The Two Faces of the Environmental
Movement
(updated
Aug. 2004)
This website has been put up to confront
all the issues Americans are now facing since we have adopted socialism, and
by that I mean involuntary socialism, as the manner in which we conduct our
day to day interactions with each other. Considering the impact the
Environmental movement has on our economy (about 10% or more of the cost of
just about everything goes to the Environmental movement and, at the same
time, it is sending jobs overseas at an unprecedented rate) and the
“progress” of our society as a whole to fill our role as Stewards of our
environment as charged by God, this topic cannot be ignored by anyone even
remotely aware of what has happened and is happening.
TO START WITH; THERE ARE TWO SEPARATE
AND DISTINCT BEINGS INVOLVED WITH THE ENVIRONMENTAL MOVEMENT. One is a
people who recognize their role is to be Stewards of it and genuinely care
about the abuse it has been subjected to and want to reverse it so that they
themselves and their progeny can enjoy better safety and comfort from it:
And then there is the other being. These are, the would-be gods making up
the core of the environmental movement. The fact of the matter is these hard
core would be god environmentalist present far more danger to Americans, if
not more so, than Al Queda and probably any other if not all foreign threats
combined which, I might add, can be done away with by adopting a proper
foreign policy. The Environmentalist I am talking about is tied to the
Secular (Godless) religion in that their goal is to create a terrarium, if
you will, that will do away with mans’ link to his Creator. An environment
where creation and creatures (man is nothing more than another creature or a
part of his environment, not steward over it) can live eternally without the
influence of their Creator. They want all progress that has been
accomplished for man’s safety and comfort from transportation, methods of
production, homes etc. utilizing energy to be done away with in that they
want to shutdown the sources of energy for such purposes, not clean them up
and strive for better efficiencies as a good Steward would do. The idea of
survival of the fittest; a world made up of beast preying on each other,
devoid of reason of which man is just another animal, is their idea of the
ideal environment. I recall one of them telling me…”The only things
permanent are death and taxes. We can do away with death, but taxes?”
Consider, if we no longer use trees,
fossil fuels, atomic energy, hydro power etc. in right and proper ways, or
any other means of producing energy and products from natural resources, an
agenda which they violently support, how will our houses be heated, how will
our vehicles be propelled, how will our factories run?
True, man has been very careless in his
role as Steward of his environment in that he has abused it badly. He has free
cut and not replanted, he has polluted, he has used the things produced by his
environment for destructive purposes and so on but the miracle of creation is
that it recreates. At any time man can correct his blunders and turn his
environment back into a place where he and his progeny can enjoy life instead
of enduring it. But even the thought of this is NOT in the vocabulary of the
hard core environmentalist. They are Beast by their own admission in that they
set aside REASON (Man’s link with his Creator/God) and concentrate on the
unreasonable. They are not Stewards in that Stewards are charged with making
things better: Better for their own preservation and enjoyment, in this case,
as God intended. They hate humanity with a passion that defies reason and
revel in its destruction, with the exception of their own: Maybe. Their
own words betray them to be nihilist. Their thinking brought abortion (the
murder of unborn children) on us while they had laws past that protect the
unborn of animal species like Eagles etc. to the extent people destroying them
can find themselves fined and imprisoned. I am not suggesting destroying
unborn animals is right and proper but any reasonable person would see through
to the heart of these Beasts in Human clothing.
My position: Start by shutting down the
Bureaucratic Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). It is a haven for the
Environmentalist/Beast and a source of power over us and profit from us
derived from the fruits of our labors. It encourages our indoctrination in
government institutions that have as their goal “teaching” us to accept the
motives of the Environmentalist and all the other bureaucracies are right and
proper. This country came further than any other in the development of safety
and comfort’s for its citizens and its track record when it came to abuse out
shines any other country in the world. The EPA, like the other bureaucratic
governmental agencies, has been given unconstitutional power to act as judge,
jury and executioner in any matter it decides to inject itself into. It can
impose fines, kill and/or imprison people based on whether it determines
people have breached its rules, and it does it with impunity.
The following is from an essay by Dr.
