Posted on 12/17/2009 11:56:16 AM PST by American Dream 246
That was my honest, stunned conclusion some years ago about the “environmentalist” movement; if anything, the evidence of anti-human insanity has become even clearer since then:
The increasingly violent, even murderous tactics of terrorist groups like the Earth Liberation Front (ELF) and the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) and their enablers — Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Wildlife Fund, and other ostensibly “mainstream” environmentalist organizations; The callous disregard of real science in the zeal for “reducing the human footprint” (eventually to zero)… accompanied on the side by mindless chanting, drumming, and puppetry in place of reason, debate, and consensus; The rise of modern “Earth religions,” which recognize no law but “save the animals — no matter what the cost to people”… a quasi-spiritualism that bears no relation to ancient pagan beliefs (which always recognized not only the friendly but also the malevolent nature of, well, Nature);
And the obsession on the part of every branch of government, from municipality all the way up to international tribunals, with enforcing environmentalist dogma and propagandizing children with the preservationist catechism, showing literally no concern whatsoever about the enormities inflicted upon individuals and communities by vague laws interpreted into enviro-madness by administrative agencies and judges run amok.
In America, the ultimate enabler of eco-terrorism is the United States Environmental Protection Agency and the entire “green machine” that enforces the Endangered Species Act of 1973 and similar anti-human legislation enacted over the decades. Many of those who supported the Nixon-era ESA were simply soft-hearted, soft-headed conservationists; but they were rolled by environmental extremists who frankly believe that the entire human race should be expunged.
Most of the elite media refuse even to report on how much of our current economic devastation is caused in fact by environmentalism run rampant:
New data from satellites show the vast underground pools feeding faucets and irrigation hoses across California are running low, a worrisome trend federal scientists largely attribute to aggressive agricultural pumping. The measurements show the amount of water lost in the two main Central Valley river basins within the past six years could almost fill the nation’s largest reservoir, Lake Mead in Nevada.
“All that water has been sucked from these river basins. It’s gone. It’s left the building,” said Jay Famiglietti, an earth science professor at the University of California, Irvine, who led the research collaboration. “The data is telling us that this rate of pumping is not sustainable.”
Darn those agricultural robber barons! They’re despoiling the very water we need to drink, just so they can make their obscene profits.
Why are they doing this?
Why?
We get only a single, slight hint, two vague words buried in the midst of the story:
Hundreds of farmers have been drilling wells to irrigate their crops, as three years of drought and environmental restrictions on water supplies have withered crops, jobs and profits throughout the San Joaquin Valley, where roughly half of the nation’s fruits, nuts and vegetables are grown.
What environmental restrictions are those? The story never elaborates.
Even worse is this piece in Science Daily, which attributes the increased pumping to… well, see if you can guess:
New space observations reveal that since October 2003, the aquifers for California’s primary agricultural region — the Central Valley — and its major mountain water source — the Sierra Nevada — have lost nearly enough water combined to fill Lake Mead, America’s largest reservoir. The findings, based on satellite data, reflect California’s extended drought and increased pumping of groundwater for human uses such as irrigation.
At the American Geophysical Union meeting this week in San Francisco, UC Irvine and NASA scientists detailed the state’s groundwater changes and outlined research on other global aquifers conducted via twin satellites called the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment. GRACE monitors tiny month-to-month differences in Earth’s gravity field primarily caused by the movement of water in the planet’s land, ocean, ice and atmosphere. Its ability to “weigh” changes in water content provides new insights into how climate change is affecting Earth’s water cycle.
Ah ha, so all this increased pumping of groundwater wells in the San Joaquin Valley is due to global warming. If only we would agree to Kyoto II, all would be well; just ask Algore.
On the other hand, maybe this has something to do with it:
The Delta smelt issue in California is a prime example how an ESA interpretation has resulted in lost jobs and businesses, Stirling says. The smelt population has declined for decades attributed to the diminished quality of Delta water, predation by other fish, invasive species consuming the smelt’s food chain, and pumps that propel Delta water through the Central Valley to Southern California.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) issued a biological opinion in 2005 indicating the smelt decline was caused by several factors including the pumps, Stirling explains. A lawsuit by the Natural Resources Defense Council and other preservationist groups challenged the biological opinion. A judge ordered the pumps shutdown when smelt are young and in the pump vicinity.
The pump shutdown reduced 2008 Delta water deliveries via the California aqueduct and caused a 30 percent reduction of pumped water and a $300 million loss to California’s economy, Stirling says. Delta water deliveries in 2009 were reduced by 90 percent in some parts of the Central Valley.
The real reason for most of the increased (and “unsustainable”) groundwater pumping in the San Joaquin Valley (a.k.a., the Central Valley) is what AP so obliquely called “environmental restrictions”: To protect the Delta smelt, farmers have been cut off from the surface water they formerly used for irrigation; now, the only options they have are (a) pump the groundwater dry, or (b) abandon the farmland that provides nearly half of all American fruits, nuts, and vegetables… let the land become a desert and allow the entire country to go hungry.
