Free Republic

The aims of the World Summit on Sustainable Development are laudable. Cleaner air and water, better stewardship of global resources, the eradication of poverty and disease no one can argue with such objectives. The question is how to get there from here. Let me offer a prescription for sustainable development that begins with a simple and powerful idea - an idea which, unfortunately, will often be at odds with what delegates, journalists and other observers hear in Johannesburg. The idea is that economic growth leads to levels of wealth and income that, in turn, inevitably produce societies that are cleaner,...

The year was 1838. In England, the Industrial Revolution was under way, but it had made rich only the owners of production, not the workers. In increasingly crowded cities, ordinary people struggled for their daily existence. Some of the poor rioted. The Poor Laws were under attack: Welfare to the needy would only increase their dependence and encourage the breeding of still more hungry mouths to feed, said critics. It was in this pivotal year that Darwin, back from his voyage on the Beagle and trying to understand the forces that drove the origin of new species, read the works...

Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) 817 Broadway, 3rd Floor, New York, NY 10003 FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE CONTACT: Cyril Boynes, Jr. April 12, 2005 212-598-4000 * email:cboynes@core-online.org Africans and US civil right group confront RAN over intimidation of banks Eco-activists keep world’s poor impoverished, hungry, disease-ridden, says CORE. NEW YORK – The Rainforest Action Network’s narrow political agenda tramples on the human rights of the world’s most destitute people, keeps them impoverished, and sends many to early graves, the Congress of Racial Equality charged today. CORE is challenging environmental extremism on the streets of New York, at the JP Morgan Chase...

WOMAN'S ERROR AND HER DEBT No despot ever flung forth his legions to die in foreign conquest, no privilege-ruled nation ever erupted across its borders, to lock in death embrace with another, but behind them loomed the driving power of a population too large for its boundaries and its natural resources. No period of low wages or of idleness with their want among the workers, no peonage or sweatshop, no child-labor factory, ever came into being, save from the same source. Nor have famine and plague been as much "acts of God" as acts of too prolific mothers. They, also,...

How Does Society Readjust its Direction in Case of Deviation from its Law? "If an instrument of governing is dictatorial, as in political systems in the world today, the society's vigilance towards deviation from law will have only one way to gain readjustment. That is violence, which means revolution against the instrument of governing. This violence or revolution, even if it is an expression of the feeling of the society against deviation, is not carried out by the whole society. It is undertaken only by those who have the initiative and boldness to proclaim the will of the society." The...

LifeSiteNews.com Extra Special MUST READ Report on Population Control Document reveals the why of attacks against life and family over past decades TORONTO, May 18, 2004 (LifeSiteNews.com)- We must first stress that the 66-page LifeSiteNews.com document to which this story refers is a MUST READ for all persons concerned about life, family and even freedom. For a small number of activists and leaders, there is little that is new in the document but, for the vast majority, the all-important big picture it reveals is critical. Without this understanding, most will continue to fight against shadows and ignore real culprits. How...

Marquelis is one of 40 men who in the last year and a half have had vasectomies in the humble towns of El Tigre and Rio Cedro on Colombia's Caribbean coast. In return for undergoing the operations, the men receive plots of land from a 54-year-old movie producer who sees sterilization as a way to reduce poverty. The man, who declined to be identified, pays for the operations. While female sterilization campaigns in Latin America have met with outrage in the past, Colombia's vasectomy-for-land scheme is cheered by locals. The program's sponsor, who himself has two daughters and has had...

he days are long past when the Episcopal Church could jokingly be called "the Republican party at prayer." But the environmental movement, now more than ever, does represent the American Left at worship. The green crusade is now crafting a new way for its own troubling religion to pervert traditional faith. Having fought in federal court to deny its religiosity — and thus continue its life-sustaining flow of taxpayer dollars — the Down With People machine is donning religious vestments and teaming up with the Bush administration to tap the president's faith-based initiative. CNSNews.com reports that "EPA is informally seeking...

An investigative report just released by the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute (C-FAM) and the International Organizations Research Group (IORP) has found widespread financial and programmatic mismanagement within the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA). "The United Nations Population Fund: Assault on the World's Peoples" reports that internal U.N. audits show that UNFPA does not monitor the quality or reliability of the reproductive goods it ships to poor countries. The report also unveils little-known internal U.N. audits that accuse UNFPA of failing to account for up to 50 percent of its funds for the years 1998 and 1999. UNFPA is...

Failed Predictions: book review of 'Betrayal of Science and Reason' by Paul Ehrlich The Ehrlichs have a message--simplistic and wrong; the paranoid title of their book pretty much tells the story: They sense a conspiracy by "anti- environmentalists," who have "successfully sowed seeds of doubt among journalists, policy-makers, and the public at large about the reality and importance of such phenomena as overpopulation, global climate change, ozone depletion, and loss of biodiversity." But there is no conspiracy out there; and if journalists are listening, it may just be that they find scientific facts persuasive. Paul Ehrlich is a professor of...

Joel Kovel's recent (2002) book THE ENEMY OF NATURE is a book about capitalism and ecology. Kovel's thesis is simple: capitalism is destroying the world, and only ecosocialism can save us from it. His logic is impeccable; Kovel starts by impressing us with the gravity of the ecological crisis facing us today, and proceeds to an analysis of what "capital" is and why it is the enemy of nature. First of all, capital is a relationship between human beings. "It is humans living as capital, people who become capital's personifications, who destroy ecosystems." (39) Capital "represents that regime in which...

Chinese women married to Taiwanese men are being ordered to have abortions or sterilization surgery during visits to the mainland to comply with China's controversial "one-child policy." At least six of those women report that family planning officials forced them to undergo pregnancy tests in recent months, according to the Taiwanese body that deals with mainland relations, the Straits Exchange Foundation (SEF). SEF legal services director Patricia Lin said by phone from Taipei Friday that those who were deemed to have violated the "one-child" rule - by getting pregnant after already having a child - were also fined and threatened...

Seeking to claim the environmental movement for its own, Conservatives often trumpet the fact that Teddy Roosevelt, a Republican, created the National Parks System. Despite environmentalism's modest beginnings, the movement has become a Socialist leviathan, unworthy of claim by anyone purporting to stand for the God-given rights of man. Desperate to be accepted at any cost, conservatives have jumped onto a liberal train, hoping to arrive at a conservative destination. In a June 26, 2002 column entitled Liberating America: Environmentalists Decide Nation Worth Preserving, Steve Sailer asserts that since environmentalists have woken up to the fact that immigration contributes to...

The green doctrine that nonhuman things have "objective value" may be descended from Marxist theory of objective value. This notion was exploded in 1871 by Carl Menger's publication of *Grundsatze der Volkswirtschaftslehre*, which exposed all values as radically subjective. As Aldo Leopold admitted, this is absolutely true for naturalistic aesthetic values. To be accepted as an "environmentalist" nowadays, it is not sufficient to seek to implement the most effective means of conserving natural resources and minimizing environmental harm. It is necessary to accept the dogma that free people are self-destructive, and that statist aggression through global nationalization and totalitarian control...

Theory Most of the many Americans who would label themselves as environmentalists, do so on the basis of a genuine advocacy of a proper stewardship of man's environment. Indeed, by such a yardstick we're all "environmentalists" - a conscious desire for a polluted and demonstrably hazardous environment would be patently irrational. Implicit but rarely explicit in such advocacy, is the premise that human health and well-being is at least a, if not the, standard of value and prime motivation. For this reason - and the fact that a majority of people are not versed in philosophy, much less Objectivist philosophy...