George Reisman, Professor of Economics at Pepperdine University, that was
printed in a publication dated September 1992 called the Freeman, published by
the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) located in Irvington-on-Hudson,
N.Y..10533. Dr. Reisman did some much needed research into the hearts and
minds of the Environmentalist/Beast, and his conclusions, which are based on
facts, not innuendoes from celebrities and politicians who share the motives
of the Environmentalist, tell a sordid tale of the goals and objectives of
said Beast. Although there may be some misguided souls in their numbers, it
does not change the fact that the hard core are comfortable with murder and
anything else they need to do to accomplish their objectives.
…“Recently a popular imported mineral
water was removed from the market because tests showed that samples of it
contained 35 parts per billion of benzene. Although this was an amount so
small that only 15 years ago it would have been impossible to detect, it was
assumed that considerations of public health required withdrawal of the
product.
Such a case, of course, is not unusual
nowadays. The presence of parts per billion of a toxic substance is routinely
assumed to be a cause of human deaths. And whenever the number of projected
deaths exceeds one million, environmentalist demand that the government remove
the offending pesticide, preservative, or other alleged bearer of toxic
pollution from the market. They do so, even though a level of risk of one in a
million is one-third as great as that of an airplane falling from the sky on
one’s home.
The Toxicity of Environmentalism
While it is not necessary to question the
good intentions and sincerity of the overwhelming majority of the members of
the environmental or ecology movement, it is vital that the public realize
that in this seemingly lofty and noble movement itself can be found more
than a little evidence of the most profound toxicity. Consider, for
example, the following quotation from David M. Graber, a research biologist
with the National Park Service, in his prominently featured Los Angeles
Times book review of Bill McKibben’s The End Of
Nature.
This [man’s “remaking the earth by
degrees”] makes what is happening no less tragic for those of us who value
wildness for its own sake, not for what value it confers upon mankind. I, for
one, cannot wish upon either my children or the rest of Earth’s biota a tame
planet, be it monstrous or- however unlikely- benign. McKibben is a
biocentrist, and so am I. We are not interested in the utility of a particular
species, or free flowing rivers, or ecosystem to mankind. They have intrinsic
value, more value - to me - than another human body or a billion of them.
Human happiness, and certainly human
fecundity, are not as important as a wild and healthy planet. I know social
scientists who remind me that people are part of nature, but it isn’t true.
Somewhere along the line – at about a billion years ago, maybe half that- we
quit the contract and became a cancer. We have become a plague upon ourselves
and upon Earth.
It is cosmically unlikely that the
developed world will chose to end its orgy of fossil-energy consumption, and
the Third World its suicidal consumption of landscape. Until such time as Homo
Sapiens should decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the right
virus to come along.
WHILE MR. GRABER OPENLY WISHES FOR THE
DEATH OF A BILLION PEOPLE, MR. MCKIBBEN, THE AUTHOR HE REVEWED, QUOTES WITH
APPROVAL JOHN MUIR’S BENEDICTION TO ALLIGATORS, DESCRIBING IT AS A “GOOD
EPIGRAM” FOR HIS OWN, “HUMBLE APPROACH”: “HONORABLE REPRESENTATIVES OF THE
GREAT SAURIANS OF OLDER CREATION, MAY YOU LONG ENJOY YOUR LILIES AND RUSHES,
AND BE BLESSED NOW AND THEN WITH A MOUTHFUL OF TERROR-STRICKEN MAN BY WAY OF A
DAINTY.”
Such statements represent pure,
unadulterated POISON. They express ideas and wishes which if acted upon, would
mean terror and death for enormous numbers of human beings.
These statements, and others like them,
are made by prominent members of the environmental movement. The significance
of such statements cannot be diminished by ascribing them only to a small
fringe of the environmental movement. Indeed, even if such views were
indicative of the thinking only of five or ten percent of the members of the
environmental movement – the “deep ecology,” Earth First! Wing – they would
represent toxicity in the environmental movement as a whole not at the level
of parts per billion or even parts per million, but at the level of parts
per hundred which, of course, is an enormously higher level of toxicity
than is deemed to constitute a danger to human life in virtually every other
case in which deadly poison is present.
