Netflix has this television show (based off a Danish original!) where they interview a famous, elderly person and vow not to release the interview until after the person has died. For 50-odd minutes, the interviewer asks the guest to reflect on their life — now and from beyond the grave — and what they amounted to on Earth. It naturally turns pretty spiritual and existential, with lots of religious undertones.

Jane Goodall, the famous primatologist and conservationist, died last year and this is the first I’m seeing of the TV show (apparently, Jane was the first episode to air/guest to die). It’s a nice format, and it lets the person speak in the end directly to you, unaccompanied and not overheard by anyone (production crew, interviewer etc.) She speculates about life — consciousness — after death, for which she’s certain, and she routinely invokes the "far right" and how we're living in dark, dark times

“I know that there is life beyond death, that consciousness survives.
I can’t tell you from where I am secrets that are not mine to share.
I can’t tell you what you will find when you leave planet Earth. But I want you to know that your life on planet Earth will make some difference in the kind of life that you find after you die.”

I don't have any specific Goodall history (haven't read or seen much), I'm just vaguely aware that she's adored and well-respected and was super important in improving scientists' understanding of chimp/primate (hierarchical) behavior in the 1950s and 1960s: they use tools, they mourn their dead, etc.

“I just don’t think being aggressive ever… ever works. If you meet somebody who disagrees, first of all listen to them, because maybe they’ve got something that you hadn’t thought about… and then, if you still think you’re on a better track than they are, now you’ve got to reach the heart…”

She said these things in the interview, so let me try to respectfully embody this approach today, ditch my usual Den snark and aggressive posturing. No insults or slurs, just honest disagreements between competent minds (ish... the jury is still out on Den…). We'll see how it goes.

The Major ContradictionsThe Major Contradictions

It's a very nice interview, and she truly is a delight to listen to: Charming, calm, sensible, with all sorts of primate and nature-related life stories.

But what she says when she talks about nature in these doomsday terms ("This swing to the far right, which is harming the environment so terribly… We’re in the midst of the sixth great extinction") is both so common and so outrageously mistaken. And what on earth does "harming the environment" mean? Sure, I don't particularly like gold miners unleashing mercury in Amazonian rivers because the market price of gold is so stupidly high (#1480191), or that there are raging fires and (small) portions of the Amazon basin turned into agriculture... but it sustains people and the economics check out, so what is honestly the big deal?

What's so strange is that a 91-year-old woman who, born in 1934 and who lived through World War II in Britain — the blitz, the rationing, the bombing, the threat of an actual far-right invasion force — can still invoke these dark and terrible words. Either the world is much worse off in ways I have seen no evidence for, or she's simply in error.

The far-right stuff comes up three-four times in less than an hour, and seems completely at odds with her actual life's work.

“Absolutely there are people that I don’t like, and I would like to put them on one of Musk’s spaceships and send them all off to the planet he’s sure he’s going to discover.
Interviewer: "Would he be on it?"
“Oh, absolutely, he’d be the host. […] Along with Musk would be Trump. And some of Trump’s real supporters. And I would put Putin in there, and President Xi. I’d certainly put Netanyahu in there and his far-right government.” […] Put them all on that spaceship and send them off!”

While tiresome and nonsensical, it's also, I believe, excusable — Goodall’s expertise lies elsewhere.
(if, say, it was discovered that Mises said something nonsensical about boats or relativity or the geocentric solar system, or Satoshi wrote something asinine about, oh I don’t know, architecture, I wouldn’t worry too much; it’s not their thing — their errors in a foreign domain are quite unimportant.)

But also, madam... if you think about those people as “far right,” you’re in need of some terminological expansion. What would you call an actual far-right person? (Or do you believe somehow that Trump is literally Hitler now?)

And if “far-right” means anything, it must be to approach the WWII Nazi ideology, or homeland-purity of actual fascism of Mussolini’s Italy, both of which are kind of the direct opposite of “Netanyahu and his far-right government.” (Something about the Jews... I don’t know, @Solomonsatoshi will weigh in on the Greater Israel Project here, I couldn't care less.)

Excuse #2: the crowds in which she spent her entire life are heavily biased in one way, self-selected into it too, so it’s not that odd for her to pick up the residual, implicit values and talking points of her crowd — however one-sided, incorrect, incomplete, or faulty.

The contradiction that troubles me so is the incredibly selective blinders she must take on in observing and describing “the” world (unspecific):The contradiction that troubles me so is the incredibly selective blinders she must take on in observing and describing “the” world (unspecific):

Having lived through World War II, the most (or second-most; relative to world population, I think the Mongol conquests outstrips WWII) destructive war in human history and by far the worst atrocity (well, perhaps the Soviet Union, not exactly a friend of the environment...) of her century-odd life span, she still holds that the world is dark (“and getting darker”), that it’s the worst it’s ever been, that we’re destroying “the” planet(!), that it’s “a really grim time.” Surely she can see that we (“we”) are so much better off in every aspect that matters, the regret and pain for some ecosystems she so intensely felt throughout her life is but a small, inconsequential blister on an otherwise thriving corpus?

And if I grant you that the machinery and techno-economic regime that brought infant mortality to 2 in the world’s civilized places (#1476033) were “purchased,” as it were, via fossil-fuel guzzling machinery and ravaging capitalism, how does one weigh that up? How many polar bears dying (not actually dying*) are those human achievements worth? #1427651

At the same time she embodies this contradiction, complaining about the young just taking for granted that there’ll be food in the fridge, that a switch will give them electricity etc. In 1934, the year of Goodall’s birth, some one-third of households and workplace premises in her country lacked any electricity whatsoever, let alone the incredible appliances that now don the homes of even the poorest among us or the amazing communication devices that let us do, know, say, or learn anything at any time. (Jury is out on that too, tho... #1383936)

At some level, environmental concerns were always the typical luxury good; the sort of thing you can and may worry about when you’re wealthy enough, when your society has high enough income, when your basic needs are met, and your kids aren’t starving or under fire.

