THE PROGRESSIVE CONSERVATIVE, USA
An Online Journal of Political Commentary & Analysis
Volume VII, Issue # 2, January 4, 2005
Dr. Almon Leroy Way, Jr., Editor
Government Committed to & Acting in Accord with Conservative Principles
Ensures a Nation's Strength, Progress, & Prosperity
WHEN VISIONS COLLIDE -- RAN VERSUS THE EARTH'S POOREST PEOPLE:
THE RAINFOREST ACTION NETWORK'S REAL TARGET IS THE THIRD WORLD'S POOR
By Niger Innis & Paul K. Driessen
RADICAL ENVIRONMENTALIST ACTIVISM & THE PEOPLE IT IS HURTING: THE RAINFOREST ACTION NETWORK'S
SHAMELESS MANIPULATION OF ELEMENTARY SCHOOL CHILDREN TO FURTHER ITS RADICAL ENVIRONMENTALIST IDEOLOGY,
TO THE DETRIMENT OF BILLIONS OF POOR CHILDREN & THEIR FAMILIES IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES ALL OVER THE WORLD --
THE LENGTH TO WHICH RAN & OTHER ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICAL PRESSURE GROUPS ARE WILLING TO GO, THE WAY THEY
MANIPULATE YOUNG MINDS & BASIC ETHICAL CONCEPTS, & THE SERIOUS DAMAGE THEY ARE INFLICTING IN THE NAME OF
PROTECTING THE ENVIRONMENT
FULL STORY:
Rainforests are disappearing at a frightening rate, the students were taught. So, they raised $523 for an environmental activist
group’s “protect an acre” program. At the behest of their teacher and the activist group, the students trekked into Manhattan to
ask a major bank to “stop lending money to projects that destroy endangered forests and cause global warming.”
Indoctrination and manipulation are deplorable enough when high school or college students are involved. But these were second
graders, and the close cooperation between their teacher and radical environmentalists underscores a widening problem.
People want to live in a clean, civil and safe world, activists piously assert, to justify their high-pressure campaigns. Corporate
interests should be aligned with the interests of “society as a whole.” Companies need to be “socially responsible” and base their
policies and investment decisions on “fundamental principles” like environmental justice and sustainable development.
But what happens when their vision of a “better Earth” collides with the dreams of billions of poor people who still don’t enjoy even
the most rudimentary necessities: electricity, safe water, basic nutrition and health care, and a chance to see their children live past
age five? Who, then, gets to decide which dreams and priorities take precedence, how high a price must be paid, and who pays that
price?
More to the point, who has given the environmental activists the moral or legal authority to inflict their ideologies on people who
may not agree with them, but must live with the consequences of decisions which they had no role in making?
Those essential questions rarely get asked, much less answered. They certainly weren’t proffered in this case, which involves yet
another attempt by the Rainforest Action Network to impose its narrow definition of ethics, ecology, and the public interest. Past
targets include the World Bank, Citigroup and Bank of America, and the message is always the same: Pull your investment dollars out
of any projects the environmental activists oppose.
This time RAN’s crosshairs are on New York-based JP Morgan Chase, a financial services firm with $1 trillion in assets and operations
in 50 countries. But the real targets – the victims – of all these campaigns are the world’s poorest children and families. Their countries
are being deprived of investment dollars to generate electricity, create jobs, improve health, education and nutrition, build modern
homes and businesses, and instill hope for the future.
To further its campaign, RAN manipulates the naïve fears, good intentions, and eco-centric worldview of young elementary school
students who have little understanding of these complex issues. RAN's latest stunt conned kids into delivering handmade posters to
Morgan Chase, asking CEO William Harrison to “protect the rainforest, instead of hurting the Earth for oil.”
The students hailed from Fairfield, Connecticut, and were led by teacher Paula Healey, who had happily recruited her young charges
and indoctrinated them in Rainforest mythology. “Earth is on loan to us from future generations,” she pontificated, via a RAN press
release that promoted the protest, “and these students know the value of protecting their natural inheritance.”
A form letter, helpfully provided on RAN’s website, makes it easy for her students and other children to tell Morgan Chase that
“using its money to invest in oil and other fossil fuels makes me sad, because children want to grow up on a healthy planet.”
Neither Ms. Healey nor her students have to worry about the life-threatening conditions that confront their counterparts in Kenya,
Uganda, India, Peru, and dozens of other less fortunate countries. Nor, apparently, did they pause to consider how much their
actions are helping to perpetuate unhealthy conditions in those nations.
