The word “fundamentalism” is appropriate, for five reasons:
Like many religions’ premises, the sustainability movement’s premises are more assumed than demonstrated. Second, weighing the costs of obedience to sustainability’s commandments is considered unworthy. Third, the sustainability crusade supplies acolytes with a worldview that infuses their lives with purpose and meaning. Fourth, the sustainability movement uses apocalyptic rhetoric to express its eschatology. Fifth, the church of sustainability seeks converts, encourages conformity to orthodoxy and regards rival interpretations of reality as heretical impediments to salvation.
This opportunity allows me to again remind readers of Pierre Desrochers’s and Hiroko Shimizu’s superb 2012 book, The Locavore’s Dilemma: In Praise of the 10,000-Mile Diet – a volume that exposes how one ring of the sustainability circus (the locavore ring) is nothing other than an ostentatious performance based upon a profound ignorance of both economics and of the empirical reality about which the locavores claim to care. (Note: Please don’t accuse me here of using, to discuss the “sustainability” movement, a different metaphor than the one used by George Will. I am indeed using a metaphor; George Will, in contrast, describes what this movement has actually become.)
Bob Murphy’s excellent new book, Choice: Cooperation, Enterprise, and Human Action – which I read in draft form – will be released on June 1st. Order your copy today!
Here’s info on this summer’s Cato University (to be held in DC).
