Paul Driessen is the author of Eco-Imperialism: Green Power, Black Death, a senior policy advisor to the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), and a senior fellow with the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow. He writes and speaks frequently on energy and environmental policy. Driessen was interviewed on March 26 by Wesley Irwin of the LaRouche Youth Movement. This interview also appeared in the April 6, 2007 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.

EIR: In the introduction to your book, it says that among other things you've done—being a senior policy advisor to certain areas of the Congress; being part of a number of different public policy institutes that focus on energy, environment, economic development; and also being the author of this book Eco-Imperialism: Green Power, Black Death—you're also a former member of the Sierra Club and Zero Population Growth. Clearly your views on things have changed greatly. Why is that?

Driessen: I gradually realized that these groups often misrepresented the facts and paid little or no attention to the impacts their policies had on people. Their agenda was uppermost. Take DDT, for example. Environmental Defense, Sierra Club, and other groups knew that scientific studies did not back up their claims about the allegedly toxic effects of DDT on bird eggshells, eagles, and people. They knew the ban on DDT was causing the deaths of millions from malaria. And yet, to this day, they have bogus and far-fetched claims about this life-saving chemical on their websites. (Some studies say DDT may be "associated with" low birth weights in babies and early lactation failure in nursing mothers, for instance—as though those speculative risks are worse than the very real risks that mothers and babies will die from malaria, which DDT can prevent.)

Over and over, I caught the Sierra Club, Greenpeace, and other groups saying things that just were not honest or accurate. They used photographs that were taken in one place and claimed they were taken someplace else; or published a close-up shot of a drilling rig site, with trees cut and the ground graded and leveled—when a wider angle would show one acre of disturbance in a thousand acres. Or a photo they claimed was a devastating clear-cut, was actually a forest area that had burned down because careless campers had let their fire get out of control.

Greenpeace flat-out lied about Shell Oil's plans to sink an oil platform as an artificial reef. And a lot of leaders and members sounded delighted when hundreds of loggers were put out of work and entire rural communities were destroyed. The director of the Sierra Club's wilderness program in Colorado actually told me that the real purpose of the wilderness designations was to eliminate opportunities to develop energy and minerals. He said Americans use too much, consume too much, and aren't going to change voluntarily. So we have to force them to change, by taking the minerals away—and the best way to do that is put them in wilderness, so that they're off limits to exploration and development.

They show incredible disregard for the rights, aspirations, and even lives of the world's poorest people. They constantly hammer on the supposed risks of using chemicals, fossil fuels, and biotechnology—and never mention the far greater risks that those technologies would reduce, or the lives they can save. And they have tax-exempt status, and get literally billions of dollars a year from foundations, and even government agencies, to promote their agendas and lies, despite their lethal consequences.

Their disregard for the poor, especially dark-skinned people in developing countries, is frightening. They've never apologized once for the deaths their anti-DDT policies have caused, never even admitted they were wrong, never offered any form of aid or compensation to victims or their families, and certainly they've never been held accountable. During the World Trade Organization conference in Cancun a few years ago, the head of a major Mexican environmental group told a friend of mine: "We don't care at all about the poor. We don't want them to become rich or middle class, because then they will become consumers and that means you have to take more resources out of the ground to meet their demands, and that's bad for the Earth. It's better to keep them poor."

My Zero Population Growth days involved a lot of concern about the supposed population bomb, and then I started reading things from Julian Simon and other people, who raised questions that Paul Ehrlich [author of The Population Bomb and other environmentalists just couldn't answer. It became apparent that there was an environmental agenda that I was very uncomfortable with: keeping poor people poor, being so concerned about population that they were promoting anti-DDT, anti-biotechnology, anti-fossil fuel development, anti-economic development policies, that ultimately meant the poor were going to be kept poor, diseased, and dying prematurely.

Jacques Cousteau said we have to find a way to "eliminate" 350,000 people a day to stabilize global populations. And Prince Philip said he wanted to come back as a particularly deadly virus, and take out large segments of the Earth's population. Club of Rome co-founder Alexander King wrote, "My chief quarrel with DDT in hindsight is that it greatly added to the population problem." And former Sierra Club president Mike McCloskey said, "by using DDT, we reduce mortality rates in underdeveloped countries without considering how to support the increase in populations."

These kinds of things just left me with a bad taste in my mouth.

EIR: As they should anyone, I think.

Driessen: You would think.

EIR: When you bring up Paul Ehrlich and Prince Philip, I remember in the Ehrlich book, The Population Bomb, he suggests that we decrease population growth by actually targetting the black and brown populations of the planet. He's very explicit about it. In the case of Prince Philip, with his World Wildlife Fund, one of the things that EIR has previously put together is a report that shows that much of the so-called "protected lands" of Africa, are controlled by the World Wildlife Fund from the standpoint of strategic control over raw materials and resources—not allowed to be accessed by the people of those countries, which helps also keep population growth in check. Do you see tendencies in other areas to go after population control, or even a decrease in population along racial lines?

