Posted on 09/15/2008 11:34:41 AM PDT by Hank Kerchief
Collectivism by Another Name
Except for the, "true believers," and other useful idiots, environmentalists promote their programs entirely by means subterfuge, deceit, and manipulation. They never reveal their true purposes or ultimate goals, which have nothing to do with saving little animals or the future welfare of mankind. They will resort to anything to push their program: when they are unable to put over global cooling, they simply switch to the equally implausible global warming, for example. Perhaps the greatest deception of all, however, is a gimmick that has been able to fool almost everyone.
No Environmentalism Debate
The greens have made almost all their progress by means of a wonderful tactic or trick. The trick was made possible by the spread of post-modern relativism in every field, from literature to science—the trick was to remove environmentalism entirely from the realm of principles.
For example, environmentalism claims to be a science, or at least scientific. To put that lie over, they have foisted the environmental agenda in amongst legitimate scientific subjects in almost every university in the world and couch all their endless screeds in pseudo-scientific jargon. No one notices that their methods are the very opposite of science.
Issues of fact and science are not resolved by means of debate, consensus, or propaganda (e.g. movies), but those are the methods of the environmentalists, and no one calls them on it. In fact, the very opposite happens. When the environmentalists claim there is a consensus on global warming in the scientific community, legitimate scientists look at global warming and conclude that real scientific research not only does not support any aspect of the global warming hustle, but contradicts it at every point.
Though reality and real science support scientists, they fall for the environmentalist methods and get up various petitions to prove it is they who have the consensus. When a clear thinking journalist sees that global warming is an alarmist hoax, what does he do? He makes a movie repudiating the environmentalists arguments. Though these true scientist and honest journalists have all the facts on their side, and they, not the environmental alarmist, hold the moral high ground, instead of simply repudiating the entire global warming scam for what it is, they apologetically engage in the, "environmentalism debate."
Though environmentalists make outrageous public statements that, "there is no more debate," they are in fact delighted with the concept of an environmentalism debate, because it lends their lies some legitimacy. The fact that their lies are being recognized and considered worthy of debate by legitimate scientists and the better intellectuals gives their phony clap-trap credibility. There is nothing legitimate in any aspect of environmentalism, and the only correct "recognition" of environmentalists is total contempt.
Here are three principles (there are many more) that demonstrate environmentalism as worthy of nothing but total dismissal (or prosecution):
1. Environmentalism is collectivism.
2. No one can predict the future.
3. Environmentalism is predictable.
Environmentalism is Collectivism
In their efforts to put over their agenda, environmentalists have tried to convince the world that it is one of the sciences. It is not a science and there is not a single scientific basis for any of it. It is, and always has been, a purely social political movement. If you have not already ready the fascinating history of environmentalism I referred to in my first article in this series, please do so for you own enlightenment and enjoyment.
The method by which environmentalism puts over the lie that it is based on science is by mixing it in with legitimate science, implying that those sciences are themselves environmentalism (or ecology), or at least part of environmentalism. To understand what environmentalism is, it is necessary to understand what it is not.
The legitimate studies of geology, soil chemistry, the biological relationships between various kinds of flora and fauna, weather, climate, water systems, even the relationships between cities and their surroundings are not environmentalism. All of these provide individuals with knowledge they need to make right decisions in business, farming, forestry, mining, manufacturing, building, and any of the other things about which human beings must make choices to live successfully and improve the quality of their lives.
A farmer who remains ignorant of soil chemistry, for example, or does not understand the causes of erosion or the depletion of soil nutrients, is not going to be successful, or, at least as successful as the farmer who learns about these things and uses them to guide his farming practices. The manufacturer chosing to produce a product he expects to sell in his community (wether that community is local or encompasses an entire country) is not going to have customers if his manufacturing processes are destroying the property or harming the well being of those same customer.
Environmentalism is not even what most are led to believe it is: a serious concern for the environment and for preserving it for its own sake—for the beauty and wonder of it and all the creatures and plants living in it. Whether such individuals devote their lives to a study of nature in that sense, or simply appreciate it, as much of it as they can, they are not necessarily environmentalists.
What distinguishes environmentalism from true science or even a love of the natural world is a single unquestioned assertion, that the environment, that is, the world and all its life, in some sense belongs to and is the responsibility of some collective we, and that we has the ability to determine exactly what the environment ought to be and therefore requires the power determine government policy at every level to force their views on others—preferably all others.
Here is an example, from an introductory seminar for freshmen in the Department of Geological and Environmental Studies at Stanford University.
