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LEGACIES
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Revolution.” She imagined a grim future where a middle-class everyman
made his morning coffee on a gas stove, electric percolators and
ovens having been banned, and endured a two-and-a-half-hour commute
on the city bus, cars now likewise forbidden. “His wife washes diapers
for hours each day, by hand, as she washes all the family laundry, as
she washes the dishes—by hand, as there are no self-indulgent luxuries
such as washing machines or automatic dishwashers.” As usual Rand
was unwilling to accept the claims of a political movement at face value,
convinced that hidden agendas drove the environmental movement.
“Clean air is not the issue nor the goal of the ecologists’ crusade. . . . it
is technology and progress that the nature-lovers are out to destroy,” she
told her listeners. 44
Nature was not benevolent to Rand, but a force to be kept at bay by
man’s reason. Petrograd under the Communists had fallen to nature,
regressing from a citadel of European culture to a city stalked by starvation,
where survival was a daily struggle. Now environmentalists seemed
to be questioning the basic achievements of industrialization and commerce,
the discoveries that had lifted man above the beasts. Collectivists,
previously focused on inequality and injustice, were “now denouncing
capitalism for creating abundance.” In this context Apollo 11 stood out for
Rand as a bright sign of hope; it was not the powers of the state that she
celebrated, but the wonders of technology and human achievement. 45
Rand missed the fact that environmentalism was yet another arena
of thought powered by selective appropriation of her work. She focused
relentlessly on what historians call conservation environmentalism,
which emphasized the dangers of technology and was resolutely antigrowth.
But another strain of environmental thought had discovered
Rand’s celebration of human creativity and the power of markets.
Pragmatic or countercultural environmentalism focused on invention
and innovation, rather than regulation, as solutions to the environmental
crisis. The survivalist Whole Earth Catalog, a hippy-techno-geek bible,
was an important node of this movement. “We are as gods and might
as well get good at it,” the catalogue announced, striking a vaguely
libertarian note with its intention to support “a realm of intimate,
personal power” and “the power of the individual.” Not surprisingly
the catalogue’s founder, Stewart Brand, thought Rand was an exciting
thinker. 46
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