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It's been my experiance that the environmental movement has, at best, a hefty dose of fairly distressing neo-Luddism in the batter under the best of circumstances. I also don't understand the aversion to nuke power; modern technology has resulted in Europe and China having the ability to construct "pebble-bed" and "spherical mass" reactors which are physically incapable of melting down. The US, however, struggles and stumbles along on 1960s-level technoogy, stuck in a nuclear time-lock by idiotic laws enacted a generation ago. Fuel reprocessing and reconstitution, which would cut the nuclear waste problem considerably, are also not permitted. Meanwhile, France gets a whopping 70% of their energy from nuke plants and Russia is making a killing reprocessing spent fuel and then re-selling it.
Unfortunately that Luddite streak I mentioned is quite influential in the American and European environmental movements, though it seems to be much stronger in the US. In some quarters, this kind of sentiment emerges as a perverse wish to undo every technological and scientific innovation of the last, say, 400 years...because supposedly the Industrial Revolution and the associated improvements in quality and length of life which were the outcomes thereof were/are bad for the planet. Mention of things like Tuberculosis, Gangrene, and Polio is usually countered with snarky advice to "eat right*" or other such silliness. This kind of lunacy is in many ways not so much pro-environment as it is anti-human.**
Worse still is an utter inability to admit error. My favorite example of this is Elephants in Kenya. For decades, environmentalists bleated that the only way to stop elephant poaching and restore their numbers was to totally ban all hunting and trading in elephants and their component parts. Well, twenty years later, the areas of Africa which continued to permit hunting have a serious problem with elephant over-population. Kenya, meanwhile, which was the environmentalist's poster-child because of their total ban...is having to purchase elephants from the over-crowded nations which still permit hunting. Kenya's absolute ban on elephant hunting has resulted in the near extenction of Kenya's elephant population, while hunter-friendly areas further south have more elephants than they know what to do with. The environmentalist's response? Urge the rest of Africa to adopt the Kenyan model.***
*Vegitarian, naturally. I'm all about a healthy diet, but I want my dead things...and to suggest that proper diet is a workable replacement for antibiotics is just insane. Yes, I did get this suggestion.
**Which, if you're an environmentalist, is a somewhat understandable reaction; after all, we've fucked up the planet pretty good. However, I move that since environmental damage can be mitigated, reversed, or arrested much more easily and effectively than the impact of the kind of forced, collectivist primitivism one frequently sees espoused by some segments of the environmental movement.
***Of course, this could just be due to the fact that the anti-overhunting wing of the environmental movement has a large and noisy animal-rights contingent which wishes to see -all- hunting banned.
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