The seminar is entitle, "Environmental Problems." Topics in the seminar include, "groundwater contamination from point (e.g., Love Canal) and nonpoint (agricultural) sources, cumulative watershed effects related to timber and mining practices, acid rain, subsurface disposal of nuclear waste, the Alaska pipeline, slope stability (e.g., Devils' Slide), oil tanker spills (e.g., Exxon Valdez), etc. These are supposedly examples of, "environmental problems." The reason why students of geology need to know about these "problem" is explained in the first part of the seminar's description:
The seminar, it says, is, "For students interested in understanding the various components of multidisciplinary environmental problems and in identifying ethical questions that are often associated with decision making in the regulatory arena." [Emphasis mine.]
There is no doubt some science in this seminar, such as the dynamics of groundwater flow and the dissemination of materials into the groundwater from various sources, the effect of various lumbering and mining practices on erosion, different methods of disposing of Atomic waste, and the dynamics of oil tankers, for example. Everything else, however, is environmentalism, that is, politics.
It begins with an agenda and a particular ideology that calls anything contrary to that agenda a "problem." Anything contrary to the environmentalist's view of what the environment ought to be and how it ought to be used (or protected) is bad. For example, the Alaska pipeline is a, "problem," because ...it makes people sick? NO! ...because it damages people's homes or property? NO! ...because it does anything at all bad to people? NO! The Alaska pipeline is a problem because it might adversely affect caribou herds and the fur trapping business. [Yes, these "greens" were worried about the fur trade, but only because it is a "native" (read primitive) industry.] It doesn't really matter, but the caribou herds are flourishing and there was no damage to the fur trade, which is just another example of the inability of environmentalists, or anyone else, to predict the future. What does matter is that anyone's particular concerns about anything that is not theirs can be used to set government policy about what other people can or cannot do.
The caribou do not belong to these meddling environmental bureaucrats, and neither does any other part of the environment. They, or you, or I, might not like the affect on some aspect of this world resulting from what some people do with their own property, but unless what they do directly affects our own property or persons, no matter how much we dislike it, no one has a right to force anyone to do or not do anything with their own property.
Remember this seminar is meant to introduce students to "ethical questions that are often associated with decision making in the regulatory arena." In a society of free individuals, the only "regulating" the government may rightly and Constitutionally engage in, is preventing any individual or any group of individuals from initiating force or the threat of it against other individuals' persons or property, and the only kind of property there is, is private property. Any other kind of regulation is unethical (and unConstitutional, for all that's worth).
Behind every aspect of environmentalism is the idea that the environment belongs to the collective, "everyone," the "community," the "society," or "the people of the whole world." Without this unstated collective assumption, there could be no environmental movement.
The correct answer to every environmentalist argument is: "SHUT UP! IT'S NOT YOUR PROPERTY!"
No One Can Predict the Future
I pointed out in my previous article, Green Hegemony, the Greens at Rutgers university actually claim to be able to, "predict the future," as part of their, "university-wide endeavor." Al Gore, the high priest of global warming has made this wild prediction: "... we have less than 10 years to make dramatic changes in our global warming pollution lest we lose our ability to ever recover from this environmental crisis." If you could believe anything these environmentalists claim, according to them 1,439,916 have so far swallowed this lie and have "signed up" to "solve" the non-existent "environmental crisis."
I have previously pointed out that this is, "The Age of Gullibility," but not even that can explain how so many have been taken in by this outright blatant scam. The, "ability to predict the future," has been the claim of every con-artist, witch doctor, fraudulent mystic, and guru in history. Their appeal is to the ignorant and credulous, and continues to this day as witnessed by the success of astrologers, tarot readers, tea-leave interpreters and other assorted fortune tellers.
Environmentalists, however, belong to a special class of "prophets"—the "doomsday" cultists who predict the end of the world as we know it. The difference between environmentalists and most other "end of the world" prophets is that environmentalist's claim to know the future without mystic revelation, but by means of "science." Instead of gaining their special "insights" through meditation or examining the entrails of chickens, their "knowledge" of the future comes from examining the spewings of some arcane computer programs that are not able to predict anything.
The creators of those programs "acknowledge that they are unable to predict future climate," and "computer climate models are unable to even simulate major features of past climate ...." "The climate simulations upon which predictions are based yield unreliable results ... [even for] the last few decades." Yet environmentalists assure us, and the a gullible world accepts, that they can predict the future of climate change with certain warnings of the end of everything within 10 years, on the basis of these programs which have no more power to predict the future than the lines on the palms of their hands.
Here is a principle: No one can predict the future. When anyone, a politician, religious leader, or environmentalist claims to be able to predict the future, it is not necessary to read their books, consider their arguments, or examine their science because no matter on what they claim to base their predictions they are either deluded or (most likely) lying.
