Bishop Hill Pluralism - an explanation for greens
This letter was sent by Steven Landsburg, professor of economics at the University of Rochester and the author of several popular books on the subject, to his daughter's teacher. It concerns the school's attempts to indoctrinate the girl in environmentalism. The letter forms part of an article by Landsburg in which he discusses the need for pluralism and respect for those with different views, noting how these environmentalists seem to fail on both counts. This is also worth a read for those with the time.
Dear Rebecca:
When we lived in Colorado, Cayley was the only Jewish child in her class. There were also a few Moslems. Occasionally, and especially around Christmas time, the teachers forgot about this diversity and made remarks that were appropriate only for the Christian children. These remarks came rarely, and were easily counteracted at home with explanations that different people believe different things, so we chose not to say anything at first. We changed our minds when we overheard a teacher telling a group of children that if Santa didn't come to your house, it meant you were a very bad child; this was within earshot of an Islamic child who certainly was not going to get a visit from Santa. At that point, we decided to share our concerns with the teachers. They were genuinely apologetic and there were no more incidents. I have no doubt that the teachers were good and honest people who had no intent to indoctrinate, only a certain naïveté derived from a provincial upbringing.
Perhaps that same sort of honest naïveté is what underlies the problems we've had at the JCC this year. Just as Cayley's teachers in Colorado were honestly oblivious to the fact that there is diversity in religion, it may be that her teachers at the JCC have been honestly oblivious that there is diversity in politics.
Let me then make that diversity clear. We are not environmentalists. We ardently oppose environmentalists. We consider environmentalism a form of mass hysteria akin to Islamic fundamentalism or the War on Drugs. We do not recycle. We teach our daughter not to recycle. We teach her that people who try to convince her to recycle, or who try to force her to recycle, are intruding on her rights.
The preceding paragraph is intended to serve the same purpose as announcing to Cayley's Colorado teachers that we are not Christians. Some of them had never been aware of knowing anybody who was not a Christian, but they adjusted pretty quickly.
Once the Colorado teachers understood that we and a few other families did not subscribe to the beliefs that they were propagating, they instantly apologized and stopped. Nobody asked me what exactly it was about Christianity that I disagreed with; they simply recognized that they were unlikely to change our views on the subject, and certainly had no business inculcating our child with opposite views.
I contrast this with your reaction when I confronted you at the preschool graduation. You wanted to know my specific disagreements with what you had taught my child to say. I reject your right to ask that question. The entire program of environmentalism is as foreign to us as the doctrine of Christianity. I was not about to engage in detailed theological debate with Cayley's Colorado teachers and they would not have had the audacity to ask me to. I simply asked them to lay off the subject completely, they recognized the legitimacy of the request, and the subject was closed.
I view the current situation as far more serious than what we encountered in Colorado for several reasons. First, in Colorado we were dealing with a few isolated remarks here and there, whereas at the JCC we have been dealing with a systematic attempt to inculcate a doctrine and to quite literally put words in children's mouths. Second, I do not sense on your part any acknowledgment that there may be people in the world who do not share your views. Third, I am frankly a lot more worried about my daughter's becoming an environmentalist than about her becoming a Christian. Fourth, we face no current threat of having Christianity imposed on us by petty tyrants; the same can not be said of environmentalism. My county government never tried to send me a New Testament, but it did send me a recycling bin.
Although I have vowed not to get into a discussion on the issues, let me respond to the one question you seemed to think was very important in our discussion: Do I agree that with privilege comes responsibility? The answer is no. I believe that responsibilities arise when one undertakes them voluntarily. I also believe that in the absence of explicit contracts, people who lecture other people on their "responsibilities" are almost always up to no good. I tell my daughter to be wary of such people — even when they are preschool teachers who have otherwise earned a lot of love.
Sincerely,
Steven Landsburg
Reader Comments (137)
The public sector utterly discredits anything it touches.
All goes to Landfill and you have to pay extra Council Tax for the privilege.
While living in the mountains of N. Wales we were given a number of various sized, very expensive looking containers in which to put material for recycling, glass, cardboard, plastc, food waste, etc. etc.. I asked how often these would be collected. and was told it was up to me to take them to the recepticals in the nearest village which was three and a half miles away. I estimated 2-3 trips a week which would cost me between £350 and £500 a year.