But the toxicity level of the
environmental movement as a whole is substantially greater than even parts per
hundred. It is certainly at least at the level of several parts per
ten.
This is obvious from the fact that the mainstream of the environmental
movement makes no fundamental or significant criticisms of the likes of
Messrs. Graber and McKibben. Indeed, John Muir, whose wish for alligators to
“be blessed now and then with a mouthful of terror – stricken man by way of a
dainty” McKibben approvingly quotes, was the founder of the Sierra Club,
which is proud to acknowledge that fact. The Sierra Club, of course, is
the leading environmental organization and is supposedly the most respectable
of them.
The “Intrinsic” Value of Nature
There is something much more important
than the Sierra Club’s genealogy, however – Something that provides an
explanation in terms of basic principle as to why the mainstream of the
ecology movement does not attack what might be thought to be merely its
fringe. This is a fundamental philosophical premise which the mainstream of
the movement share with the alleged fringe and which logically implies hatred
for man and his achievements. Namely, the premise that nature possesses
intrinsic value – i.e., that nature is valuable in and of itself, apart
from all contribution human life and well-being.
The anti-human premise of nature’s
intrinsic value goes back, in the Western world as far as St. Francis of
Assisi, who believed in the equality of all living creatures: man, cattle,
birds, fish, and reptiles. Indeed, precisely on the basis of the philosophical
affinity, and at the wish of the mainstream of the ecology movement, St.
Francis of Assisi has been officially declared the patron saint of ecology by
the Roman Catholic Church.
The premise of nature’s intrinsic value
extends to an alleged intrinsic value of forests, rivers, canyons, and
hillsides – to everything and anything that is not man. Its influence is
present in the Congress of the United States, in such statements as that
recently made by Representative Morris Udall of Arizona that a frozen, barren
desert in Northern Alaska, where substantial oil deposits appear to exist, is
a “sacred place” that should never be given over to oil rigs and pipelines. It
is present in the supporting statement of a representative of the Wilderness
Society that “There is a need to protect the land not just to have it there.”
It has, of course, also been present in the sacrifice of the interests of
human beings for the sake of snail darters and spotted owls.
The idea of nature’s intrinsic value
inexorably implies a desire to destroy man and his works because it implies a
perception of man as the systematic destroyer of the good, and thus as the
systematic doer of evil. Just as man perceives coyotes, wolves, and
rattlesnakes as evil because they regularly destroy the cattle and sheep he
values as sources of food and clothing, so, on the premise of nature’s
intrinsic value, the environmentalists view man as evil, because, in the
pursuit of his well-being, man systematically destroys the wildlife, jungles,
and rock formations that the environmentalist hold to be intrinsically
valuable. Indeed, from the perspective of such alleged intrinsic values of
nature, the degree of man’s alleged destructiveness and evil is directly in
proportion to his loyalty to his essential nature. Man is the rational being.
It is his application of his reason in the form of science, technology, and an
industrial civilization that enables him to act on nature on the enormous
scale on which he now does. THUS IT IS POSSESSION AND USE OF REASON
–MANIFESTED IN HIS TECHNOLOGY AND INDUSTRY—FOR WHICH HE IS HATED.
The doctrine of intrinsic value is itself
only a rationalization for the pre-existing hatred of man. It is invoked not
because one attaches any actual value to what is alleged to have intrinsic
value, but simply to serve as a pretext for denying values to man. For
example, caribou feed upon vegetation, wolves eat caribou, and microbes attack
wolves. Each of these, the vegetation, the caribou, the wolves, and the
microbes, is alleged by the environmentalists to possess intrinsic value. Yet
absolutely no course of action is indicated for man. Should man act to protect
the intrinsic value of the vegetation from destruction by the caribou? Should
he act to protect the intrinsic value of the caribou from destruction by the
wolves? Should he act to protect the intrinsic value of the wolves from the
microbes? Even though each of these alleged intrinsic values is at stake, man
is not called upon to do anything. When does the doctrine of intrinsic value
serve as a guide to what man should do? Only when man comes to attach value on
something. Then it is invoked to deny him value he seeks. For example, the
intrinsic value of nature is invoked as a guide to man’s action only when
there is something man wants, such as oil, and then, as in the case of
Northern Alaska, its invocation serves to stop him from having it. In other
words, the doctrine of the intrinsic value of nature is nothing but a
doctrine of the negation of human values. IT IS PURE NIHILISM.
