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April 01, 2004
The Sierra War In The American Spectator
Peter Brimelow writes:
After I was
purged from
National Review, Bob
Tyrrell’s American
Spectator took what what I thought, perhaps wrongly,
was a malicious glee in running my
review of Pat Buchanan’s
trade book The
Great Betrayal. (I said Buchanan should have focused
on immigration, which he did
subsequently in
Death
Of The West.) Here, TAS asked me to reply to
RiShawn Biddle’s rather orthodox
account of the Sierra
Club shootout.
[Originally
published on the American Spectator website,
3/31/2004]
Re: RiShawn Biddle's
Malthus's Quarreling Children (3/25/2004)
By Peter Brimelow
I read with nostalgia my fellow Forbes magazine
alumnus
RiShawn Biddle's attack on both sides in the
Sierra Club civil war—the Old Guard, who want to
keep the club as a
handmaiden of the
Democratic party, and the Insurgents, who think it
should actually do something about the environment,
specifically that it should work to
cut immigration, which is now the
dominant factor in U.S. population growth.
The immigration reform website I edit,
www.VDARE.com, figures in this war because we have
posted
several articles on the Insurgents. The Old Guard is
accordingly
smearing them with our general lack of
political correctness.
My nostalgia was triggered by RiShawn's attempt to cram
this argument into the old,
1980s-style markets-solve-everything Forbes
template.
Doesn't work, RiShawn. The point is not just that
ecological catastrophe could possibly result if
immigration drives the U.S. population up to 500 million
by 2050. (That's the
Census Bureau's High Series projection, the 394
million you comfortingly cite is merely its Middle
Series projection.)
Of course, population growth can cause ecological
catastrophe, as it did in
Haiti. But the broader point is that this population
growth will certainly result in a loss of amenity. There
will be more
sprawl, fewer trees. California will cease to be the
Golden State and become the
Golden Suburb.
It's a value judgment, RiShawn. You can't get around it
by saying the market will make it workable.
Environmentalists don't want it whether it's workable or
not. In fact, a better word for them would be
conservationists—a word that was once Republican
territory, under Teddy Roosevelt.
Like RiShawn, I used to assume that environmentalists
were just
refugee socialists, looking for another excuse to
push people around. And I still think that's true of
the Sierra Club's Old Guard. But I was fascinated to
discover, while
traveling to promote my 1995 book
Alien Nation: Common Sense About America's Immigration
Disaster, that there really are genuine
environmentalists (conservationists) out there. They
just plain prefer trees, open space, to sprawl. Many of
them are just not political people at all—which I think
is true of many Sierra Insurgents.
An epochal issue like the need to do something about
America's immigration disaster comes along every two or
three generations. It cuts across all traditional
political lines. It creates new alliances.
Environmentalists (conservationists) are just one
component of the immigration reform coalition. I'm glad
they're there.
Peter Brimelow, editor of
VDARE.COM and author of the much-denounced
Alien Nation: Common Sense About America’s Immigration
Disaster (Random House -
1995) and
The Worm in the Apple (HarperCollins - 2003) |