Driessen: They're rarely as open or blunt as Cousteau, Prince Philip, and Ehrlich were in the past. But if you just look at the environmental movement's policies, you see programs they would never get away with in Canada, Australia, the United States, or Europe, if they resulted in even a dozen deaths. They're trying to shut down the use of genetically modified (GM) crops in poor countries, where nutrition is marginal at best, people are starving, and GM crops would grow better, resist insects and plant diseases, require less water and pesticides, and bring in bumper crops. Even without the modern high-tech farming practices we use, biotech crops could and do make a huge difference.

But Sierra Club and Greenpeace have launched campaigns that are based on lies about the dangers of GM food and claims that planting any GM crops (or using DDT to stop malaria) would threaten these poor farmers' exports to Europe. They tell people: "If you plant GM crops, your exports to Europe, the mainstay of your economy, will dry up. If any crops in your country are bio-tech, there could be pollen contamination, and Europe is going to ban all your crops." And then they use their political muscle to stir up more European Union paranoia about GM food, DDT, and even air transport of crops from Africa.

I think we're beginning to see a change in attitude by people in these poor countries. South African farmers, for example, have been planting Bt corn, and their yields have risen so far—ten times or more—that they are making money for the first time, have more corn than they can sell, and are planting other crops they couldn't afford to plant in the past. They've also cut way back on their water and pesticide use, and their exposure to pesticides. They get much higher yields, much higher quality, at less human and environmental risk.

But there's sizable pressure against GM crops and DDT. They didn't get the ban on DDT until long after we had used it to eradicate malaria in Europe and the United States. But once malaria was gone, environmentalists, politicians, and regulators began to worry about things that only people in wealthy, healthy, disease-free countries can afford to worry about. And they exported their obsessions and paranoia, by getting them into international treaties and trade programs. They even tried to get DDT banned completely from the health-care arena.

But the radical greens still fight DDT to this day, even after it has been approved by the U.S. Agency for International Development and World Health Organization, even after it has been shown, over and over, that the chemical is safe for people and the environment, and that it does what no other chemical in existence, at any price, can do: keep 90% of mosquitoes from even entering a home, for six to twelve months with a single spraying, and prevent those that do enter from biting, and thus reduce the malaria rate by 75% or more.

And the countries are beginning to use DDT again, to spray the indoor walls of houses. They're saying, "We're not worried about unlikely risks of using DDT. We're worried about dying of malaria, we're worrying about 3,000 women and children dying every day from malaria—"

EIR: Every day!

Driessen: Every day. So African countries are saying, "Why do you want us to worry about something as speculative as 'lactation failure,' where you don't have any scientific evidence and just make these crazy claims? And we're not supposed to use a weapon that could save people's lives, prevent brain damage from malaria, get people healthy enough so they can work instead of being sick in bed, taken care of by other people who otherwise would be working productively?" By launching comprehensive, integrated programs to combat mosquitoes and malaria, where DDT is one more weapon in the arsenal, these countries could almost eradicate that disease in a few years. By using GM crops and more modern agricultural practices, they could improve farm yields and nutrition. Economies, hopes, and lives would be transformed.

And then you get to the other issue that I've been writing about, and that is, electricity. In sub-Saharan Africa, some 95% of the people don't have electricity. In one week, Al Gore uses more electricity than 25 million Ugandans use in a year. And yet the radical greens battle every mode of electricity generation, except the most nominal, irrelevant generators. Rainforest Action Network and other activists are constantly pressuring banks and construction companies not to build coal- or gas-fired power plants in Africa or other developing countries. Friends of the Earth and the International Rivers Network battle hydroelectric projects, like the Bujagali dam in Uganda, because it will interfere with kayaking. And Greenpeace and Sierra Club hate nuclear power.

EIR: Isn't their argument, or the argument you hear a lot of the time, that by man changing nature in that way, we are interfering with the so-called natural process on the planet; that it's somehow unnatural for us to be using these man-made innovations to change the Biosphere in which we live?

Driessen: Yes, that is clearly part of what they say. But it goes deeper than that. They also say human beings are a "cancer" on the planet, that we're really not part of the eco-system, that we interfere so much with natural planetary cycles, that we should be restricted in number, scope, and influence.

And yet, I have not seen them say they're ready to live in a mud hut in Africa for even a month or two. Some friends of mine in South Africa have offered to put Drew Barrymore and Cameron Diaz and their "Trippin" crew up for a month in a state-of-the-art mud hut, out in the middle of nowhere, so they can live the cute, indigenous lifestyle that they extol and want to perpetuate. They can go without lights and refrigeration; drink the same filthy water that's loaded with parasites and bacteria; go without bug repellants and DDT, and battle malarial mosquitoes all night long; eat the same meager, insect-infested organic food the locals eat. And when they come down with malaria, they can walk, just like the locals, 20 miles to the nearest clinic, and hope that nurse has something other than chloroquine to treat their malaria.

If they survive, they might come back changed people. I don't see any of them volunteering to do something like that, even for one month. But they're happy to keep these people in that state of permanent poverty.

As my friend June Arunga from Kenya says, "indigenous lifestyles" just mean indigenous poverty, indigenous malnutrition, indigenous disease, and childhood death. And that's really what it comes down to: When you don't have these modern technologies, your lifespan is cut almost in half.