Editor's Blog
Ecology should be an honorable profession, but its leadership is flawed when they distort data, denigrate human existence, foment hysteria to sell apocalyptic screeds, and reject technological solutions. Civilization is presently over-ripe with idiotic environmental activists. Here’s my list of the worst, with quotes from their misanthropic ideology:
Paul Ehrlich, population biologist, Stanford University
King of the pessimistic screechers, it would require a book to list all his foolish ideas… actually, he’s written several. Here’s a random sampling:
“In ten years [by 1980] all important animal life in the sea will be extinct. Large areas of coastline will have to be evacuated because of the stench of dead fish.”
“We must go back to the spinning wheel, returning to a beatific state of endless drudge labor, six days a week…”
“In the 1970′s… hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death…”
“I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.”
John Davis, former editor of Earth First! Journal
Winner of my “Pol Pot” award for advocating mass homicide.
“Human beings, as a species, have no more value than slugs… I suspect that eradicating smallpox was wrong. It played an important part in balancing ecosystems.”
David Foreman, founder of Earth First!
His vision is even more annihilating:
“Phasing out the human race will solve every problem on Earth, social and environmental… It may take our extinction to set things straight.”
Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, ex-president of the World Wildlife Fund Winner of my “Inbred Royal Vicious Retard” trophy for his remark:
“If I were reincarnated I would wish to be returned to earth as a killer virus to lower human population levels.”
David Graber, National Park Service. Another germophile
“Some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along.”
Carl Amery, German author
Give him a “Green Nazi” ribbon for this comment:
“We, in the green movement, aspire to a cultural model in which killing a forest will be considered more contemptible and more criminal than the sale of 6-year-old children to Asian brothels.”
Pentti Linkola, Finnish ecophilosopher
Co-winner of my Luddite Award:
“Everything we have developed in the last 100 years should be destroyed.”
John Shuttleworth, founder of Mother Earth News
Sharing Luddite honors:
“The only real good technology is no technology at all.”
Maurice Strong, first director of the United Nations Environment Programme:
“Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrial civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?”
Lamont Cole: Yale University
Give him a “Mean Math Moron” trophy for this equation:
“To feed a starving child is to exacerbate the world population problem.”
Honorable Mention goes to David Brower, Paul Watson, Judi Bari, John Zerzan, and Ted Turner. If I failed to include your favorite eco-fascist, please email me at hankhyena1@gmail.
link: http://htomc.dns2go.com/text/ENVIRO.TXT
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23 Comments
Was Paul Ehrlich somehow incorrect; coastlines never made briny amoeba and trash grottoes, drudge never forced upon humanity in great numbers for survival overall, mere tens of millions starved dead in the 1970s, and England never blinked from the earth in 2000?
Learn to read Lemmas properly, Hyena.
Most of them are right. Humans are awful.
Not to mention that to achieve the “back to the earth” movement, we would have depopulation the planet by about 75 – 80%.
““Inbred Royal Vicious Retard” trophy”
Pure. Win.
How could you overlook Jay Hanson and Richard C. Duncan?
http://dieoff.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_C._Duncan
I would add Ayn Rand to the list, because her novel “Atlas Shrugged” now reads like Peak Oil dieoff porn. She postulated a collapse of industrial civilization for prophylactic reasons, to rid the planet of all the altruistic, collectivist, religious, family-oriented people who didn’t meet her philosophical standards.
The hypocrisy of these people blows my mind when I think about them living their first world lifestyle while seeing the rest of humanity as nothing but a plague. I seriously went brain-numb contemplating it for a few seconds just now. Especially the pampered royal advocating mass genocide and his desire to be the germ that carries it out.
I wish more about these people’s true beliefs was better known in the mainstream so that they would become more radioactive to policy makers who might otherwise listen to them in order to scoop up green voters.
the hatred these people have for their own species is appalling, and they have had far too much influence on politicians, the media, university studies and social activists for about three decades now. They are arch-enemies of transhumanists, humanists, and human beings in general. I am eager to assist in discrediting and ridiculing them.
If these a******es think the human race is a disease to the earth, they should start the healing themselves by jumping off a cliff. These people are incredibly ignorant and heartless.
An infelicitous term in many ways, the “watermelon” moniker does hold some…um..water. “Green on the outside, red on the inside.” So many of the dark, misanthropic fantasies of these radical environmental-cases have much to do with the idea of collectivism and control. They arrogate to themselves the prerogative to dictate which advances of human civilization are appropriate and which are not (“What’s our read on the ox-drawn plow? Too likely to increase the surplus population?”).
I do have my problems with Ayn Rand, but I stop well short of including her in this list. A thriving, productive, accountable population in Randian terms could be as big as you choose, and as advanced. Her issue was with those who exist in parasitical fashion on the industry of others…a description which could be quite aptly applied to the would-be hegemonic eugenicists of the anti-human environmental fringe.
Wise stewardship of the natural substrates of our technological civilization is very much in keeping with Objectivism, since it entails recognizing the intrinsic value of those substrates, and a sober accounting for the act of withdrawing from that value for the service of other ends.
“Environmentalism” (of the human-hating stripe) does grievous and hypocritical violence to this standard, since it demands that we deny the value which is added by the act of being human and doing human things…as long as we are not talking about *them.*
Two recent biographies of Rand have made it abundantly clear Rand’s disdain not only for “the folks next door,” but also for family life and having children.