As you can probably guess. The containers were used for just about anything and everything other than recycling.
He doesn't seem to know what "literally" means, but that aside I agree with most of what he says. I do not recycle anything either, simply because this practice is based on ideology, rather than actual need, and comes at a senseless cost in money and energy. Good on him, I say.
In this area we are now up to 4 wheelie bins and a food waste caddy. Some people with small gardens have them virtually filled with bins. The sheer number of collections can't be particularly green, but the real scandal is the council's insistence that containers put in the recycling bin should be rinsed out. This is a triple whammy, wasting drinking water and loading the sewerage system with uncooked food which is much harder to treat than the human waste the system is intended for as well as increasing the hydraulic load.
If rubbish needs to be washed for recycling it should be done at a central point where the water used can be recovered and reused.
The whole exercise is typical greenwash and a pointless gesture.
There is also a question as to why every council regardless of their political leanings has accepted the ever increasing landfill tax without demur.
TinyCO2 said
> You wanted to know why some recycling uses more
> resources than it saves. I gave you an example
> where it's going wrong.
No I didn't. I noted that I don't share the Bishop's certainty that "most recycling" uses more resources than it saves. It may be true or it may not, but I don't know and my guess is that he doesn't either. It is just the type of certainty that demagogues like to proclaim, whereas a pragmatist would be more equivocal. Pragmatists are generally less dangerous.
Roy said
> There are already charges on the consumption of
> plastic bags and they have been very successful
> in reducing their use, especially in Wales. I
> assume you live in England since you seem
> incapable of distinguishing between England,
> Britain, and the United Kingdom.
I made no mention of England, Britain, or the United Kingdom.
Chandra
Putting aside distractions (from everyone) about Wales/England etc etc........(OH, WHAT ABOUT ROCKALL EH?!...reminds me of the debate in The Life of Brian when they're arguing over whether they're the peoples front of Judea or the Judeans peoples front.....anyway, I digress...) I can find very little indeed to fault your suggestion list.....All sound stuff.
Anyone who does tease apart what you say with a (recycled??!) electron microscope are just splitters....(That pertains to the Life of Brian bit above).
As a child in Wales (just so you know) I and all in the gang I terrorised the community with went to huge personal efforts to find the Corona bottles that were refunded.
Wouldn't have done it without the incentive of course......I was a filthy capitalist even then....
Steven Landsburg is entitled to his beliefs, and to control how his child is educated (FULL STOP)
I didn't used to be a great supporter of this degree of individualism, but after watching the AGW/Climate Change and environmentalist brigade at work, I am now a believer in opposing this new religious dogma, and it's attempt to indoctrinate.
Many of the comments here have been recycled.
I have exactly the same experience as DocBud - I just don't bother with most of it, and the recycle bin still gets full.
As for this guy, I fully agree with him. He has a point of view, and I may not agree with it, but he has the right not to have alternative points of view forced on him (law-breaking excepted).
My thoughts for a long time have been that what we really need is to become a 'real' disposable society. I noticed when travelling in Ireland that the gypsies there had made an awful mess of one beautiful site. Why? Because they were now using what society produces, and just never had the experience most of us were brought up with to bin all our waste. They do what they have done for generations, but in the past, it would be biodegradable, and no problem. Now it is not.
When travelling in the Northern Territories in Australia, I noticed the exact same problem, and for the exact same reason. You can regularly see a beer carton surrounded by flattened beer cans by the road. The Aborigines drive somewhere, drink a case of beer, and just leave it. Most of us would not, because we learnt from year dot to bin our waste. They have not had that training for generations, just like the gypsies have not. In reality, it is 'our' fault, not 'theirs', if you look for an 'us and them' reason.
The solution is a truly disposable society, which probably equates to a 100% recyclable society. Chuck it all away, but in a way it can be reused. I have no solutions, I admit, but I think 3d printers will probably fix the situation, and create a situation where all that old waste will be immediately valuable again.
In my suburb of Chicago, they do not accept metal except for pop cans or aluminum foil. I put a piece of steel out and they did not take it, so I called. They said we don't accept it, but the rubbish pickers will take it, just leave it next to the trash can. So they are fine with scrap men picking out the most valuable part of the trash, and they do come by all night and early morning of trash day. Makes no sense unless it is not a business but a symbol.
