Keith Hudson writes one of the most intelligent and important newsletters out there. He has kindly agreed to share this particular essay with the readers of this blog.
The hunter-gatherer tribes which are still to be found in the rain forests of Amazonia, Africa and Borneo are not “living with nature” as imagined by some environmentalists. Authentic hunter-gatherers are savannah specialists. Those that are found in the rain forests today have been pushed there by population explosion among the farmers or coastal inhabitants over the last few thousand years. The remnants, who are picturesquely shown in many TV films are, in fact, as rapacious and destructive of wild-life as sporting hunters or colonizing farmers ever have been.
The only true conservers of wildlife are biological scientists (for their own study purposes), followed further by rich individuals who buy countryside (for aesthetic satisfaction), followed by businessmen (who promote eco-tourism), and large agricultural syndicates who buy up large chunks of the countryside (for food growing, of course).
The first two categories are correctly considered to be benign, the middle category given reluctant blessing but the last category is still considered to be evil (not too strong a word among environmentalists).
However, other than these sorts of initiatives, the fate of the lowland gorilla in Africa or the orang-outan in Borneo — among many other species — is total extinction. Small farmers, desperate for food of course, will continue to hack away at the natural habitat to grow food on family holdings. Ultimately, though, they will simply denude the soil and produce dust.
But looking at the four categories again, there is a link between them. They are all products — to greater or lesser extents — of the consequential social values of the new scientific era. The last category (in particular) may be thought to be fundamentally harmful to wild-life but, if farmers of Western Europe are anything to go by in recent years, they are potentially amenable to environmental argument. Farmers and biological scientists may very well have been at school or university together and, although their careers went in different directions, may still be the best of friends.
A flimsy argument? Perhaps, at first sight. After all, the large syndicates and private equity funds of America, Europe and China which are now buying large tracts of land in Africa — and intending to increase food production several-fold therefrom by modern methods — are motivated primarily by profit-seeking. And to which — it must be added — there are millions of consumers in the Western world who want to buy food from the supermarkets at the cheapest possible prices. They are no-less profit-seekers, too.
However, the syndicates which are increasingly going to take over immense regions of land suitable for food growing all over the world are also wealthy enough to buy up large areas of natural habitat. The more they are successful in business, the more they are going to employ scientifically-trained staff, the more that environmental values will seep into boardrooms, the more they will be persuaded (with additional middle-class pressure from the West or those of the new China or India) to set aside enough conservation areas in which our more interesting species reside.
Two or three billion of today’s world population are living off a handful or so of grain every day and, as world population continues to expand for a generation or so more, billions more will also starve. Even the modern methods of the new syndicates will only make a moderate dent in the total suffering. Firstly, their cheaper food will be preferentially absorbed by the advanced countries — as now — and secondly, there is the ultimate limit as to the amount of freshwater that can be deflected from the natural cycle and applied to agriculture, however mechanized the methods may be. We are now close to that already.
At bottom there is a trade-off between the deaths of humans and the deaths of species that middle-class people in the advanced countries wish to survive. The pan balance can only swing heavily in one direction or can slightly (but ultimately decisively) swing in the other. My money is on the latter. Experiential variety, under-strapped with scientific curiosity, will win over long-distance charity — already so low as a percentage of advanced countries’ GDPs as to be almost invisible
