It is perhaps just another irony that is so prevalent on the left. Many of the same leftists who support protecting the environment also support communism. The irony is that communist nations are the ones that have waged a deadly assault on the earth’s environment and by far have caused the most environmental damage.
Via the Dissident blog of the Victims of Communism:
Is Communism Good for the Environment?
Is communism environmentally friendly? At first glance, one might be tempted to answer “yes.” A powerful central government with a collectivist philosophy might be just the thing necessary to combat pollution, climate change, and modern society’s rampant disregard for nature. It could, quite literally, save the world.
True, a heightened focus on the environment goes all the way back to the Communist Manifesto. Yet the attitude toward the environment found in that document is one more of extraction than of stewardship: Marx and Engels argue for the “abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.” If land is a source of wealth, it can and should be under the total control of the state.
But this level of power inspires a dangerous sense of recklessness. Any designer can confirm that, given a seemingly unlimited number of resources to work with, planning and implementation becomes sloppy. With wastefulness no longer a concern, one is free to barrel forward, to make new attempts if the first do not succeed, and to forget about cost consideration. When this attitude is applied to the environment and to human lives, death and destruction result.
One need not dwell too long in the realm of the hypothetical, however. The environmental track record of communist regimes like East Germany, the Soviet Union, and the People’s Republic of China is a matter of historical fact.
In 1984, a UN report named East Germany Europe’s most polluted country. In the same year, the German Economic Institute in West Berlin reported that East Germany’s sulfur dioxide emissions “have reached at least 46 tons annually per square kilometer”—well beyond any acceptable level. Acid rain, polluted water sources, and sewage leakages were just a few of the environmental issues that ravaged the country during its time under communist leadership.
In another example, a 1990 article from the Multinational Monitor reported that “40 percent of the Soviet people live in areas where air pollutants are three to four times the maximum allowable levels,” and that “in Leningrad, nearly half of the children have intestinal disorders caused by drinking contaminated water from what was once Europe’s most pristine supply.” Other issues included deforestation, metal poisoning, and eroding topsoil—although the Soviet Union itself reported almost none of this.
Or consider Central Asia, which the Soviet Union treated as a blank slate for grandiose industrial and military projects. Massive canals like the Karakum (originally “Lenin”) Canal and the Fergana (originally “Fergana Stalin”) Canal irrigated new cotton fields in the arid lands of Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. The Fergana Stalin Canal was built in 1939 in only 45 days—by 180,000 forced laborers, that is. But the diversion of existing rivers resulted in the near-disappearance of the Aral Sea, once one of the world’s largest lakes. It has left behind a basin of salt and pesticide-infested dust, swept across the landscape in giant storms.
Both the Soviet Union and China undertook open-air nuclear tests in Central Asia as well, at the Semipalatinsk Test Site in Kazakhstan and Lop Nur in Xinjiang Province, respectively, with little concern for the health of local people. High levels of cancer and disease have resulted.
Continue reading HERE.