It’s Well Past Time the ACF Swerved Back into its Lane
Dr Geoff Curry is Australia’s go-to expert on nuclear medicine, and in 2016 began countering the motivated misinformation regarding medical isotopes that is spread by anti-nuclear campaigners. More recently:
The Australian Conservation Foundation has also very recently sought to perpetuate the unjustified conflation of nuclear weapons and civilian energy production, which is indispensible for action on climate change and national development. In 2014 seventy-five biodiversity scientists penned an open letter telling the ACF as much.
If not ignorant and reckless, then we are faced with true neo-Malthusians, and as Michael Lind wrote in 2015:
In the twentieth century, neo-Malthusianism became a fad among affluent whites in the U.S. and Europe who became obsessed with alleged overpopulation in non-white developing countries as well as their own. Malthusianism tends to be associated with conservatism of a highly reactionary kind, because it treats birth rates as a variable to be manipulated while ignoring technological innovation and treating class and power relations within societies as fixed.
The racial and class biases of neo-Malthusianism are evident, in the argument that global underdevelopment is caused, not by bad policies or unequal distribution of economic gains, but by “natural” limits to growth imposed by resources or pollution, including greenhouse gas emissions. Neo-Malthusians who argue that the earth is overpopulated naturally lash out against any suggestion that technology-based economies, combined with liberal democratic reforms, can allow billions of people on earth to enjoy higher living standards than they do today.
Updating its comprehension of nuclear technology to a twenty-first century standard would go a long way to showing us this doesn’t apply to the ACF. Diverting its campaign funds back to actual biodiversity and ecological conservation work would seriously help, too. Otherwise,
There are so many other meritorious organisations. For those who value direct conservation action in Australia, try Nature Foundation or Nature Conservation Society of South Australia.
~ Ben Heard, Bright New World.
