Prescience?

Ironically, over at the Weekly Standard today Paul Mirengoff takes the idea I noted in my last post about environmentalist being anti-development simply for the sake of being anti-development. Here is the applicable excerpt:

"Environmentalists have expressed concern about the local caribou population. During some years, one caribou herd (there are 20 in Alaska) visits the part of ANWR at issue. In those years, the herd appears only in the summer when no exploration activity will take place. In all likelihood, the herd will flourish, just as caribou have flourished in nearby Prudhoe Bay. There, according to Hickel, the caribou population has increased from 6,000 to more than 27,000 since drilling began in the late 1970s.

But caribou are not the real issue. Rather, as Ben Prendergast of the American Enterprise Institute has written, caribou are a pretext of the kind used by environmental ideologues to oppose almost any attempt to develop a pure landscape for the benefit of mankind. Caribou in a desolate arctic landscape; Indian graves in a desert--any pretext will do. The real point is that humans should not gain an advantage through the exploitation of nature. It was this doctrinaire position that Senate Democrats attempted to uphold when they voted with near unanimity against developing ANWR."

The article itself isn't about ANWR, but instead about pragmatism. It's actually a good (short) read itself.