It should be realized that it is logically
implicit in what has just been said that to establish a public office, such as
the recently proposed in California, of “environmental advocate.” Would be
tantamount to establishing an office of Negator of Human Value. The work of
such an office would be to stop man from achieving his values for no other
reason than that he was man and wanted to achieve them.
Of course the environmental movement is
not pure poison. Very few people would listen to it if it were. As I have
said, it is poisonous only at the level of several parts per ten. Mixed in
with the poison and overlaying it as a kind of sugar coating is the advocacy
of many measures which have the avowed purpose of promoting human life and
well-being, and among these some that considered in isolation, might actually
achieve that purpose. The problem is that the mixture is poisonous. And thus,
when one swallows environmentalism, one inescapably swallows poison.
Given the underlying nihilism of the
movement, it is not possible to accept at face value any of the claims it
makes of seeking to improve human life and well-being, especially when
following its recommendations would impose on people great deprivation or
cost. Indeed, nothing could be more absurd or dangerous than to take the
advise on how to improve one’s life and well-being from those who wish one
dead and whose satisfaction comes from human terror, which, of course, as I
have shown, is precisely what is wished in the environmental movement – openly
and on principle. This conclusion, it must be stressed, applies
irrespective of the scientific credentials of an individual. IF AN ALLEGED
SCIENTIFIC EXPERT BELIEVES IN THE INTRINSIC VALUE OF NATURE, THEN TO SEEK HIS
ADVISE IS EQUIVALENT TO SEEKING THE ADVICE OF A MEDICAL DOCTOR WHO WAS ON THE
SIDE OF THE GERMS RATHER THAN OF THE PATIENT. Obviously, Congressional
committees taking testimony from alleged expert witnesses on the subject of
proposed environmental legislation need to be aware of this fact and never
forget it.
Errors and Panics
Not surprisingly, in virtually every
case, the claims made by the environmentalists have turned out to be false or
simply absurd. Consider, for example, the recent case of Alar, a chemical
spray used for many years on apples in order to preserve their color and
freshness. HERE, IT TURNED OUT THAT EVEN IF THE ENVIRONMENTALISTS’ CLAIMS HAD
ACTUALLY BEEN TRUE, AND THE USE OF ALAR WOULD RESULT IN 4.2 DEATHS PER MILLION
OVER A SEVENTY YEAR LIFETIME, ALL WOULD HAVE BEEN SIGNIFICANT WAS THAT EATING
APPLES SPRAYED WITH ALAR WOULD THEN HAVE BEEN LESS DANGEROUS THAN TO DRIVING
TO THE SUPERMARKET TO BUY THE APPLES! (Consider: 4.2 deaths per million over a
seventy-year period means that in any one year in the United States, with its
population of roughly two hundred and fifty million people, (not counting
ILLEGAL ALIENS) approximately fifteen deaths would be attributable to Alar!
This is the result obtained by multiplying 4.2 per million times 250 million
and then dividing by 70. In the same one year period of time, approximately
50,000 deaths occur in motor vehicle accidents in the United State, most of
them within a few miles of the victims’ homes, and undoubtedly far more than
fifteen of them on trips to or from supermarkets.) Nevertheless, a panic
ensued, followed by a plunge in the sale of apples, the financial ruin of an
untold number of apple growers. And virtual disappearance of Alar.
Before the panic over Alar, there was
the panic over ASBESTOS. ACORDING TO FORBES MAGAZINE, IT TURNS OUT THAT
IN THE FORM IT IS NORMALLY USED IN THE UNITED STATES, ASBESTOS IS ONE-THIRD AS
LIKELY TO BE THE CAUSE OF DEATH AS BEING STRUCK BY LIGHTENING.