Pisspoor letter from a species of US anti-green fanatic. What the f*** is wrong with recycling? It doesn't take that long. WTF is wrong with environmentalism in general?? Are rainforests, tigers, etc not worth the bother? Global warming alarmism is the issue here, (isn't it) let's keep the baby in the bath after we pull the plug out!
An interesting debate:
http://theconversation.com/on-global-warming-settled-science-and-george-brandis-25806
What the f*** is wrong with recycling?
Apr 23, 2014 at 3:36 AM TonyB
See earlier comments in this thread to understand what the f*** is wrong with recycling. In brief it results in an overall waste of resources. As has been pointed out, where recycling saves significant resources (eg steel, lead acid batteries) people do it anyway.
I saw my neighbour put a box of glass jars in her car. She told me she was going to the bottle bank - a round trip of about 15 km. She was convinced that the petrol consumed would be well worth it, in enabling the recycling of a couple of kilograms of glass.
I don't know about the South of England but here in the North the only paper recycling plant is at the old steel works at Shotton, N.Wales. Lorries carrying paper to Shotton can be seen every day on the M56. I presume they return empty.
Glass all goes to a recycling plant in Doncaster where any batch contaminated with, for example, crockery is ground to be mixed with aggregate for roads. Also green glass is either ground or exported to France as they do not have facilities for it. Economic nonsense.
TonyB Apr 23, 2014 at 3:36 AM
"... WTF is wrong with environmentalism in general?? Are rainforests, tigers, etc not worth the bother? ..."
Putting the gross rudeness of this whole comment to one side, it's a good example of the confusion that has bedevilled this thread. It confuses concern for our environment with environmentalism.
Environmentalism is a viciously misanthropic political ideology that systematically privileges the non-human over the human and "the elect" over the rest, is profoundly hostile to human freedom of any kind, and - in its essence - denies that human civilisation and human lives have any intrinsic value.
The horrifying negative impacts that environmentalism has had on the poor in this world - the DDT ban, the bio-fuels disaster, the ongoing Golden Rice scandal, artificially high food and energy prices, and so on and on - are manifestations of its true nature. These are features, not bugs.
Recycling is not in itself meritorious or worthwhile. That something so very obvious should even have to be said is proof of how far our conceptual world has already been captured by environmentalism. Those people above who described themselves as environmentalists, but who are clearly not "environmentalists" have a real problem: how can they express and act on their concern for our environment without conceding the ground to environmentalism, just by the words they use?
This thread has the whole green debate in a nutshell:
"How can you not agree with (green thing)? It is wonderful, you must be some sort of evil capitalist."
"(green thing) is fundamentally flawed because (reasons) and actually wastes resources / increases pollution"
"How can you not agree with (green thing)? It is wonderful, you must be some sort of evil capitalist."
When my daughter was 6, in first class at small 4 teacher country school, I cleared, plowed, limed & fertilised 320 acres, half a square mile block. It was planted to rock melons & water melons, & under planted with a mixture of pasture grasses & legumes. The idea was to cover the cost of pasture development with the melon crop.
A few weeks later my daughter got off the school bus crying. Her young city girl teacher, newly graduated & full of chattering class idealism, had declared that any one who cut down a tree was a vandal.
The next day, with the head master & a couple of other members of the parents & citizens association I had a gentle chat to the young lady. We took her to see my 320 acres of thriving melon plants, & explained to her that out in the country we had to clear trees to earn a living, & produce the wealth that paid her salary.
I don't know if she was convinced, but she did refrain from voicing her radical greenie point of view in future.
Within a few minutes of completing her 2 year stint among the rednecks in the bush, she had scuttled back to the city, where her kind flourish. She did not even wait for the end of year party.
Bishop,
I think that the Germans are creating some new very large holes which will need to be filled with something once all the lignite has been extracted.
Chandra
apart from plasma technology nothing in your list is new to us children of the 50s in the UK. Even bags for life are old hat, even the free element of plastic bags was introduced well after the plastic bag. For me rather than Corona it was Barrs (Irn Bru) and Crieff Aerated Water who supplied additional pocket money.
You must agree that things like knitting, sewing, repair sewing,darning should be taught in school handwork classes again?
