BROWN LIVING TIPS: A Testament of Neo-Malthusian Civil Disobedience

Deal me out of “Green Living”. I have played the soft-green game long enough. The game that pretends that we can solve our ecological crisis by largely cosmetic and relatively trivial ‘lifestyle’ changes.

The game that offers inconsequential ‘feel-good’ environmental dispensation to globe-trotting green yuppies whose air miles have left a carbon footprint exceeded only by their too many children.

The game that serves as displacement behaviour for the politically correct so that they may not confront the root cause of environmental degradation---runaway immigrant-driven population growth at home and unchecked fecundity abroad.

The game that is played by environmental NGOs to appease a donor base that includes corporate benefactors who want to reward growth-managers, not growth-stoppers.

“Green Living” is a game of blind man’s bluff. The willful ignorance and disregard of the Elephant in the Room which they choose not to see. It is a morally self-righteous and hypocritical game of reducing one’s footprint but turning a blind eye to the flood of footprints which make that sacrifice futile. A game for blind-folded penitents so that they may focus entirely on reducing per capita consumption and forget that it is total consumption that is relevant.

“Green Living” is a mug’s game that only postpones the day of reckoning so that more people and wildlife will perish in numbers which will stagger our imagination. Each day that we accommodate growth, or render it benign, is a day lost to fighting it and one day more when the wildlife holocaust will continue at the cost of our future as well as theirs. Each day that we squeeze our personal consumption in order to move over a little more for relentless growth we condemn another 200 species to extinction. For wildlife habitat has “moved over” too far already, well beyond the bounds of viability. Growth must be halted and reversed, not made more comfortable or liveable.

My job then is to refuse to budge. To force growthists to face the wall sooner rather than later. I will become my own Mahatma Ghandi of neo-malthusianism. I will not only not comply with their agenda of making us do with less so that more and more can be invited to share it, but I will defy growthism by increasing my footprint as much as I can afford. My actions may not amount to much, but they will be my personal statement of civil disobedience. A counterpoise to the “little steps” that Green Livers think will add up to big changes. To that end I offer these resolutions:

1. I will yank out my CFL lights and replace them with conventional bulbs.
2. I will endeavour to increase both the volume and frequency of my meat consumption. Consequently less grazing land will become available to feed yet more people who will in turn breed more people. People who, even if they were vegans, would impact the environment more severely than a smaller population of omnivores.
3. I will purchase regular gasoline rather than cleaner fuel and drive as much as my budget will allow. More fuel expanded in transportation will deny fuel to the food production that threatens to expand to feed more people.
4. Whenever I encounter fallen trees or limbs strewn over hiking trails, I will fail to report them. The Sierra Club volunteers in collusion with the Chamber of Commerce work to make the trails an enticement to visitors. According to Professor Albert Saiz, popular tourist destinations encourage tourists to become permanent residents, so that annual growth rates in tourist meccas typically rise by 2%. In my community, that would cut the “doubling time” of the present population level from 28 to 16 years.
5. I will mix my garbage, compost nothing, and conserve as little as possible, so that on garbage pick-up day there will be two rather than one refuse can at the end of my driveway, and the recycling depot will never witness my presence. One immigrant or one newborn wipes out the gains from 80 years of responsible recycling in Britain, according to the calculations done by a researcher for the Stockholm Environmental Institute.
6. I will collect litter from the beach in daily increments with garbage bags and save them until Earth Day when the local Sierra Club, the flagship of population growth-denial, organizes a volunteer brigade to scour the beach for litter. Instead of donating my collection to their clean-up drive, I will wait until early dawn the next morning and scatter the contents of my bags over areas from which they removed litter the day before. Another deterrent to tourism. Catch me if you can.
7. As a final gesture of defiance and the one that will give me the most satifaction, I will follow the daily route taken by a neighbourhood Sierran who stops to pick litter along the road. He was the one who conducted a race-baiting slander campaign to isolate me politically and socially. I will roll down my car window and toss out candy wrappers that I will have on hand on the passenger seat, crumbled into balls and ready for action. Witnesses?

Many would characterize this, and other such actions as brazenly nihilistic, as “cutting off my nose to spite my face.” But I will foul my own nest if only I can raise a largely symbolic middle index finger to the environmental bowel movement, who are demographic litterbugs on a scale that dwarfs any damage that I could do to the biosphere. To hasten the demise of this civilization to any degree is the best favour one could perform for humanity, which must be scaled down by a major die-off of 6 billion or more in order that a remnant of biodiversity is still available to the handful of survivors.

It is socially responsible to be socially irresponsible.

Bring on the Apocalypse. Now.