The there is the alleged damage to lakes
caused by acid rain. ACCORDING TO POLICY REVIEW, IT TURNS OUT THAT THE
ACIDIFICATION OF THE LAKES HAS NOT BEEN THE RESULT OF ACID RAIN, BUT OF THE
CESSATION OF LOGGING OPERATIONS IN THE AFFECTED AREAS AND THUS THE ABSENCE OF
THE ALKALINE RUN-OFF PRODUCED BY SUCH OPERATIONS. THIS RUN-OFF HAD MADE
NATURALLY ACIDIC LAKES NON-ACIDIC FOR A FEW GENERATIONS.
Besides these cases, THERE WERE THE
HYSTERIAS OVER DIOXIN IN THE GROUND AT TIMES BEACH, MISSOURI, TCE IN THE
DRINKING WATER OF WOBURN MASSACHUSETTS, THE CHEMICALS IN LOVE CANAL, AND
RADIATION AT THREE MILE ISLAND. According to Professor Bruce Ames. one of the
world’s leading experts on cancer, it turned out that the amount of dioxin
that anyone would have absorbed in Times Beach was far less than the amount
required to do any harm and that, indeed, the actual harm to Times Beach
residents from dioxin was less than that of drinking a glass of beer. ( The
EPA itself subsequently reduced its estimate of the danger from dioxin by a
factor of fifteen-six-teenths .) In the case of Woburn, according to
Ames, it turned out the cluster of leukemia cases which occurred there was
statistically random and that the drinking water there was actually above the
national average in safety, and not, as had been claimed, the cause of the
leukemia cases. In the case of Love Canal, Ames reports, it turned out upon
investigation that the cancer rate among the former residents has been no
higher than average. (It is necessary to use the phrase “Former residents”
because the town lost most of its population in the panic and forced
evacuation caused by the environmentalists’ claims.) In the case of Three Mile
Island, not a single resident has died, nor even received an additional
exposure to radiation, as the result of the accident there. In addition
according to studies reported in The New York Times, the cancer rate
among residents there is no higher than normal and has not risen.
Before these hysteria’s, there were
claims alleging the death of Lake Erie and mercury poisoning in Tuna fish. All
along, Lake Erie has been very much alive and was even producing near record
quantities of fish at the very time the claims of its death were being made.
The mercury in the Tuna fish was the result of the natural presence of mercury
in sea water; and evidence provided by museums showed that similar levels of
mercury had been present in Tuna fish since prehistoric times.
And now, in yet another overthrow of the
environmentalists’ claims, a noted climatologist, Professor Robert Pease, has
shown that it is impossible for chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) to destroy large
quantities of ozone in the stratosphere because relatively few of them are
even capable of reaching the stratosphere in the first place. He is also shows
that the celebrated ozone “hole” over Antarctica every fall is a phenomenon of
nature, in existence since long before CFCs were invented, and results largely
from the fact that during the long Antarctic night ultraviolet sunlight is not
present to create fresh ozone.
Pseudo – Science
The reason that one after another of the
environmentalists’ claims turn out to be proven wrong is that they are
made without any regard for truth in the first place. In making their claims,
the environmentalists reach for whatever is at hand that will serve to
frighten people, make them lose confidence in science and technology, and,
ultimately, lead them to deliver themselves up to the environmentalists’
“tender mercies.” The claims rest on unsupported conjectures and wild leaps of
imagination, from scintillas of fact to arbitrary conclusions, by means of
evasion and the drawing of invalid inferences. It is absurd to leap from
findings about the effects of feeding rats or mice dosages the equivalent of a
hundred or more times what any human being would ever ingest, and then draw
inferences about the effects on people consuming normal quantities. Fears of
parts per billion of this or that chemical causing single-digit deaths per
million do not rest on science, but on imagination. Such claims have nothing
to do either with actual experimentation or with the concept of casuality.
No one ever has, can, or will observe
such a thing as two groups of a million people identical in all respects
except that over a 70-year period the members of one of the groups consume
apples sprayed with Alar, while the members of the other group do not, and
then 4.2 members of he first group die. The process by which such a conclusion
is reached, and its degree of actual scientific seriousness, is essentially
the same as that of a college students bull session, which consist of
practically nothing but arbitrary assumptions, manipulations, guesses and
plain hot air. In such a session, one might start with the known consequences
of a quarter-ton safe falling ten stories onto the head of an unfortunate
passerby below, and from there go on to speculate about the conceivable
effects in a million cases of other passers-by happening to drop from
their hand or mouth an M&M or peanut on their shoe, and come to the conclusion
that 4.2 of them will die.