@NW spot on
skeptics have the grown up logic
alarmists want the childish simple logic
..and want to program it into the children ..and with no questioning of authority ..all hail BigGreen
Despite being a Christian, I think that there should be no Religious Education in schools (except by choice). I also think there should be no 'sex education' in schools either. In both cases it is abysmally taught. In the latter case much 'sex education' is state sponsored child abuse - as is the teaching of 'climate change'. The more 'sex education' has increased the higher the number of cases of teenage pregnancy and of child on child rape etc.
There! - another nutter maybe?
Steven Landsburg comes across as a nutter who is opposed to all recycling in principle, detests all environmentalism of any kind and is fixated on controlling every belief his children are exposed to.
I doubt that's really what he thinks, but that's how he comes across.
"Composting -- Best bang for the buck"
http://www.cmconsultinginc.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/Composting_LSA_BestBangforBuck1.pdf
This is a short article found on Google Scholar that may be of interest.... Only composting some types of organic waste show a return. However, I believe the formulas in the model they used (with some data) may actually show CO2 as a negative and a cost -- rather than acknowledging that CO2 can also be beneficial -- as plant food.
However, worth a look!
He doesn't come across as a nutter to me. It's a straightforward point - if you don't practice a certain religion, schools don't usually try and convert you. They respect your beliefs. If you're not a true believer in environmentalism, they do try and convert you (or rather your children) and don't respect your point of view at all.
As someone who lives in a part of the UK constantly being eroded by the sea, I have often wondered whether the material that goes to land fill could be used to restore and bulk up certain areas.
There is another issue here where greens have been allowed to shape and colour the debate.
Landfill has been set up as a completely negative option, always illustrated by a low angle picture of a bulldozer with spiked wheels moving a pile of rubbish.
I know of a number of landfill sites which have been completed, capped and landscaped and most people don't know they are anything but natural. You won't find pictures of them in green recycling propaganda. Where a former extraction site has been used the result is a return of the landscape to its natural appearance.
Neither is landfill final disposal. Potential resources in the waste are still there, stored against the point when their recovery becomes truly viable and economic, either because new technology becomes available or raw materials prices rise, or a combination of both. This will not require subsidies and the public will be largely unaware that it is happening, so there is no mileage in it for grandstanding politicians.
Interesting facts about landfill here:
http://raedwald.blogspot.co.uk/2008/06/no-shortage-of-landfill-in-uk.html
It sums up the climate debate
one side : The "of course the planet is warming", "of course recycling can only be a good thing", That's why : they get so frustrated with skeptics,
: and they don't believe they need to check their facts.
.. lets call them the shallow thinkers.
- Whereas on the other side you have deeper thinkers
On Steven Landsburg seeming like a bit of a nutter, that's only cos the dramagreens have succeeded in moving what 'normal' is
.. Provactive yes, but if he can show that overall recycling is more harm than good then that is a rational argument.
- Can you say what the net environmental value of recycling is ? If you can't then you can't say that you are more rational than he.
(I note the Freakonomics economist Steven Levitt employs the same kinds of logic)
- My no-recycling day is my favouite weapon to use against trolls and the BBC climate troll network, cos I know it really upsets them
..... but really makes little difference to the environment.
I firmly believe that left to economic drivers, and not bureaucratic regulations, recycling will occur naturally.
As an example of this consider when the wool industry still existed in Bradford in Yorkshire, washing of the raw wool resulted in significant amounts of Lanolin being flushed into the sewage system.
An entrepreneur established a very profitable company to extract the lanolin from the sludge produced at the Esholt sewage plant. If memory serves correctly he was supplying close to 70% of the lanolin used in the UK Cosmetic Industry. He was also using a further example of recycling in that some of the solvent extraction vessels in his facility had been fabricated from re-purposed steel floats that he had purchased as scrap in the 1950s from the temporary Mulberry Harbor.
Even his waste stream was profitable, the solid waste left over, having been steam sterilized, was bagged and sold as a high nitrogen fertilizer.
A true example of the old expression "where there's muck there's brass". Also I'm sure that whilst many parents may have told their daughter to "wipe that muck of her face" when she first tried lipstick they wouldn't have realized just how close to the truth that statement was.
An example of an opportunity seen and acted on, capitalism at its best and a win-win for all involved.
Mike
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Trashmore_Park
A brilliant example of landfill re-use.
From the Ecclesiastical Uncle, an old retired bureaucrat in a field only remotely related to climate with minimal qualifications and only half a mind.
