If This is the Sixth Great Extinction, Where are All the Corpses? By Elizabeth Nickson

Like so much of what passes for science in the environmental movement, conservation biology’s connection to reality is tenuous and its tenets are more political than scientific. From Elizabeth Nickson at elizabethnickson.substack.com:

There are none. That’s a clue.

When I tell someone that the Endangered Species Act (in every country) is the most powerful law of the land outside the cities, I watch their eyes go blank. They have no comeback, because they know nothing about it. Most feel deeply that species must be protected, and most – not counting hysteric activists – suspect that we are destroying biodiversity. This is not the case. This is blatant propaganda that rains down on us ceaselessly. In fact, wherever humans land, almost inevitably, they increase biodiversity. There is more activity in the interstices between humans and wilderness than there is in all wilderness put together. Further, the Environmental Kuznets curves shows that, as income rises, people (without the hectoring of an agency) start to take care of their land, their towns, water, rivers, forests and wildlife, and this is just when median income reaches about $15,000. Industrialization can be lethal – it is when the worst happens – but humans have found mitigation technology, which if we were honest, and not seized by hysteria – the hysteria costs billions a year – we could force implementation. As it stands lawfare from the environmental junta, eats up billions of tax dollars every year which should and could be better spent. The lawfare is funded by the richest people on earth, usually, I hate to say, the most witless women in those families, searching for the feeling of benevolence and significance. Rich, cruel, stupid and profoundly malignant.

Culture is far more fragile than nature.

Here is a relatively painless overview of the situation:

Where Are All The Corpses?

The rationale underpinning this subterfuge lies in a form of science established, more or less, in 1978, at the University of California–San Diego . Conservation biology marks a sharp veering away from the scientific method we all learned in middle school. The scientific method is the reason bridges don’t collapse when you drive over them and that 99.999 percent of the time, your food is not dangerous to eat. A hypothesis is advanced, and the relevant scientific community bends towards testing it. The scientist has to go back, revise some of his thinking, and advance his theory again. And when every shred of falsification or doubt has been rooted out, the theory is deemed to have utility.

Conservation biology starts with the assumptions that humans are wreaking havoc on the natural world and that resources are finite and decreasing. These are plausible assumptions, but assumptions nonetheless. History and hard evidence demonstrate that bounty, life expectancy, health, wealth, clean water, and air are all increasing, at least for those of us who live in countries under the system of democratic capitalism. Oil finds, for example, in 2010 and 2011 surpassed even optimistic predictions by an order of magnitude, at which point the peak oil argument went all quiet. Next comes the assertion that a third of all animal and plant species are threatened, largely because of “development” and corporate greed. The job of the conservation biologist is no longer investigation but educating the public on biodiversity loss and species extinction. Conservation biologists claim that their profession holds higher values and those values are universal, so they must be treated as normative or established fact.

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