Furthermore, as indicated, in contrast
to the procedures of a bull session, reason and actual science establish
causes which, in their nature, are universal. When, for example, genuine
causes of death, such as arsenic, strychnine, or bullets, attack vital organs
of the human body, death is certain to result, in all but a handful of
cases per million. When something is in fact the cause of some effect, it is
so in each and every case in which specified conditions prevail, and
fails to be so only in cases in which the specified conditions are not
present, such as person’s having built up a tolerance to poison or
wearing a bullet proof vest. Such claims as thousand different things each
causing cancer in a handful of cases are proof of nothing but that the actual
causes are not yet known – and, beyond that, an indication of the breakdown of
the epistemology of contemporary science. (This epistemology breakdown, I
might add, rapidly accelerated in the 1960’s when the government took over
most of the scientific research in the United State and began the large-scale
financing of statistical studies as a substitute for the discovery of causes.)
In making their claims, the
environmentalists willfully ignore such facts as that carcinogens, poisons,
and radiation exist in nature. Fully half of the chemicals found in nature are
carcinogenic when fed to animals in massive quantities – the same proportion
as applies to man-made chemicals when fed to animals in massive quantities.
(The cause of the resulting cancers, according to Professor Ames, is actually
not the chemicals, either natural or man-made, but the repeated destruction of
tissue caused by the massively excessive dosage in which the chemicals are
fed, such as saccharin being fed to rats in a quantity comparable to humans
drinking 800 cans of diet soda a day.) Arsenic, one of the deadliest poisons,
is a naturally occurring chemical element. Oleander, one of the most beautiful
plants, is also a deadly poison, as are many other plants and herbs. Radium
and uranium, with all their radioactivity, are found in nature. Indeed, all of
nature is radioactive to some degree. If the environmentalist did not close
their eyes to what exist in nature, if the did not associate every negative
exclusively with man, if they applied to nature the standards of safety they
claim to be necessary in the case of man’s activities, they would have to run
in terror from nature. They would have to use one half of the world to
construct protective containers or barriers against all the allegedly deadly
carcinogens, toxins, and radioactive material that constitute the other half
of the world.
It would be a profound mistake to
dismiss the repeatedly false claims of the environmentalists merely as a case
of the wolf crying again and again about alleged dangers to the little
boy. The only real danger is to listen to the wolf.
Direct evidence of the willful
dishonesty of the environmental movement comes from one of its leading
representatives, Stephen Schneider. Who is well known for his predictions of
global catastrophe. In the October 1989 issue of Discover magazine, he
is quoted (with approval) as follows: “…To do this, we need to get some broad
based support, to capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, entails
getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make
simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we
might have. This double ethical bind’ we frequently find ourselves in cannot
be solved by any formula. EACH OF US HAS TO DECIDE WHAT THE RIGHT BALANCE IS
BETWEEN BEING EFFECTIVE AND BEING HONEST.”
Thus, in the absence of verification by
sources totally independent of the environmental movement and free of its
taint, all of its claims of seeking to improve human life and well-being in
this or that specific way must be regarded simply as lies, having the actual
purpose of inflicting needless deprivation or suffering. In the category of
malicious lies fall all of the environmental movement’s claims about our
having to abandon industrial civilization or any significant part of it in
order to cope with the dangers of alleged global warming, ozone depletion, or
exhaustion of natural resources. Indeed, all claims constituting denunciations
of science, technology, or industrial civilization which are advanced in the
name of service to human life and well-being are tantamount to claiming that
our survival and well-being depend on our abandonment of reason. (Science,
technology, and industry are leading products of reason and are inseparable
from it.) All such claims should be taken as nothing but further proof of the
environmental movement’s hatred of man’s nature and man’s life,
certainly not of any actual danger to human life and well-being.
Which Environment??