Fairfield County’s real estate prices are among the highest in America. The area is so white that it imports children from Jersey and
the Bronx to give its schools an integrated feeling – so wealthy that residents happily shell out $50 apiece for Christmas trees. That’s
tops for Christmas trees in the USA and equal to three-months’ income for a billion of our Earth’s citizens.
So, it’s perversely ironic that these students are the “poster children” for a campaign that self-righteously demands that Morgan
Chase join them in “saving the planet.” That their utopian efforts are being carried out on the backs – and often the graves – of the
world’s most destitute and powerless people certainly never occurred to them. And it probably wasn’t mentioned in their one-sided
curriculum on rainforests.
RAN battles timber cutting and fossil fuels. Its equally radical allies – Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, the Natural Resources Defense
Council, and hundreds of other “socially responsible” organizations, foundations, and government agencies – oppose nuclear and
hydroelectric power, biotechnology, pesticides, and economic development. In other words, Ran and its radical environmentalist
allies oppose pretty much everything that generates health, prosperity, and improved environmental quality.
The death toll these groups inflict is unfathomable, and unconscionable. Four million children and parents die each year from lung
infections, caused by breathing the smoke, dust, bacteria, and pollutants that are ever-present in their homes and villages, because
families don’t have electricity and are forced to burn wood and animal dung for fuel.
Six million more perish from intestinal diseases like dysentery, caused by spoiled food and unsafe water, due to nonexistent
refrigeration and water purification. Three million die from malaria and other insect-borne diseases, because mosquitoes are
everywhere and their countries are prevented from using pesticides. Eleven million die from malnutrition and starvation, which
could be alleviated with biotechnology.
Would Ms. Healey, her students, and the RAN radicals “go native” 100 percent – and live under these conditions? Eat only what
they grow themselves, organically? Do without electricity, heating, and air conditioning? Without safe water or decent jobs,
nutrition and medical care? Happily endure being bitten by hundreds of malarial mosquitoes year after year? Give up their cars,
televisions, Barbies, IM-ing, and Nintendo? Highly unlikely.
“What, then gives them the right to make choices for the world’s poor?” Kenyan economist James Shikwati wants to know.
“Wealthy countries want the Earth to be green. The underdeveloped want the Earth fed.”
There is no more basic human right than to live, and no worse human rights violation than to cause or prolong the needless
suffering and premature death of so many people. With nearly half the world’s population – over three billion people – struggling
to survive on less than U.S. $700 a year, one can only hope the tide of public opinion is turning against these narrow special
interests of the radical environmentalists. The need for more balanced environmental policies could not be more clear.
All too often, the targets of RAN, Greenpeace, and other environmentalist political pressure groups’ attack simply cave in.
Seeking to placate their antagonists, they buy a brief respite -- lasting until the next attack – and thereby encourage (and
inadvertently help to fund) assaults on still more targets.
Through project funding and donations, like a promised $3 million in aid for tsunami victims, Mr. Harrison and his bank have
helped millions in the United States and overseas. During the new year, they could give a special and precious gift to the world’s
poor: the gift of life.
They could do what their World Bank, Citigroup, and Bank of America colleagues could not bring themselves to do: Stand up to
the Rainforest Action Network demagogues.
They could continue helping to protect destitute families from real and immediate life-threatening risks, while resisting pressure
to condemn families to poverty, malnutrition, disease, and premature death in the name of preventing risks associated with
purely conjectural eco-catastrophes. And they could expand efforts to explain how Morgan Chase protects the environment,
while making life in poor countries just a little more like what Fairfield County enjoys every day.
It would epitomize what corporate social responsibility and environmental justice really mean. It would make Morgan Chase
shareholders proud to be part of such an institution. And it would make the world a better place.
© 2005 Paul K. Driessen
LINKS TO RELATED TOPICS:
Policy Issues Relating to Energy, Environment,
& Natural Resources
Niger Innis is national spokesman for the Congress of Racial Equality (www.CORE-online.org).
Paul Driessen is Senior Policy Advisor for the Congress of Racial Equality, the Committee for A Constructive Tomorrow, and the
Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise. Driessen is author of Eco-Imperialism: Green Power, Black Death, which can be
obtained at www.Eco-Imperialism.com. Email: pdriessen@cox.net --- Telephone:
(703) 698-6171
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