Posted on 02/18/2015 8:19:27 AM PST by Heartlander
Julia Roberts delivers a stone-cold video message from Gaia, courtesy of Conservation International. There is something bracing and powerful in this little film. We moderns surely do need to be reminded that material reality poses stark limitations on our narcissistic desires. We can’t foul our nest, wreck the only known habitable planet and expect it to magically fix itself. Thus far, we’re on board with Julia.
Check the video out for yourself: HERE
What is off-putting and ominous about this video is the narrator’s tone and language as she discusses humanity. Speaking with all the haughty disdain we’d associate with the Witch-Queen of Narnia, Roberts scoffs at man as an insignificant and transient biological blip. “I have fed species greater than you,” she warns. “And I have starved species greater than you.”
In what sense could this be true? By what criteria could one judge a species greater than humanity? Yes, most dinosaurs weighed more. Insects and microbes outnumber us. Alligators have been around longer. (Is that what they always seem to be grinning about?) But somehow, body mass, numbers or sheer longevity don’t stack up as measures of greatness.
No single species has had a greater impact, for better or worse, on planet earth than human beings. This has led biologists to name this era the Anthropocene, to mark the massive effects of human efforts on the biosphere. The Conservation International video obscures this empirical reality along with the even more fundamental truth that humans are unique among their fellow animals as creatures made in the image of the Creator.
This oversight is impoverishing all around. Conservation International’s video is “subhumanist.” As we wrote in The Race to Save Our Century:
Subhumanism is a pale, degraded copy of the brave image of man asserted during the Renaissance; it lacks the confident rationality that inspired the Enlightenment; it has shrugged off the dreams of self-transcendence and communion with nature that beguiled the romantics. When we speak of humanity now, too often we think in terms of ecological damage, excessive numbers, and intractable hatreds. Ecologists have even taught us to see ourselves as a kind of plague on the planet, with our generation’s task to limit the damage we do to the rest of the biosphere. And yet, somehow and from somewhere, we are said to possess a set of things called “human rights,” which can be so expansive as to include the right to transgender reassignment surgery funded by our neighbors, but which do not necessarily include the right of terminal patients to food and water.
When we were growing up, the tone of environmental messages was winsome, poignant and mournful — along the lines still used by animal shelters. Those of a certain age will remember the public service ad that showed various gorgeous American landscapes, befouled with trash — then cut to a noble American Indian, who looked on stoically except for a single tear that ran down his cheek. Programs such as Wild Kingdom highlighted the beauties of God’s creation, then solemnly recounted the various threats to the integrity of species and habitats posed by man’s growing and heedless dominance over the biosphere.
These environmentalist messages reminded us of an important truth. While human lives have been vastly improved and extended by the modern drive to make man (in Descartes’ words) “the master and possessor of nature,” the earth has paid a price. As one of us (Zmirak) wrote in 2002:
Almost every nature show ended sadly, in a catalogue of dangers to [God’s] extraordinary creation: Tractors plowing down mangrove stands, chain saws felling ancient redwoods, bounty hunters gunning down the proud elephant or rhino for tusk or horn, hacking off the shark’s fin and leaving him to drown, the gold-miner burning whole forests or poisoning rivers to gain a handful of gleaming nuggets. The narrator would chronicle how many wondrous species were already extinct — hunted like the passenger pigeon or buffalo for sport, massacred for hat plumes, aphrodisiacs, or cheap protein by reckless adventurers. The more sophisticated programs would take account of the difficult lives of the men who lived in or near these habitats, how their struggle for survival and development led them into tragic conflict with the beasts and birds, the latter doomed to dwindle and disappear, before the implacable needs of man and his machines.
The answer isn’t to ignore the unique creative capacity of human beings, or to imagine that humility and gentleness can be sown in our hearts with the lie that we are less than the ants because we are fewer. This is the confusion of Conservation International.
The answer also isn’t to power up our bulldozers, laugh at the “tree huggers” and gleefully clear-cut the natural order.
Surely there is room for conservatives to practice conservation. Surely there is space for Christians to champion the integrity and beauty of God’s creation in the face of man’s fallen will and its limitless quest for comfort, variety and instant gratification.
We are creators and stewards, uniquely made in the image of the Creator. At the same time, a created order pervades the biological world. We disregard both truths at our peril.
And supposedly we're capable of burning the planet alive via Global Warming. As Dr. Peter Venkman said in Ghostbusters, "Let's show this prehistoric bitch how we do things downtown."
So this Gaia can’t also say “I laugh your carbon dioxide off like it was nothing!” ??
Sounds like our dear leader. My, My, My....
The idea of the story is that people from the future are coming to the present to wage bio-warfare against the population as a form of population control.
The fact that this hasn't already happened is a sign that (1) there will never be time travel, or (2) liberalism and environmentalism are debunked, and don't survive into the future.
I’ll start trying to save the environment when the environment stops trying to kill me.
Roberts is Sheila Jackson Lee STUPID.
Why doesn’t she show us how it’s done...by holding her breath and reducing her own carbon footprint?
If the human race is the “problem” those who advocate such should lead by example... and remove themselves from the Earth.
Environmentalists have been fantasizing about mass human die-offs - in the billions - for years. You wonder if they will ever try to implement their fantasies, and how. I’ve often wondered if modern economic and social realities (putting women en masse into the work force, middle-class wage stagnation, promotion of homosexuality, encouraging apartment dwelling through stifling building of single-family homes) aren’t part of a grand scheme to reduce population by making having children difficult and economically perilous and socially optional.
On the movie set, unless you’re a director or star, just looking at queen Julia is forbidden.
man need to grow and move out in to the universe...
the green weenies wants basically for man to be thier well behaved little boys living in mommy's basement and never grows up
They're traveling back in time to STOP the plague that wipes out most of mankind.
Surely, the best thing we can do for Gaia is make the human race extinct as quickly as possible, so it can begin the healing.
Julia, you go first.
This disregard for humans reflects a reductionist form of Darwinian theory. Christopher Manes, one of the early leaders of the environmentalist group Earth First!, explains:
Taken seriously, evolution means there is no basis for seeing humans as more advanced or developed than any other species. Homo sapiens is not the goal of evolution, for as near as we can tell evolution has no telos—it simply unfolds, life-form after life-form. Elephants are no more developed than toadstools, fish are no less advanced than birds, cabbages have as much ecological status as kings. Darwin invited humanity to face the fact that the observation of nature has revealed not one scrap of evidence that humankind is superior or special, or even particularly more interesting than, say, lichen.A similar Darwinian worldview inspired ecoterrorist James Lee, who in 2010 took staff of the Discovery Channel hostage. Lee called on the Discovery Channel to “talk about Evolution. Talk about Malthus and Darwin until it sinks into the stupid people’s brains until they get it!” Lee’s stated goal was to save “what’s left of the non-human Wildlife by decreasing the Human population. That means stopping the human race from breeding any more disgusting human babies!”
Life on the planet has survived several extinctions that wiped out 80%+ of species, including the one around 200 million years ago that allowed the dinosaurs to arise in the first place as well as the one that wiped the dinosaurs out.
Human transportation networks connecting all the world, bringing plants, animals, pests, diseases and so forth are doing more to create localized extinctions around the planet than “climate change”. And in that context, most of the damage is already done.
Don’t trust anyone whose utopia requires killing off everyone else in the world but their own tribe.
99.9% of all species that have ever inhabited the planet are extinct, life goes on.
So,.... TinkerBell got a Terminal case of “The Stupids.”
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