"Given the history of the past half century, environmentalists come off to normal thinking people as the boys who cried wolf, rather than the men who saved the wolves."
Robert Maranto April, 2015
Environmental activists attend a protest in Zucotti Park on Earth Day on April 22, 2014 in New York City. About three dozen activists marched around New York's financial district calling for greater respect for the environment.
. . . "Back in the 1960s, environmentalists declared with great authority that pesticides would wipe out birdlife. Remember Silent Spring? I do. After reading it I was one terrified sixth-grader, convinced that the next robin I saw would be my last. My backyard birds, not to mention the far away whales and forests, were on their way out, thanks to man's greed and corporate transgressions against divine Gaia.
"While I feared for the birds, self-righteous professors preached that unless we changed our sinful ways there would be hell to pay. As Alex Berezow and Hank Campbell detail in Science Left Behind, in 1977 then Harvard Professor and current Obama "science czar" John Holdren co-authored a book predicting mass starvation by the 1980s due to overpopulation. Governments would need to consider extreme methods, including forced sterilization, for humanity to survive.
"Meanwhile, in the real world, this all proved to be false. The percentage of the population in developing nations living in extreme poverty shrank from 50 percent to 21 percent from 1981 to 2010." . . .
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Robert Maranto (B.S. Maryland, 1980; Ph.D. Minnesota, 1989) is the 21st Century Chair in Leadership at the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas, and previously taught political science at Villanova University and worked at the Brookings Institution and for the Clinton administration in the 1990s.