Radical green/socialist activist George Monbiot has made a short video describing the Covid-19 pandemic as ‘a symptom of a global economic system that is destroying the living planet’. As usual, he is wrong.
‘After the financial crisis in 2008, we bailed out the banks. In 2021, we need to bail out the planet,’ claims George Monbiot in a short video. Monbiot is a 58-year-old Guardian columnist,Welsh nationalist, radical environmental activist and vocal supporter of the socialist Jeremy Corbyn, who led the British Labour Party to its worst-ever electoral defeat in 2019.
To whom exactly he is trying to appeal with this rhetoric is a bit of a mystery.
He rants against corporations, but only corporations would have been in favour of the 2008 bank bailouts. Neither his own left-wing, red-green fanbase, nor free marketeers of libertarian, liberal or even conservative persuasions, would have supported the idea of transferring wealth from the poor to the rich by means of printing money, just to protect big banks who took risks they couldn’t afford.
By evoking the idea of a bailout, he is suggesting that instead of printing money to throw at fat cat bankers, we should pump the money into Big Green instead. He advocates the same corporate welfare, only in favour of different special interests.
Monbiot is a quintessential ‘watermelon’. He is an environmentalist on the outside, and a socialist on the inside. He seeks to promote socialism and economic central planning under the pretence of ‘saving the planet’ from capitalism.
It comes as no surprise, then, that Monbiot would seize upon a crisis like a global pandemic, and propose that it be exploited in order to undermine liberty and free markets, and promote government-planned eco-utopias in their place.
Fortunately, Monbiot’s argument fails dismally upon closer scrutiny.
Zoonosis
He begins by saying that before we think of returning to live as usual, we should consider the zoonotic origins of Covid-19. ‘Like many infectious diseases, Covid-19 has its origins in the encroachment of human activity into the natural world. As countries have sought to grow their economies, activities like logging, mining, road building, agricultural expansion and urbanisation cause massive habitat destruction,’ he says.
‘This in turn has brought people into ever closer contact with wild animal species, many of which carry dangerous pathogens and diseases. When humans venture into ecosystems and destroy the habitats of wild species, these diseases can jump from animals into the human population.’
He adds: ‘Covid-19 is not a random event. It is a symptom of a global economic system that is destroying the living planet and killing off our magnificent wildlife.’
He is correct, of course, that Covid-19 is a zoonotic virus. He is incorrect in suggesting that this is a new phenomenon, however. While it stands to reason that larger human populations are better at spreading disease, zoonotic infections have always been a threat to humans.
Long before human activity started to make a substantial impact on the natural environment, the Black Death, a zoonotic bacterial infection, caused death, destruction, and draconian counter-measures around the world. The most devastating outbreak was in Europe in the 14th century. It also emerged in China, and travelled along trade routes, just as Covid-19 did. Even earlier, in the 6th century, the Justinian Plague wreaked havoc in the Byzantine Empire.
Hippocrates described influenza in the 4th century BCE. It has been argued that all human viral infections were originally zoonotic in origin.
Ancient religious laws suggest precautions against contracting zoonotic infections going back thousands of years. It is certain or likely that rabies, anthrax, tularemia, West Nile virus, measles, smallpox, influenza, HIV, diphtheria, the common cold and tuberculosis all had zoonotic origins that had little or nothing to do with Monbiot’s dystopia of ‘destroying the living planet’.
Unbridled nature
On the contrary: the ‘living planet’ has a powerful penchant for destroying humans. It is not our friend. It is not benign. At the core of human development and civilisation is the ability to minimise the threats that unbridled nature poses to human existence and flourishing, and to turn nature to our purposes in providing food, clothing, shelter and the other material needs of a comfortable life. Of course, that does not justify rampant over-exploitation of resources, but suggesting that human flourishing is the cause of pandemics like Covid-19 is perverse.
‘So before we spend billions of dollars reinstating the status quo, perhaps it’s time for a rethink,’ says Monbiot. ‘In order to prevent future pandemics and tackle ecological and climate breakdown, governments must take a different path. What would this look like?
‘It means,’ he continues, ‘investing to decarbonise the global economy as fast as possible, and shrinking our environmental footprint. It means bringing an end to destructive activities like deforestation and intensive mining. And it means ending our addiction to economic growth and putting the needs of people and the planet first.’
Whether or not these prescriptions are desirable, they will do hardly anything to reduce the threat of pandemic diseases of zoonotic origin. Moreover, Monbiot’s dream of ‘ending our addiction to economic growth and putting the needs of people and the planet first’ is self-contradictory.
Economic growth is nothing but the satisfaction of the needs of people, in aggregate. Conversely, lifting people out of poverty, drudgery and poor living conditions cannot be done without using the resources that nature provides.
Wealthy elitists like Monbiot might live high enough on the hog to contemplate a future without economic growth, but billions of people around the world certainly do not.
Our goal should not be to ‘end our addiction to economic growth’ and instead direct investment towards industries of which Monbiot approves. That way lies a totalitarian dystopia of government control, failed central planning, poverty and exclusion.
The goal should be to establish an economy in which secure property rights put us on the path to sustainable use of natural resources.
We should welcome economic growth. The environmental ills that Monbiot mentions, like destructive mining, deforestation, agricultural expansion and habitat destruction, are the problems of poor and developing countries. In prosperous countries, agricultural land is being returned to nature, mining is less invasive, forests are protected and growing, pollution levels are relatively low, and water resources are well managed.
Although economic development at first contributes to environmental damage, there is a point beyond which prosperity reduces environmental damage. Our choices are to return to universal poverty and the hardships of a primitive existence, or to pursue universal prosperity in a sustainable, healthy environment.
Monbiot’s prescription would reduce prosperity, and leave us more, not less, vulnerable to pandemics and other natural disasters. Saving the planet must start with increasing prosperity in poor countries. It must start with economic growth.
As Alexander C. R. Hammond wrote recently over at the excellent Human Progress publication, true environmentalists should prioritise economic prosperity. Only then will humanity have the means to protect itself from the caprices of nature.
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR
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