It is important to realize that when the
environmentalists talk about destruction of the “environment” as the result
off economic activity, their claims are permeated by the doctrine of intrinsic
value. Thus, what they actually mean to a very great extent is merely the
destruction of alleged intrinsic values in nature such as jungles, deserts,
rock formations, and animal species which are either of no value to man or
hostile to man. That is their concept of the “environment.” If, in contrast to
the environmentalists, one means by “environment” the surroundings of man –
the external material conditions of human life – then it becomes clear
that all of man’s productive activities have the inherent tendency to
improve the environment – indeed, that that is their essential purpose.
THIS BECOMES OBVIOUS IF ONE REALIZES
THAT THE ENTIRE WORLD PHYSICALLY CONSISTS OF NOTHING BUT CHEMICAL ELEMENTS.
THESE ELEMENTS ARE NEVER DESTROYED. THEY SIMPLY REAPPEAR IN DIFFERENT
COMBINATIONS, IN DIFFERENT PROPORTIONS, IN DIFFERENT PLACES. APART FROM
WHAT HAS BEEN LOST IN A FEW ROCKETS, THE QUANTITY OF EVERY CHEMICAL ELEMENT IN
THE WORLD TODAY IS THE SAME AS IT WAS BEFORE THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION. THE
ONLY DIFFERENCE IS THAT, BECAUSE OF THE INDUSTRAI LREVOLUTION, INSTEAD OF
LYING DORMANT, OUT OF MAN’S CONTROL, THE CHEMICAL ELEMENTS HAVE BEEN MOVED
ABOUT AS NEVER BEFORE. IN SUCH A WAY AS TO IMPROVE HUMAN LIFE AND WELL BEING.
FOR INSTANCE, SOME PART OF THE WORLD’S IRON AND COPPER HAS BEEN MOVED FROM THE
INTERIOR OF THE EARTH, WHERE IT WAS USELESS, TO CONSTRUCT BUILDINGS, BRIDGES,
AUTOMOBILES, AND A MILLION AND ONE OTHER THINGS OF BENEFIT TO HUMAN LIFE. SOME
PART OF THE WORLD’S CARBON, OXYGEN, AND HYDROGEN HAS BEEN SEPARATED FROM
CERTAIN COMPOUNDS AND RECOMBINED IN OTHERS, IN THE PROCESS RELEASING ENERGY TO
HEAT AND LIGHT HOMES, POWER INDUSTRIAL MACHINERY. FUEL AUTOMOBILES, AIRPLANES,
SHIPS, AND TRAINS, AND IN COUNTLESS OTHER WAYSSERVE HUMAN LIFE. It follows
that insofar as man’s environment consists of chemical elements iron, copper,
carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen, and his productive activity makes them useful to
himself in these ways, his environment is correspondingly improved.
All that all of man’s productive
activities fundamentally consist of is in the rearrangement of nature-given
chemical elements for the purpose of making them stand in a more useful
relationship to himself – that is, for the purpose of improving his
environment.
Consider further examples. To live, man
needs to be able to move his person and his goods from place to place. If an
untamed forest stands in his way, such movement is difficult if not
impossible. It represents an improvement in his environment, therefore, when
man moves the chemical elements that constitute some of the trees of the
forest somewhere else and lays down the chemical elements brought from
somewhere else to constitute a road. It is an improvement in his environment
when man builds bridges, digs canals, opens mines, clears land, constructs
factories and houses, or does anything else that represents an improvement in
the external, material conditions of his life. All these things represent an
improvement in man’s material surroundings – his environment. All of them
represent the rearrangement of nature’s elements in a way that makes them
stand in a more useful relationship to human life and well – being.
Thus, all economic activity has as its
sole purpose the improvement of the environment – it aims exclusively at the
improvement of the external, material conditions of human life. Production and
economic activity are precisely the means by which man adapts his environment
to himself and thereby improves it.
So much for the environmentalists’
claims about man’s destruction of the environment. Only from the perspective
of the alleged intrinsic value of nature and the non-value of man can man’s
improvement of his environment be termed destruction of the environment.
