Hippy activists have harmed more people than they have saved
In this guest essay, Battle of Ideas festival speaker Zion Lights argues four ‘dark tenets’ of environmentalism have blocked progress on human welfare and tackling climate change.
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Science communicator and author Zion Lights is taking part in two debates, Is nuclear the future of energy… again? and Are we making a meal of GM foods? Here, she argues that four big ideas spread by the eco-warriors of the Sixties and beyond have held back progress both for humanity and the planet.
When you think of hippies, you probably think of anti-war protesters with long hair, dressed in tie-dyed clothing, holding placards. Delve a little deeper into the stereotype (which, like most stereotypes, contains a grain of truth) and most of us imagine peace-loving, tolerant, open-minded people.
What if I told you that this is nothing more than clever branding?
Most hippy organisations have dark beliefs once you look beneath the surface of their messaging. Their ideology can be summarised along these lines:
Humans are a virus on the planet. There are too many people and overpopulation will lead to mass starvation and death;
The world is going to end because of environmental damage caused by humans (the current iteration of this is climate change);
Everyone should ‘live on the land’ without technology as this is ‘natural’. Technology and modern civilisation are bad;
Capitalism, consumerism and the use of money are the root of all evil and unhappiness (this used to be referred to as ‘The Man’ but is now packaged as ‘degrowth theory’).
These four tenets have come to underpin much modern thinking today. The campaigns they continue to prop up have actively harmed people.
Technology is bad?
To begin with, anti-technology activists have an addled idea of ‘nature’ and ‘technology’, since anything humans have invented is classed as technology, and any object used for a purpose becomes a tool. This includes the clothes you wear, your toothbrush, glasses, hair brush, shoes, the sticks early humans used to make fire, and so on. It is impossible to ‘live on the land’ without technology.
On closer inspection, the 'living on the land' fallacy is nothing more than a sickening romanticisation of poverty. You may find this hard to believe, so consider a thread that recently went viral on X, where an academic degrowth activist argues in favour of communal hand-washing of clothes to replace washing machines. In reality, washing machines have improved life for billions of people, liberating women in particular from hours of time-consuming, back-breaking labour, and allowing them the freedom to follow other pursuits. Who would giving up the benefit of washing machines, other than a movement that believes itself to be anti-technology?
Note also the irony that there is no way to hand wash clothes without using tools of some shape or form, to wash the clothes in (eg, a bucket), to wash them with (eg, detergent) and to transport the water (probably also a bucket). These are still forms of technology - just non-electrical ones. The assumption that they are less wasteful is ludicrous, since buckets need to be fashioned out of waterproof material, and tools are needed for that process.
Yet we've seen this nonsensical thinking play out multiple times already, for example with the misconception that organic agriculture is better than modern farming methods, and in the act of phasing out plastic bags for cotton bags for supposedly environmental purposes. Cotton is actually a resource-intensive crop that requires huge amounts of water, pesticides and fertilisers. A report by the Danish Environmental Protection Agency found that a cotton bag has to be used at least 7,100 times to offset its environment impact when compared with a plastic bag that is reused once and then incinerated. Try telling that to anyone who is in the cult. You won't get far.
Doomer narratives have occasionally come about due to a real posed risk, like the decline of the ozone layer and climate change. But they also revel in human decline, and underestimate human ingenuity and capability to solve these problems. Most of the time, they are falsely manufactured crises that have been engineered to prop up the delusions of a cult.
Too many people?
A classic example is the ‘overpopulation’ narrative which was concocted by ‘Stanford population ecologist and environmental activist’, Paul Ehrlich, whose bestselling book The Population Bomb led to a worldwide moral panic about ‘overpopulation’ in the 1970s. In it, Ehrlich wrote: ‘The battle to feed all of humanity is over…. Hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death.’ He predicted that ‘nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate’. Ehrlich preached of ‘mass starvation’ on ‘a dying planet’, and pointed at the number of people in India after a trip to Delhi as proof of his claims.
Thanks to Ehrlich’s polemic - which continues to this day, despite the fact that population is on the decline or is close to peaking almost everywhere in the world - the Indian government acted fast. They ‘embraced policies that in many states required sterilization for men and women to obtain water, electricity, ration cards, medical care and pay raises. Teachers could expel students from school if their parents weren’t sterilized. More than eight million men and women were sterilized in 1975 alone.’
Read that again. Eight million people were sterilised due to a manufactured panic based on a false tenet. This is just one of the many false and deadly campaigns that has been built upon the dark tenets.
The GM foods scare
Now let’s consider genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and gene-editing technologies.
Put simply, a GMO is an animal, plant, or microbe whose DNA has been altered using genetic engineering techniques. For thousands of years, humans have used breeding methods to modify organisms by crossing sexually compatible plants and then choosing what seemed like desirable characteristics (sturdy roots, for example, or disease resistance) from their offspring.
Within the past few decades, modern advances in biotechnology have allowed scientists to also directly modify the DNA of microorganisms, crops and animals, which means that we can now achieve desired traits without lengthy and wasteful breeding programs. This is known as gene-editing.
Now, almost all the plants we cultivate, including corn, wheat, rice, and even Christmas trees, have been genetically modified through breeding to last longer, look better, taste sweeter or grow more vigorously in dry soil. The scientific consensus is that foods derived from genetically modified crops are as safe to eat as any other food. Both GMOs and gene-editing technologies are essential for improving crop yields, adapting to climate change and enhancing the nutritional quality of food.
