Environmentalists Would Make Human Life Impossible

http://newsmax.com/archives/articles/2003/4/21/ 124028.shtml

Environmentalists Would Make Human Life Impossible Michael S. Berliner Tuesday, April 22, 2003

Earth Day approaches, and with it a grave danger faces mankind. The danger is not from acid rain, global warming, smog or the logging of rain forests, as environmentalists would have us believe. The danger to mankind is from environmentalism.

The fundamental goal of environmentalists is not clean air and clean water; rather it is the demolition of technological/industrial civilization. Their goal is not the advancement of human health, human happiness and human life; rather it is a subhuman world where 'nature' is worshipped like the totem of some primitive religion.

In a nation founded on the pioneer spirit, they have made 'development' an evil word. They inhibit or prohibit the development of Alaskan oil, offshore drilling, nuclear power - and every other practical form of energy. Housing, commerce and jobs are sacrificed to spotted owls and snail darters. Medical research is sacrificed to the 'rights' of mice. Logging is sacrificed to the 'rights' of trees.

No instance of the progress which brought man out of the cave is safe from the onslaught of those 'protecting' the environment from man, whom they consider a rapist and despoiler by his very essence.

Nature, they insist, has 'intrinsic value,' to be revered for its own sake, irrespective of any benefit to man. As a consequence, man is to be prohibited from using nature for his own ends. Since nature supposedly has value and goodness in itself, any human action which changes the environment is necessarily immoral.

Of course, environmentalists invoke the doctrine of intrinsic value not against wolves that eat sheep or beavers that gnaw trees; they invoke it only against man, only when man wants something.

The ideal world of environmentalists is not 21st century Western civilization; it is the Garden of Eden, a world with no human intervention in nature, a world without innovation or change, a world without effort, a world where survival is somehow guaranteed, a world where man has mystically merged with the 'environment.'

Had the environmentalist mentality prevailed in the 18th and 19th centuries, we would have had no Industrial Revolution, a situation environmentalists would cheer - at least those few who might have managed to survive without the life-saving benefits of modern science and technology.

The expressed goal of environmentalism is to prevent man from changing his environment, from intruding on nature. That is why environmentalism is the enemy of man, the enemy of human life.

Intrusion is necessary for human survival. Only by intrusion can man avoid pestilence and famine. Only by intrusion can man control his life and project long-range goals. Intrusion improves the environment, if by 'environment' one means the surroundings of man - the external material conditions of human life. Intrusion is a requirement of human nature.

But in the environmentalists' paean to 'Nature,' human nature is omitted. For the environmentalists, the 'natural' world is a world without man. Man has no legitimate needs, but trees, ponds and bacteria somehow do.

They don't mean it? Heed the words of the consistent environmentalists.

'The ending of the human epoch on Earth,' writes philosopher Paul Taylor in 'Respect for Nature: A Theory of Environmental Ethics,' 'would most likely be greeted with a hearty 'Good riddance!' '

In a glowing review of Bill McKibben's 'The End of Nature,' biologist David M. Graber writes (Los Angeles Times, Oct. 29, 1989): 'Human happiness [is] not as important as a wild and healthy planet. ... Until such time as Homo sapiens should decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along.'

Such is the naked essence of environmentalism: It mourns the death of one whale or tree but actually welcomes the death of billions of people. A more malevolent, man-hating philosophy is unimaginable.

The guiding principle of environmentalism is self-sacrifice, the sacrifice of longer lives, healthier lives, more prosperous lives, more enjoyable lives, i.e., the sacrifice of human lives.

But an individual is not born in servitude. He has a moral right to live his own life for his own sake. He has no duty to sacrifice it to the needs of others and certainly not to the 'needs' of the non-human.

To save mankind from environmentalism, what's needed is not the appeasing, compromising approach of those who urge a 'balance' between the needs of man and the 'needs' of the environment.

To save mankind requires the wholesale rejection of environmentalism as hatred of science, technology, progress and human life. To save mankind requires the return to a philosophy of reason and individualism, a philosophy which makes life on earth possible.

Michael S. Berliner is the former executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute (www.aynrand.org) in Irvine, Calif. The Ayn Rand Institute promotes the philosophy of Ayn Rand, author of 'Atlas Shrugged' and 'The

No offense, but I've seen this article before - about a week ago in fact, and on this same message board. It's just as stupid now as it was then.

I've been a radical environmentalist now for 30 years, and I'd have to agree that there are a few fruitcakes in the environmental movement - and some overly excited kids - who do talk about hating humanity, etc. etc. I've fought with these people in print, and I'd agree they're a nuisance.

What really persuaded me to become an environmentalist, though, is that I used to live in a beautiful little town in western New York State that was about 19 miles downstream from the Love Canal toxic waste dump site. When I was going to high school in the town I used to wonder why our well water tasted so funny and why there seemed to be so many widows and orphans in our relatively tiny community.

Well, there was reason. There have been about 250 buried toxic waste dumps discovered so far in Lake County, NY, the county where I used to live, and the local high school happens to have been about 3 miles from the Lake Ontario Ordnance Works, a radioactive dump site where the US government left about 35 tons of uranium pitchblende ore and some 35,000 pounds of radium left over from the Manhattan Project.

The people I know aren't environmentalists because we want to make 'human life impossible.' We're environmentalists because we think that Corporate America and the US Government are working to make human life impossible, and we intend to stop it.

Some people I know also like the environmental movement because they'd like to have national parks to visit, and clean water to drink, and scenery to look at, and places where they can fish or hunt or hike or ride bicycles without having to breathe and drink and eat pollution. Some of us also would like our grandkids, or our nephews and nieces, to grow up in a world where there are still tigers, caribou, storks, eagles, ducks, porpoises and whales.

If Michael Berliner of the Ayn Rand Institute thinks this is 'anti-human,' I'd like to suggest that he is the anti-human one. He's trying to get Americans to agree to the poisoning of our air and water, our exclusion from public lands and the destruction of the natural beauty that helps make life worth living - and he says he's doing it in the name of humanity.

I hope HIS kids and grandkids and great grandkids get to live someday in a concrete and plastic world that the Ayn Rand Institute has built. As for me, I'd just as soon stick with the Sierra Club.