I liked the letter, but then, I would, wouldn't I?
(1) The English is eloquent and easy to understand, like the stuff I like to think I routinely produced in days of yore but, alas, am now sure is beyond me.
(2) (re Jonothan Abbott) I'm old (future is of limited duration), a sexist MCP (never had a baby), Tory (L/Cpl aspiring to be Col Blimp), an environmentalist (never earned enough to be a conspicuous consumer), capitalist (but regretted the vote I gave them and seldom worked outside the public sector), and according to the nutters I know almost certainly one of them. And I am fixated on controlling the beliefs my children are exposed to but, inevitably, have had no more success than is experienced by the average dad. In all, just like most of the good chaps I know.
I hope that's how I come across.
On my website, one of the first things I addressed was why I call myself a conservationist, not an environmentalist. While I do recycle when it makes sense, there is a painful awareness that doing so may lend support to the environmentalists and their dogma. Sadly, when discussing prudent use of resources, one has to weigh the cost of appearing to agree with or support the environmental zealots versus the real need to think about best use of current resources. One must also realize there will be legitimate disagreements. Not everyone will go along with every idea. As noted by other commenters, recycling and most of the requirements the environmentalists demanded everyone adhere to would have come about naturally as technology and cost allowed. There are many, many very bad ideas that came about by "trying to save the planet".
A number of the comments on this thread seem misdirected and lacking in understanding of the points raised by Professor Landsburg. First of all, he clearly considers Environmentalism a religion and one he finds objectionable. The fact that he intervened with an apparent public school to request that Christmas not be preached and an apparent private Jewish school ('preschool of the Jewish Community Center') that environmentalism not be preached indicates to me that he takes his religion seriously and wants his daughter raised Jewish and not Christian or Environmentalist.
So, first and foremost his article ('Why I am not an Environmentalist') appears to be about religious freedom - the expectation that his young daughter not be indoctrinated with a set of religious beliefs he does not share. The second point of his article is to use his expertise in economics to argue that the myths of Environmentalism lack scientific support ('The antidote to bad religion is good science.'); that Environmentalists use tactics similar to 'other coercive ideologies', and that our children are being bombarded with these myths in school, on tv, etc.
On Thursday morning I watched the blue recycling truck pick up both the waste and recycling bins. Once I would have been horrified by this, but that was when I believed that recycling would help save the environment and could be cost effective. I once believed in Santa Claus rewarding good little boys and girls too.
What a badly argued letter. She taught them about recycling, not about worshipping mother Gaia. If Landsburg thinks there are good rational arguments against the kind of recycling done in his commmunity, like it being uneconomical, he should tell the teacher and ask her not to make a moral issue of something that could be controversial.
Better still, he should leave the teacher alone and tell his daughter why he thinks one shouldn't recycle.
It's for his daugher to decide who is more convincing, her teacher or her father.
Being against recycling solely because its supposedly part of the environmentalist religion sounds nutty to me. Where I live, they have been recycling paper since way before any environmentalist movement, simply because ist makes economic sense.
Using the same non-aguments as Landsburg does, one could rant against the teaching of evolution ("part of the atheist religion").
Pluralism? He doesn't sound all that pluralist to me.
It is, which is why the greens are so desperate to frame the debate in those terms, this is their standard tactic.
In this thread we have seen this in action, and several of us have explained that we are against it where it is a waste of energy and resources and simply promoted on the seen-to-be-doing-something feelgood basis.
The result, as usual, is squeals of "It's green! It must be good! Why do you hate the planet?"
In Wellington New Zealand, we pay for refuse collection. You can either buy the shitty plastic bags that the dogs rip open, or you can contract with a company for a wheelie bin. I opted for a wheelie bin, costs about $1 a day and is collected weekly. Most companies offer a smaller (cheaper) bin for smaller households, and also offer fortnightly collect as a cheaper option.
The council have provided two recycling bins: one small one for glass, collected every 2 weeks, one half-sized wheelie bin for everything else. I can choose not to use them, but by using them I free up a lot of space in my refuse bin.
I'm too risk averse to reduce the freq of my refuse collection to fortnightly, or opt for the smaller bin. Especially as every now and then, we do a bit of weeding and fill the thing to overflowing.
Taking refuse collection away from rate-payer funded councils is the best thing to do: user pays is great.