Children 'bad for planet' | NEWS.com.au. I love this because it highlights perfectly the environmentalist outlook: people are a problem, the planet would be better off if we weren't here. Cf. Paul Watson, who calls humanity a "virus" and the "AIDS of the Earth":
The commentary reminded readers that Watson had called humans a disease before and he wasn’t sorry. “I was once severely criticized for describing human beings as being the ‘AIDS of the Earth.’ I make no apologies for that statement,” the column continued.
Watson was invoking the worst of Robert Malthus, an English political economist who claimed that mankind was overpopulating the earth. That claimed first appeared in the late 1700s. Watson urged some solutions for mankind as part of a process to “need to re-wild the planet”:
· “No human community should be larger than 20,000 people and separated from other communities by wilderness areas.” New York, London, Paris, Moscow are all too big. Then again, so are Moose Jaw, Timbuktu and even Annapolis, Md.
· “We need vast areas of the planet where humans do not live at all and where other species are free to evolve without human interference.”
· “We need to radically and intelligently reduce human populations to fewer than one billion.”
· “Sea transportation should be by sail. The big clippers were the finest ships ever built and sufficient to our needs. Air transportation should be by solar powered blimps when air transportation is necessary.”
· At least Watson was generous and said people could still talk with one another across great distances. “Communication systems can link the communities,” he proclaimed from on high.
The Watson rant kept on going calling for everything from cutting down on the population of domesticated dogs and cats to cutting down on everything else in what he called “simplify, simplify, simplify.”
Watson essentially called for humans to return to primitive lifestyles. “We need to stop flying, stop driving cars, and jetting around on marine recreational vehicles. The Mennonites survive without cars and so can the rest of us.”
This is the natural endpoint of the environmentalist religion. The environmentalist's Eden is the planet before the arrival of modern man, and its vision of salvation is a planet in which man does not "subdue" the earth as the Bible commands, but one in which man's influence all but disappears from its face.
Al Gore even uses religious terminology, calling global warming "a spiritual crisis"; the common reference to "Mother Earth" is a religious reference as much as is calling God our "Father". Make no mistake that environmentalism is a religious movement.
Also see: Michael Crichton on Environmentalism.
Monday, May 7, 2007
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Of course, environmentalism is a religion. And so are many other things, like the Free Software Movement. Or Communism.
I don't know if that, per se, is bad. What I know to be bad is when a religion is against one of the fundamental features of humans - technological advancement that changes the shape and features of their world. Or the need to make a buck.
Whatevs, anyways. Most things are over-rated in the first place.