The environmentalist recent claims about
the impending destruction of the “plant” are entirely the result of the
influence of the intrinsic-value doctrine. What the environmentalist are
actually afraid of is not that the planet or its ability to support human life
will be destroyed, but that the increase in its ability to support human life
will destroy its still extensively existing “wildness.” They can bear the
thought of the earth’s becoming fully subject to man’s control, with it’s
jungles and deserts replaced by farms, pastures, and forests planted by man,
as man wills. They cannot bear the thought of the earth’s becoming man’s
garden. IN THE WORDS OF MCKIBBEN, “THE PROBLEM IS THAT NATURE, THE INDEPENDENT
FORCE THAT HAS SURROUNDED US SINCE EARLIEST DAYS, CANNOT COEXIST WITH OUR
NUMBERS AND OUR HABITS. WE MAY WELL BE ABLE TO CREATE A WORLD THAT WILL
SUPPORT OUR NUMBERS AND OUR HABITS, BUT IT WILL BE AN ARTIFICIAL WORLD…”
The Virtue of Separation
The toxic character of the environmental
movement implies the observance of a vital principle in connection with any
measures which the movement advocates and which might actually promote human
life and well-being, such as those calling for the reduction of smog, the
cleaning up of rivers, lakes, and beaches, and so forth. THE PRINCIPLE IS THAT
EVEN HERE ONE MUST NOT MAKE COMMON CAUSE WITH THE ENVIRONMENTAL MOVEMENT IN
ANY WAY. ONE MUST BE SCRUPULOUSLY CAREFUL NOT ADVOCATE EVEN ANYTHING THAT IS
GENUINELY GOOD, UNDER ITS AUSPICES OR BANNER. TO DO SO IS TO PROMOTE ITE EVIL
– TO BECOME CONTAMINATED WITH ITS POISON AND TO SPREAD ITS POISON. In the
hands of the environmentalist, concern even with such genuine problems as smog
and polluted rivers serves as a weapon with which to attack industrial
civilization, as though filth were not the all-pervasive condition of human
life in pre-industrial societies, and as though industrial civilization
represented a decline from more healthful conditions of the past.
The principle of non-cooperation with
the environmental movement , of the most radical differentiation from
it, must be followed in order to avoid the kind of disastrous consequences
brought about earlier in this century by people in Russia and Germany who
began as basically innocent and with good intentions. Even though the actual
goals an programs of the Communists and Nazis were no secret, many people did
not realize that such pronouncements and their underlying philosophy must
betaken seriously. As a result, they joined with the Communist or Nazis in
efforts to achieve what they believed were worthy specific goals, above all
goals falling under the head of the alleviation of poverty. But working side
by side with the likes of Lenin or Stalin or Hitler and Himmler did not
achieve the kind of life these people had hoped to achieve. It did, however,
serve to achieve the bloody goals of those monsters. (And will however, serve
to achieve the bloody goals of our monsters…my words) And along the way, those
who may have started out innocently enough very quickly lost their innocence
and to varying degrees ended up simply as accomplices of the monsters.
EVIL NEEDS THE COOPERATION OF THE GOOD
TO DISGUISE ITS NATURE AND TO GAIN NUMBERS AND INFLUENCE IT COULD NEVER
ACHIEVE ON ITS OWN. Thus, the doctrine of intrinsic value needs to be mixed as
much as possible with alleged concern for man’s life and well-being. In
allowing themselves to participate in advancing the cause of the mixture,
otherwise good people serve to promote the doctrine of intrinsic value and
thus the destruction of human values.
Already large numbers of otherwise good
people have been enlisted in the environmentalist campaign to throttle the
production of energy. This is a campaign which, to the degree it succeeds, can
only cause human deprivation and the substitution of man's limited
muscle power for the power of motors and engines. It is actually a campaign
which seeks nothing less than the undoing of the Industrial Revolution, and
the return to the poverty, filth, and misery of earlier centuries.”
Dr, Reisman goes on to document the
realities of the Industrial Revolution and how the agenda of the
Anti-Industrial Revolution movement can cause catastrophic reversals in the
good parts of our lifestyle since it started. He also outlines what we, the
people who function with regard to moral conduct can do to not only clean up
the sins of the past, but take measures to see to it they are not repeated.
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