I’m aware that I’m trained in economics, a discipline that literally refigures your mind and ethics after completing your training, so I ask Jane’s consciousness, wherever it may be — and others who believe parts of her environmental-doomsday story— that maybe, just maybe we over here in econland have another piece of the human coexistance puzzle.

Wealth is the best protection there is against a harsh nature — the baseline harshness of which is already there, or the even harsher natural world we may (or may not) encounter as a result of climate change. Nature wants 5 of your 7 children dead, etc.

Of course, having lived in the jungle and observed nature upfront for large portions of her life, Jane is well aware that everything lives by the death of something else — even the chimps she studied opportunistically raid and kill other chimp groups or hunt monkeys for meat. Also: plants have consciousness, says Michael Pollan and the scientists he interviews (#1464029, #1456628). It’s a sad myth to believe (like democracy...) that everyone and everything can live happily and peacefully at the expense of something else.

The view of trade-offs, of opportunity cost, of real growth, of meaningful, technical, and economic prosperity, is what an economic mind can bring to the otherwise quite zero-sum mind (#1482802) of an environmentalist.

I doubt the progress of "the" world (...not specific enough!) as much as the next Bitcoiner or contrarian or cypherpunky prepper (#1476033, #1476043, #1476710, #1477450, #1480167) but in critiquing the glaring holes of the environmentalist creed, I can’t help but invoke the wonders of the modern world — all the ills we’ve conquered, all the ways in which we live better lives than most waves of humans before us have.

The only time I screamed loudly, paused the episode and went to do something else was when she invoked climate change and sixth extinction event. Sod off. You can safely ignore anything and anyone claiming sixth great extinction… it’s a geological framework, and not something that “happens” in human-relevant timeframes ("background rate" doesn't matter, doesn't translate to a yearly species-extinction budget). Our civilization crowding out of whatever animal species somewhere (that we, honestly, didn't know were there...) does not constitute one of those, and even if it did, we wouldn’t be able to confidently say that for another ten thousand years or whatever. With all due respect, madam, this is a nonsense thing to believe or invoke.

But let’s play.

What about that “Planet” after the other five extinction events?What about that “Planet” after the other five extinction events?

Has Mother Nature died five times? If so, her death, like Mark Twain, seems a little overhyped. Who is she, anyway? I’m pretty sure this is Mother Nature too (#1474724, #1477604): it’s not obvious to me that it’s in some sort of danger, or in need of saving. Looks good.

“The” planet was perfectly fine when it was Snowball Earth; when there were trees growing either in Greenland or Antarctica; when the Sahara was a seaway, or as recently as 10,000 years ago, a lush tropical jungle; after the dinosaurs violently or not-so-violently died; when there were kilometers of ice above the place I currently sit, when the valleys I adore and the mountain I cherish were being carved and perfected by the ice sheet that carry our name. Humans showed up here (=the Nordics) relatively late, a couple of thousand years ago, and very late in Iceland itself (about a thousand years ago).

Environmentalist concerns are often stuck in this “freeze, hammer time” moment of an idealized, inexact past — the garden of Eden when nature looked like that. But when indeed was America great the first time? And if you answer “before the White Man arrived,” I’m not sure what to tell you except "no."

Which portion of what we’ve “done” to these ecosystems is lamentable and tragic? The Vikings intentionally (or accidentally) eradicating the 40% of Iceland that was once forested? Is Iceland and its pristine nature now a terrible disaster because all the birch trees that once grew here are gone? Is the Scottish Highlands a tragedy because the Caledonian forest isn’t as all-encompassing as it was x thousand years ago? What about the U-shape usage of Britain’s forest cover over the last millennia (cut, cut, unearth coal, cool off the cutting, use the coal, and regrow all the forest)? The native American cultivation of the Amazon (terra preta, intentional fires)? Is it the human presence at all that troubles you?

If you grant me, or any other human, the permission to live, you must also concede that I may use (“consume,” “transform,” “alter”) my natural environment in some way. If so, then we are, as Mr. Churchill ostensibly said, just haggling over price. How much may I impact the natural world, and for what purposes?

And while Goodall is a nice and lovely grandmotherly-like character I’d entrust my dog or kids with in a heartbeat, I’m not so sure I’d let her govern the resource usage of my town, community, land, nation, or world. She has reasonably good values — not angelic ones. (Insert that saying about the road to hell and good intentions.)

“Do we have time?! I don’t know”“Do we have time?! I don’t know”

Before what? The planet will endure and be fine even if the worst projections of overpopulation and resource use and climate-induced fires and storms (that somehow seem to be flat, or kill fewer people every year...); indeed, whatever the planet is is fine… It’s not obvious to me that any state of the planet is clearly preferable to another — except, as a member of the human species would say, naturally — in the temperature range in which we thrive. Indeed, plenty of my neighbors would be happy with slightly warmer times... and we'd probably grow more crops globally with a warmer, CO2-denser, greener world.

But it's also quite possible that these concerns are overblown, incorrect, or straight-up a substitute for a religious belief we long ago lost. We killed God, as Nietzsche told us, and the blood from that horrendous crime doesn't wash off so easily.

I am not convinced that "the" world is in great peril, that we're running out of time to "save" "it," or that the human project (really, the Western, Enlightened, fossil-fuel-using and mostly capitalist project) is an error or somehow not worth it.

I thank you for your contribution, Ms Goodall, and all you've done for bringing humanity closer to nature and chimps in particular. As for the rest, I, politely, can't see what you're getting at.