The Politics of Fear

I have noticed that individuals pushing an issue agenda keep using fear to advance their narrative in the public's consensus. While there is evidence that fear and negative campaigning does indeed work to elect candidates into office, I do not think this is an effective method to increase public recognition of a political cause or empower a larger minority to demand change. Furthermore, I think ridiculous projections and/or talking points reduce one's ability to grow their coalition and damages the efforts by many who are working to actually achieve progress on the cause.

I'm going to take two examples to illustrate my rationale: radicals in the environmental movement (this post) and the U.S. right-wing campaign against socialism (future post TBD).

Knowing that an individual has said the following statements over the years do you really think that he is an effective messenger to increase the environmental movement's coalition?

• "the battle to feed all of humanity is over ... In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now" (1968);
  
• "India couldn't possibly feed two hundred million more people by 1980" and "I have yet to meet anyone familiar with the situation who thinks that India will be self-sufficient in food by 1971" (1968);
• "I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000" and "'Smog disasters' in 1973 might kill 200,000 people in New York and Los Angeles" (1969);
• "in ten years all important animal life in the sea will be extinct. Large areas of coastline will have to be evacuated because of the stench of dead fish" (1970);
• "before 1985, mankind will enter a genuine age of scarcity . . . in which the accessible supplies of many key minerals will be facing depletion" (1976);
• "by 1985 enough millions will have died to reduce the earth's population to some acceptable level, like 1.5 billion people" (1969);
• "by 1980 the United States would see its life expectancy drop to 42 because of pesticides, and by 1999 its population would drop to 22.6 million" (1969);
• "actually, the problem in the world is that there is much too many rich people..." (1990);
• "giving society cheap, abundant energy would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun" (1992); and
  
• "we've already had too much economic growth in the United States. Economic growth in rich countries like ours is the disease, not the cure" (1990)

The answer is clearly a resounding NO!!! I was catching up on some podcasts recently and listened to a Science Friday's from August entitled "Mass Extinction Event on the Horizon?" Host Ira Flatow was interviewing the man responsible for the previous statements... Paul Ehrlich.

Now I strongly consider myself an environmentalist. I believe public policy in regards to the environment must incorporate not only the needs of humans, it must take into consider the interests of plants and animals as we do in fact SHARE this planet with them.

However, it blows my mind why anybody takes Ehrlich seriously or would give him a platform to spew his nonsense... unless they are against growing the global coalition to take public policy measures to combat climate change and pollution caused from human activities. Ehrlich had the audacity to claim:

• "the United States is going to be 439 million people by 2050. That's roughly 300 million people more than anybody has ever given a reason for having alive in the United States at one time";
• "I think people need to be scared (of future environmental devastation)... Fear ought to be a big incentive now if we care anything about our children or grandchildren world" (Paul, fear doesn't work if you have 0 credibility);
  
• "we don't even have a population policy! In the United States we argue about immigration policy without having a population policy. It's kind of like designing an airplane that can load 100 people a minute and when you say how many should it fly and you say well don't worry about that just design a plane that will load 100 people a minute." (Seriously? First off, government doesn't belong in the bedroom!!! Beyond that, Paul has consistently ignored evidence showing that as economic material well-being goes up, birthrates go down & the role technology can and will play to produce goods consumers want far more efficiently.)

This nonsense and tactical advise does not and will not convince anybody who is not a part of the growing environmental coalition to join -- it only reduces the credibility of the movement as a whole and damages the credibility and validity of the environmental brand. For the sake of the planet, please stop giving Ehrlich anymore media opportunities to tarnish the hard fought gains the environmental movement has made with the American and global public.