The Middle is Always Evil

Since starting this blog, I’ve blogged about environmentalism a little more than I’d like to.

There are other issues out there; issues that are more pressing, that affect our country and our world much more directly– like Iran’s nuclear program, or the fact that they’ve been launching test missiles capable of striking Israel. But so often I choose to write about the Environmentalist Movement over other things for a very specific reason, which is:

The choice to accept environmentalism or not is the choice between industry and inactivity, civilization and primitivism, comfortability and suffering; it is the choice between life and death. Many may disagree with this claim, citing the good intentions of the environmentalists: taking care of the earth couldn’t be bad, could it? After all, not all environmentalists are nut jobs like Eric Pianka, a noted ecologist who wants to kill off 90% of human life; most are in fact quite moderate, and simply believe that humans have a responsibility to look after the earth.

Such people are not evil, but they are misguided. They accept the two basic premises of environmentalism: that the environment is good because it is the environment, and that the smallest human interference in the natural ecological structure is a desirable goal. The logical conclusion of these premises, of course, is that human activity must be restricted as much as possible in order to prevent such interference. If you accept these premises, chances are good that you would not be in favor of a mass culling of the human population. The danger is that men like Pianka also accept them, and they desire to see their logical ends carried out. Since you’ve already accepted their premises, they can use the power of guilt to get you to accept a gradually more oppressive environmental policy. Case in point:

Yesterday, the leaders at the G8 Summit agreed to cut their countries’ carbon emissions by 50% by 2050, a radically anti-industrial move that will dismember the economy and stunt the standard of living for the global population. No one can claim that such an act was motivated by anything other than a hatred for mankind. Last week, a measure was put up for conideration in the British Parliament that would institute a personal cap-and-trade policy for every resident of England. Was this act considered because its proponents love the earth, or because they hate humanity? You be the judge.

With the basic premises of environmentalism so common today, it won’t be long before such cap-and-trade proposals are made in the United States. Do you really believe that such a measure would be beyond the scope of a Barack Obama environmental policy? Maybe not now, but what about four years from now? This is why the environmentalism issue is so important to me.

But there is another reason I frequently choose environmentalism over other topics. Throughout history, the war against man’s productive faculty has been waged under the banner of countless different names and movements; tribalism, monarchism, feudalism– more recently communism, socialism, and fascism– and of course, there’s always been the monstrosity that is organized religion. All of these have been a part of an overarching war on Individualism and a hatred of humanity; environmentalism is no exception here– it is merely the newest leader in the same war, the latest manifestation of the same hatred. However, environmentalism is different from its ideological ancestors in one, very important way.

In the past, movements that sought to destroy humanity (the modern ones anyway) have disguised their hatred for man’s virtues, proclaiming them to be the immoral while holding up their own standards as the moral alternative. With the broad base of society accepting altruism, their unpracticeable moral code, they guilted people into embracing their own self-destruction in the name of the love of mankind. Environmentalism is different because it makes no attempt to disguise its contempt for humanity.

Now, I won’t run through my whole spiel on environmentalism again because I’ve already blogged on it and have stated my opposition to it in as clear terms as I can, both here and in other places. But I will say this:

Tonight, my girlfriend and I decided to go see The Happening, M. Night Shyamalan’s latest train wreck of a film. Not only was the acting and the plot development poor, it didn’t make any sense– and worst of all, by the end, the film reveals itself to be nothing more than a piece of crass, anti-humanist environmentalist propaganda.

The film revolves around a man named Elliot and his wife, who are trying to flee from an apparent biochemical terrorist attack in the form of a toxin in the air, which, when people are exposed to it, causes them to kill themselves in unusual and gruesome ways. We soon find that it is not a terrorist attack at all, but a pesticide released into the air by plants— all plants. Apparently, the plants become sensitized and release the pesticide when large groups of people come near. The audience is left utterly clueless as to why all of this is happening until the very end of the film, when (after the event mysteriously ends) a scientist speculates that the plants were taking defensive measures to wipe out a virus that was infecting them, and is infecting them still— humanity.

This kind of attitude about human kind does not exist in isolation within this film; this anti-human sentiment has existed for years in the Ecology movement, and it is not a laughing matter. There are serious groups dedicated to the extinction of humanity– some of them are passive, like the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, which says on its website that an earth without humans

sounds like paradise, doesn’t it? …Without us meddlesome humans, all other species would get their fair chance at survival.

They ask us to

envision an impossible dream: all human sperm suddenly and permanently loses viability – no impregnated human egg begins meiosis to form a zygote – none transforms from embryo into the sacred fetus, is carried to term and sentenced to life. Zero conceptions, wanted or un.

In their defense, the VHEM only calls for what they call a “voluntary extinction” which means no forced population control, no nuclear weapons, no mass graves; they simply want us all to stop breeding, and they want us to do it right now. But these crazy folks are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to hatred of mankind.

In April of 2006, Professor Eric R. Pianka, noted ecologist, gave a speech (to a packed audience, no less) in which he called for the extermination of 90% of humans now living with an airborne Ebola virus. No further comment is needed.

The entire driving philosophy behind environmentalism is flawed, and must be checked. Environmentalists believe that nature is an end in and of itself, that it must be upheld and protected above all else. This is why some of them (the ones that are consistent, anyway) will say things like, “You’re looking at the world with a humanity bias,” which means, of course, that you are brutish and selfish for valuing human life above a tree frog or dirt. If we accept that nature is good because it is nature, and for no other reason, it makes sense to desire human extinction; such a desire is merely taking the saying “Leave the Smallest Footprint Possible” to heart. Man survives by manipulating the environment to suit his needs– there is no other way. If we accept that we should leave the smallest impact on the world as possible, why not just wipe ourselves out?

The environment is not an end in and of itself, it is only an end so long as it serves human ends. I want clean air, not because I love the earth goddess and want to see her restored to her natural state, not because of some nebulous responsibility that I feel I have for nature, but because I like clean air, it feels good in my lungs, and it serves as a major value for me to be able to breathe. I want clean water for similar reasons. I want trees around, because I know that, instead of attacking me and forcing me to commit suicide as M. Night Shyamalan would have it, they produce Oxygen for me to breathe, and as I said above, I consider breathing to be important to me. But I will not stop myself from cutting down trees to make room for my house for any reason other than that those trees are, for whatever reason, of more value to me than the house. I refuse to act in discordance with my values, and so should you.

Proclaim once and for all that your own life, not nature, is your standard of what is good and evil, and renounce environmentalism forever.