic. With no incentive to plant new forest or let young forest grow, the result has been a desert in Haiti.
This relationship between property rights and bio-diversity is something we see over and over again, yet death cults ranging from communists to climate alarmists refuse to accept this. They don't see the good that human activity does to the environment in the Dominican Republic. They only see the destruction in Haiti, and they blame it on capitalism even though it's the Dominican Republic that's the capitalist nation on the island of Hispaniola.
The planet isn't dying because of human activity. It's messed up due to destructive policies. Insects aren't disappearing because of humans. They are disappearing because composting isn't any longer done at the scales that it used to be done. Mega farms are replacing smaller farms. Chemicals are replacing compost. But all of this is due to bad policies. Remove the bad policies, and everything will become greener and healthier.
Humans are the stewards of the world, and all that's required for bio-diversity to increase is to strengthen property rights everywhere.
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| Greta Thunberg |
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