No one can predict what the environment will do, what animals will survive or not, what the consequences of human activity (which "nature" mostly ignores) will be, or what next week's weather or next year's climate will be. The idea that anyone can predict what the climate will be in 5 years, much less 10 or 50 years, is totally absurd. In the entire history of the world, not one of these kinds of predictions has ever been correct, or ever will be.
Ironic Environmentalism
There are no paradoxes in this world, but there is plenty of irony! That irony shows up whenever there is a conflict between policies, or ideologies, or popular movements and reality. Since everything about environmentalism flies in the face of every truth of philosophy and science, the whole of it is shot through with ironic contradictions.
One of the most ironic aspects of environmentalism is its history of over-population hysteria.
Since Thomas Robert Malthus (1766-1834) predicted, "the human population would grow to a point so as to outstrip the world's resources needed to support it," environmentalists have been predicting the end of the world because we would all (or most of us) starve to death, or die in some other environmental catastrophe.
In 1864,George Perkins Marsh published his famous Man and Nature: Or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action described by the reviewer as a, "litany of environmental destruction." This particular environmental propaganda was republished in 2003.
The inside cover of the book jacket of Fairfield Osborne's 1948 book Our Plundered Planet reads, "This book ... contains unmistakable evidence that a continued defiance of nature threatens even the survival of mankind." Osborne published a second similar gloom and doom book, The Limits of the Earth in 1953.
Perhaps the most famous environmental doomsday prophet is Paul Ehrlich. His 1968 The Population Bomb repeated many of the wild predictions made in an earlier "article that appeared in New Scientist in December 1967. In that article, Ehrlich predicted that the world would experience famines sometime between 1970 and 1985 due to population growth outstripping resources. Ehrlich wrote that "the battle to feed all of humanity is over ... In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now." Ehrlich also stated, "India couldn't possibly feed two hundred million more people by 1980," and "I have yet to meet anyone familiar with the situation who thinks that India will be self-sufficient in food by 1971." None of these predictions were correct, of course. But that doesn't stop a good environmentalist propagandist. Ehrlich continues to make wild baseless predictions and is still believed by the gullible.
Eugenics and Environmentalism
Environmentalism's perennial panic about overpopulation has made population control one of its central concerns from its beginnings over 300 years ago. In all of its variations, population control means eugenics which has always been part and parcel of environmentalism and remains part of it today.
This is a description of environmental views of those who first practiced eugenics on a wide scale:
"It decried the accelerating extinction of species, disturbance of global ecosystemic balance, deforestation, destruction of aboriginal peoples and of wild habitats, urban sprawl, and the increasing alienation of people from nature. In emphatic terms it disparaged ... capitalism, economic utilitarianism, hyperconsumption and the ideology of 'progress.' It even condemned the environmental destructiveness of rampant tourism and the slaughter of whales, and displayed a clear recognition of the planet as an ecological totality."
Sound familiar? You may be surprised to learn the "it" being described here is the book Man and Earth published in Germany in 1913 by the "venomous antisemite," (sic) Ludwig Klages. It was in Germany that environmentalism in all its present day variations began, including eugenics as a "practical" means of implementing the environmental policy of population control. The Nazis were radical environmentalists and there is not a single aspect of the modern day environmentalist movement, including its eugenics, which did not begin with them. [please read the linked article.]
The Irony
Environmentalism's concern with overpopulation is always couched in language that sounds like concern for humanity, such as avoiding famine or disease or other supposed impending disasters. Their solution called population control is really some form of eugenics to reduce the world's population. The irony is, if there were widespread famine, disease, or other life-threatening disasters, the population would be reduced. That very irony reveals the true nature of environmentalism, which has nothing to do with saving either the environment or mankind, but a lust for worldwide political power.
Fine essay.
(If you want on or off this list please freepmail me.)
This is the first of the three articles posted on FR. So you won't be pinged three times, the other two, if you are interested are here:
Hank
The global climate models of today cannot even predict the past. Where we have known climate data and information, the models predicted something else altogether.
If this were true we'd be seeing livestock grazing on city lots, 30 year old 40' mobile homes in up scale neighborhoods. 2 or 3 junk cars in the front yard of every other home. I could go on.
“If this were true we’d be seeing livestock grazing on city lots, 30 year old 40’ mobile homes in up scale neighborhoods. 2 or 3 junk cars in the front yard of every other home. I could go on.”
So that’s how you would live if there weren’t laws to prevent it? Or are you just better than everyone else?
Hank
No, but many would and some do.
Or are you just better than everyone else?
I take pride in my property and try to maintain it to the best of my ability as do my neighbor's. If thats better (and it is) so be it.
That's one little inconvenient truth you can trust the MSM never to report.
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