IRVINE, CA --The environmentalists' campaign for "sustainable development" is not motivated by a desire for development, said Robert Tracinski, a senior fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute.

"The whole concept of 'sustainable development' being discussed at the U.N. conference in Johannesburg," Tracinski said, "is a dishonest attempt to put a respectable face on the greens' anti-development, anti-industry, antitechnology philosophy."

The environmentalists' goal, Tracinski said, is "to stop development and keep the Third World in a state of poverty--while they work to bring the same ideal of poverty to industrialized nations. The campaign for 'sustainable development' is an attempt to pretend that "strangling industrial civilization and international trade would not consign the world to a permanent hell of poverty, starvation and mass death."

"History has amply demonstrated what kind of development is truly good for human life. For two centuries in the West, free markets, property rights and industrial civilization made possible and produced an ever-increasing--and indefinitely 'sustained'--prosperity."

"The Industrial Revolution brought us all of the development goals set forward at the U.N. conference--clean water and sanitation, the elimination of disease, plentiful food--and much, much more. But we have yet to see an international 'capitalism summit' or 'industrialization conference.'"

"If one actually cared about improving human existence," Tracinski noted, "one would support--not attack--what is really required for sustained development: capitalism."

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Robert W. Tracinski was a senior writer for the Ayn Rand Institute between 1997 and 2004.

 
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