As Whittaker Chambers in his famous review of “Atlas Shrugged” shrewdly observes:
http://old.nationalreview.com/flashback/flashback200501050715.asp
All Miss Rand’s chief heroes are also breathtakingly beautiful. So is her heroine (she is rather fetchingly vice president in charge of management of a transcontinental railroad). So much radiant energy might seem to serve a eugenic purpose. For, in this story as in Mark Twain’s, “all the knights marry the princess” — though without benefit of clergy. Yet from the impromptu and surprisingly gymnastic matings of the heroine and three of the heroes, no children — it suddenly strikes you — ever result. The possibility is never entertained. And, indeed, the strenuously sterile world of Atlas Shrugged is scarcely a place for children. You speculate that, in life, children probably irk the author and may make her uneasy.
Rand and her fans might claim otherwise, but she portrayed behavior consistent with the recommendations of the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement.
Have you actually read anything Rand ever wrote? Or did you get that idea purely from other people who also haven’t read anything Rand ever wrote? Rand *abhorred* the concept of population reduction. “Anti-human” was one of her favorite insults. I certainly have my disagreements with her (she’s a little too statist and centralist for me, in final review), but to claim she has something in common with people who see humanity and human technology as a plague to be eradicated is to demonstrate total ignorance of her beliefs.
Don’t want to hijack this thread in a Randian apologia direction, especially since I do find her elitism more than a bit off-putting (though I do cut her some slack in that “Atlas” was more a mythic tome about Pure Types than a novel about real people…for which it suffers dreadfully as a novel, IMHO).
But I would point out that the denizens of Galt’s Gulch were in fact procreating, and raising their kids to be responsible, accountable net producers of value. The fact that Dagny and her finally-chosen beau had not made with the baby-making by the end of the book does not strike me as an indictment against child-bearing as such. No telling how many little Objectivists were set to march out of the Gulch to re-make the world in the time after the curtain (finally!) fell on her magnum opus.
Rand’s personal feelings about replenishing the ranks of Homo Sapiens lie a bit outside the parameters of the depth to which I’m personally inclined to delve into these things. And, to my mind, they are a bit beside the point. Where I’m drawing my opinions on the matter is from the fictionalized accounts of the world as she would have it be (i.e., her novels). In the world she paints, there is in fact plenty of room for having families….so long as that act does not perpetuate the pattern of “mooching” and “looting” in which the common folk (again with the elitism) engage by doing so. This differs from the anti-human environmentalists, who seem to view humanity itself as a plague.
I’ve read quite a bit of Wilbur Smith in my time. All his heroines are beautiful, intelligent, young and resourceful. All his heroes are wealthy, tall, broad chested and handsome. They’re war heroes who also hold a half-dozen different doctorates. It doesn’t really make his yarns any less entertaining. If perhaps a bit more trite.
Rand didn’t mention children in here novels because, frankly they’re a problem for her philosophy. Think about it, a philosophy based on self-interest (not a bad thing in itself), really doesn’t have room for the self-sacrifice involved with raising children. So she pretty much ignored the problem altogether.
But to equate THAT with an active interest in killing people really shows how far some people will go to discredit Rand. She did nothing *but* preach about the sanctity of the individual and her philosophy taught that *I exist* as one of the three unarguable tenants of her philosophy. How can you possibly say, unless out of ignorance or malice, that Rand somehow advocated killing people?
“To feed a starving child is to exacerbate the world population problem.”
Turn this around, and it says, “One way to lower the world population is to stop feeding children.”
In a literal sense, that’s true. But our love and care for others leads most of us to wish, very strongly, to feed a starving child.
The point is that normal human instincts and ethics lead us to do the opposite of what would diminish the population. Our instincts make us want to increase the population, not decrease it.
So population control is, crudely speaking, anti-human. Yet we don’t want to live in a more and more crowded world, full of violence.
So what’s to be done? Unfortunately, because of this stark human contradiction, there is no one answer.
This is why we must use birth control to stop population growth. Other, more “natural” methods of doing so are horribly inhumane. Those who talk of killing others in the name of population control really ought to start with themselves.
These morons calling for the extinction of the human race are like those who invoke others to suicide bombing. But not them. What would all the little folks do without their guiding light? How many of them travel in jets, stay at luxury hotels, work in heated or air conditioned rooms, use toilets for christ’s sake – and all the while proclaiming the evil of humanity?
OK. I’ll take a shot…
All of them?
well linkola, for one, actively pursues a luddite lifestyle and is buying up forest area in finland to save it from clearcuts. he is literally surrounded by clearcuts.
Those who talk of killing others in the name of population control really ought to start with themselves.
Well I certainly hope they do start with themselves. What kind of position would it be to suggest that various unknown others should die while oneself and one’s family should live? That’s not only wrong, it’s absurd.
Native Americans practiced birth control… I believe there are plenty of natural contraceptives.
Your label “ecologist” is misleading.
An ecologist is a scientist who studies the interaction between the physical processes of the earth and living organisms, as well as the interactions of living organisms amongst themselves. They also do research on the impact of humans on environment. Ecology is a legitimate branch of science rooted in biology but also physics and chemistry.
An environmentalist is someone who prioritizes what he or she considers the health of the planet above other issues.
this is Hank Hyena the author – there are also Environmental Ecologists and Ecological Environmentalists. Thanks for your clarification of the terminology, but it seems irrelevant to the theme of my article.
Why should ‘greenies’ be any different from any other group and not have extremes at their edges? I don’t agree with most if not all of the quotes, no more than many blinkered techno-optimists who are more concered about getting to their techno-utopia’s than what is happening to the rest of the human race.
Having said that I would rather see a population that isn’t acting like a ‘dump’ bacteria and just chewing up all their available resources living in their own ‘sh#t’ and killing of any other species in their way.