But at least we can bask in the knowledge that some thumb-sized fish still survive. After all, what’s more important, an endangered fish — or a few measley humans? Only an enviro-mentalist apparatus that nurses an intstitutional hatred of humanity could possibly enforce the ESA in such a way:
On the ESA loss-of-private-property-rights claim, Stirling points to the case of Paul Fisher whose home in Perdido Bay, Fla., was destroyed by Hurricane Ivan in 2004. Before the Fishers could gain local permits to rebuild, FWS declared Fisher’s private property as a critical habitat for the Perdido Key beach mouse. “The federal government has virtually taken their (Fisher’s) property as a nature preserve for the mouse in effect,” Stirling said, “but refuses to pay them just compensation under the Constitution’s 5th Amendment.” PLF is representing Fisher in a lawsuit.
The apotheosis of enviro-mentalism is Globaloney itself, of course; and its synecdoche is found in ClimateGate: erstwhile climate “scientists” became so absolutely certain that human technology is destroying the Earth that when the evidence just wouldn’t behave — when other scientists kept asking inconvenient questions and finding confounding and complicating answers — the true believers started falsifying the science, blocking independent investigation, banning publication by the wrong sorts, destroying the careers of “deniers,” and ultimately, so utterly politicizing the field of AGCC research (anthropogenic — “man caused” — global climate change) that today we face a mandated energy cut-off that could hurl us back into the Dark Ages. At the core of enviro-mentalism is an arrogance so intense and narcissistic, it mimics the hubris of classical Greek theater: The AGCC inquisitors literally seem to believe they can remake the Earth by signing a treaty, passing a law, or electing one of the anointed.
After all –
This was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal; this was the moment when we ended a war and secured our nation and restored our image as the last, best hope on earth.
Environmentalism became a religion long before the rise of “global warming;” in fact, even before the earlier exercise in catastrophism, “global cooling.” The Endangered Species Act of 1973 was not the beginning, it was just the warning shot that should have been heard round the world, but was ignored. I suspect the First Church of Fundamentalist Enviro-Mentalism was founded in the early 19th century, wrought by the Romantics and their anti-industrialism nature-worship.
But it’s finally come to the boiling point today. And unless we find the guts and the will to turn off the heat — and if necessary, identify the lunatics who want to cleanse the planet of pesky humanity and exile them from the halls of science, politics, and the judiciary — we’ll all be boiled in our own primordial soup.
Many moons ago, to quote my Native American Brothers (the ones who would kick me in the ass if they ever heard me call them Native American Brothers) the Great State of New Jersey decided to open High Point State Park to a very limited blackpowder hunt to reduce deer overpopulation. Deer browse the new growth of trees, eating the buds and green leaves. Deer are large animals, 100 to 200 pounds. They eat a lot of buds and leaves. When the deer eat all the buds and leaves, there’s nothing left for other animals that also eat them.
A signicicant deer population will browse the trees so much that they create a browse line. This is the lack of buds and leaves on the trees from ground level to about seven feet high, the height a large deer can reach if it rears up to eat the buds. A hunter can gauge the number of deer in an area by looking for browse lines. If there is a pronounced browse line, there are a lot of deer in the area. If the trees were browsed high up, there are large deer in the area.
So I got the special permit to hunt the park and went to scout the area. The whole place was a browse line. Everywhere I looked, there was not one green thing less than seven feet above the ground. This covered thousands of acres. It was obvious that the deer were destroying the place. Smaller animals faced extinction. Some plants were likewise threatened with total detruction. The deer had eaten everything in sight. Besides that, the overpopulation was so severe that if the park lacked for new growth in some year, significant numbers of deer would starve to death. The parks department opened the hunt to save the park from itself.
The so-called environmentalists threw a hissy fit. They sued and whined to an agreeable press. Oh, those mean deer hunters, how can the state indulge such sadistic and macho murderers when animals are our friends and they know what’s best for Gaia. These were very scientifically minded deer. Needless to say, the deer also supported the Kyoto Protocol and said so to anyone who was spiritual enough to commune with them. Why the deer would be against global warming when it would increase their food supply is anybody’s guess.
They lost and the hunt was planned to proceed as scheduled. So the environmentalists snuck into the park the night before the hunt opened and cut down oak trees to block the roads. Of course, some of these oak trees were fifty or sixty feet tall, and quite old. But the greenies were defending Gaia, so it was perfectly okay to defile the place. They also painted imaginative slogans like ‘murderer” in red paint all over the signage in the park. This turned out to be a boon to the hunters, who harvested a pile of deer, and had their pictures taken in front of the graffiti.
“I suspect the First Church of Fundamentalist Enviro-Mentalism was founded in the early 19th century, wrought by the Romantics and their anti-industrialism nature-worship.”
The first “back to nature” movements came as a knee jerk reaction to the earliest stirrings of the industrial revolution. They have appeared in many guises; with disaffected elitist and “bohemian” groups forming
taking up nature worshiping polytheistic religions, and forming numerous political movements that have come and gone. Now still another one is in its way out.
The film illustrated brilliantly how the thing works. The animal rights crazies and treehuggers can make themselves real nuisancs by doing all sorts of stupid vandalism type crimes, but they're just the footsoldiers. They're just stupid and immature people looking for a cause that can make them feel important who lack the power to inflict damage beyond the level of a college fraternity prank. The really scary people are the supereducated sociopaths in white laboratory smocks who run big science. Those people are truly terrifying. Those people hate people and they have the power to actually cause unspeakable damage.
It's really a "must see" film.
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