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Endangered Species v. Endangered Jobs: Environmental Politics Hurts Man and Nature
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11261 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
Date : |
9 / 1993 |
1,557 Words |
| Author
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James M. Sheehan
James M. Sheehan is a research associate at the Competitive
Enterprise Institute, a free-market think tank in Washington,
D.C. |
Alaska and Norway lie on opposite sides of the Arctic Circle. The International Whaling Commission (IWC) allows Alaskan Eskimos to hunt the bowhead whales, which are an endangered species, with only 7,500 left, but forbids Norwegian fishermen from hunting minke whales, which at 760,000 are abundant enough to sustain a limited harvest.
Norway's recent announcement that it would defy the IWC ban and permit the hunting of 400-600 minkes off its coastal waters was greeted with much resistance from environmental pressure groups such as the Humane Society, the Earth Island Institute, and Greenpeace, which are organizing an international boycott of Norwegian products. In the United States, food chains such as Burger King, Wendy's, and Long John Silver's now shun Norwegian fish. And the Clinton administration has threatened trade sanctions against Norway if it goes ahead with its plan.
The controversy surrounding whales is a microcosm of environmental policy today. The political management of the environment caters to ideological zealots who premise their activities on the idea that society should confer rights upon animals. Meanwhile, government exempts Native Americans, a "politically correct" constituency, from the whaling ban.
This confusion leads to policies that are blatantly hypocritical on one hand, and disturbingly antihuman on the other. Whales become so important to environmental sensibilities that the livelihoods of Norwegian fishermen can be pushed aside. The environment becomes more important than humans.
ECOLOGICAL APARTHEID
The whale has become an international symbol for the environmental movement. The way we deal with the conservation of this resource will have important implications for all interaction between man and nature.
The environmentalist vision for preserving the whale supposes that animals are sacred and must be separated from man. If applied to all environmental resources (not just those the political system now deems important), this vision would lead to global ecological apartheid that would exclude humanity from the natural world.
Ecological segregationists invoke familiar antihuman themes: "There are too many people, technology is out of control, and we're greedy!" Mankind is the enemy whose impact on nature must be managed by an
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