A neo-Jacobin

Biggest threat to Africa is environmentalism

Environmentalists current obsession with the hypothetical problems relating to climate change, threatens to marginalize and overlook more pressing problems for humanity in the here and now – like the fight against malaria in Africa and the rest of the Third World.

Environmentalists constantly bang on and on about forcing the most powerful leaders of the Western world to do this, that or the other, in order to ‘save us all from global warming’, but meanwhile in the real world, the body count for malaria in Africa alone is a million per year, and rising. (1) What makes me really angry is that these deaths need not have occurred. In fact, all those deaths lead right back to earlier environmentalists political obsessions – the banning of pesticides.

Malaria, extinct in the Western world for nearly thirty years, is alive and well and killing Africans by the millions. Yet, it seems as though environmentalists couldn't care less about fighting real killers of Africans, like malaria, it doesn't really fit into their ecological agenda. But don't take my word for it, go and ask any wannabe eco-warrior what's more important for Africa 'the fight against malaria' or 'climate change'? The chances are, they wouldn't even bother to answer such a question. It's as if they don't know what the difference is between a real threat to life in the here and now, and a percieved hypothetical threat of the far distant future.

Meanwhile, in the West, we’ve had the pleasure of using the miraculous life-saving pesticide known as DDT, which has all but eradicated malaria from the advanced world. Then came the World Wildlife Fund and the rest of the Green Gang calling for a worldwide ban on the use of DDT. They got their ban, now surprise, surprise, malaria; a once nearly defeated disease is killing more people globally than ever. But who would ever relate environmentalist anti-DDT policy with millions of malaria related deaths and illnesses?

For all their talk about the dire urgency of spending billions, upon billions of pounds reducing carbon emissions in order to ‘stabilise the climate’ by one or two measly degrees, it seems as though the life of Africans, is in fact far, far less important than advancing the politics of their latest green obsession – climate change, like nothing else matters anymore.

Read on:

(1) WHO: Malaria is alive and well and killing more than 3000 African children every day. 2003

Picture: Malaria victim from sub-Saharan Africa. (Cris Bouroncle / AFP-Getty Images)

posted by Courtney Hamilton @ 11:15 AM