But hippies hate the idea of what they consider to be ‘interfering with nature’. For a long time, activists have been convincing people that gene-edited foods aren’t safe to eat, and lobbying against legislation that allows them. Because of this, only a handful of genetically modified organisms have been authorised in the EU, mainly for animal feed.
While countries with relatively stable food security are able to weather this, the same cannot be said of poorer nations. For example, lack of vitamin A is the world’s leading preventable cause of childhood blindness, especially common in Africa and South-East Asia. Every year, up to 500,000 children go blind due to vitamin A deficiency, and half of them die within 12 months of losing their sight.
In many countries, including India, Bangladesh, and China, many children consume only rice daily, which means that Golden Rice - a genetically modified rice - could easily save millions of young lives from malnutrition, hunger and blindness. A bowl of cooked Golden Rice provides 60 per cent of the recommended nutrient intake of vitamin A for children aged between six and eight. Just 20 per cent of the recommended daily allowance can prevent or eliminate symptoms such as blindness.
Golden Rice was developed over 20 years ago, but it has not been readily adopted in the countries that most need it. Why? Hippy activists strike again.
Organisations like Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth have played a major role in successfully demonising gene-editing technology and have successfully imported their anti-GMO campaigns to Asia and Africa. In 2013, activists destroyed crops on an experimental field trial of Golden Rice in the Philippines.
In 2016, a third of living Nobel laureates - including James Watson, who co-discovered the basic structure of DNA - signed an open letter to Greenpeace and world leaders, calling the scare campaigns a ‘crime against humanity’. They wrote:
Organizations opposed to modern plant breeding, with Greenpeace at their lead… have misrepresented their risks, benefits, and impacts, and supported the criminal destruction of approved field trials and research projects. We urge Greenpeace and its supporters to re-examine the experience of farmers and consumers worldwide with crops and foods improved through biotechnology, recognize the findings of authoritative scientific bodies and regulatory agencies, and abandon their campaign against ‘GMOs’ in general and Golden Rice in particular.
Nuclear power is safe
A similar story can be told of nuclear energy. Nuclear energy comes from the binding energy that is stored in an atom and holds it together. To release the energy, the atom has to be split into smaller atoms. In nuclear-power stations, the heat energy released by this splitting boils water to drive turbines to generate electricity.
Nuclear power plants are clean, reliable and have the smallest land footprint per unit of the electricity they produce compared to all of the alternatives, which makes them good for biodiversity. They also require the least amount of resources to build, and the waste they produce is extremely small in quantity. All the high-level nuclear waste produced in the world would fit in a single football field to a height of approximately 10 yards.
Then why hasn’t everywhere in the world built a huge amount of civilisation-powering nuclear power plants? The answer is: activists, with groups like Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth again leading the charge. By hyper-focusing on nuclear meltdowns for decades, hippies have managed to turn people against this incredible source of clean energy.
All of the meltdowns that have ever occurred - including Chernobyl, Fukushima, and Three Mile Island, have resulted in fewer than a few thousand deaths. No one was killed at Three Mile Island and Fukushima; estimates for the deaths caused by Chernobyl vary, but - at most - are still in the few thousands. Now put this in context with the alternatives: a similar number of lives have been lost due to wind and solar power, and hydropower is immensely more deadly; approximately 171,000 lives were lost due to the Banqiao Dam Failure in China in 1975.
But following the Fukushima Daaichi power plant meltdown 2011, Germany and Japan phased out their nuclear-power plants, increasing their reliance on burning coal instead. (Japan has restarted some of its nuclear-power plants.)
Research by leading climate scientist James Hansen and NASA scientist Pushker Kharecha found that nuclear energy has saved more than two million people from early deaths due to the air pollution produced by burning fossil fuels. The clean energy it has generated has saved 64 gigatonnes of greenhouse-gas emissions - around two years’ worth of total global emissions - which would have been produced by the burning of fossil fuels. As the title of their research postulates: nuclear saves lives.
A study by MIT found that more people have died due to shutting down nuclear-power plants out of fear, leading to countries burning coal instead, than they have from nuclear energy itself. In summary:
Without nuclear power, air pollution worsened in general…resulting in 5,200 pollution-related deaths across the country…more people are also likely to die prematurely due to climate impacts from the increase in carbon dioxide emissions, as the grid compensates for nuclear power’s absence. The climate-related effects from this additional influx of carbon dioxide could lead to 160,000 additional deaths over the next century.
Meanwhile, air pollution from fossil fuels is responsible millions of deaths a year. Waste from fossil fuels is currently stored in the Earth’s atmosphere, and waste from solar panels (which is also toxic) is left to leach into landfill sites (usually in poor countries), but most people believe that it’s nuclear waste that isn’t safely managed. In fact, the opposite is true.
If you’re against nuclear energy, your fears are misplaced, and I’m sorry to inform you that you have fallen for fearmongering hippy rhetoric.
The hippy movements that came up with the anti-GMO and anti-nuclear narratives have had significant repercussions around the world. The millions of deaths caused by their selective campaigns against life-saving technologies far outweigh any potential lives that were saved through protesting wars. In a world where billions of people remain trapped in poverty, hippies now clearly stand for the very thing they claim to stand against when they attend anti-war demonstrations. The wars they wage against human prosperity have cost billions of lives, and there is nothing hip about that.
Zion Lights is author of the evidence-based book The Ultimate Guide to Green Parenting. She writes widely, including for her own Substack, Everything is Light. Follow Zion on X/Twitter: @ziontree.
