Green genocide
It’s all too easy to be swept away by emotional crusades that claim to be working for the benefit of humanity. The French revolutionaries of 1789 declared they represented the interests of the men of Europe, and that they would bring liberty, equality and fraternity to an autocratic continent. Instead, they ushered in almost 25 years of unprecedented bloodshed and suffering.
The Russian Bolsheviks of 1917 guaranteed economic justice and total equality. Their movement led to the advent of the Soviet Union and more than 70 years of orgiastic murder. At least 20 million people were killed in the Soviet experiment of the “common good.” But there’s another well-intentioned genocide you haven’t heard of, and it’s happening right now.
After World War II, western nations confronted the persistent problem of malaria by embracing the use of DDT, an insecticide particularly effective against mosquitos, the chief hosts of the malaria virus. While malaria had once been common in Europe and the United States, the widespread use of the miracle insecticide reduced its incidence to an unremarkable level. DDT was deployed in the steamy tropics of Africa, Latin America and Asia, with predictably positive results.
In a representative example, according to a July 2001 article in The Telegraph, Sri Lanka experienced three million cases of malarial infection in 1946. By 1964 and after decades of DDT use, malaria was found in but 29 new individuals. Entire nations were safely fumigated and millions of people were able to live without fear of contracting another deadly disease. But not everyone was happy about the miracle insecticide.
The 1960s brought the emergence of the environmentalist scam and with it the end of the widespread use of DDT. Environmentalists screeched that DDT thinned the eggshells of eagles and harmed wildlife and humans. But they had little data to prove their claims. Moreover, they weren’t content to only ban DDT in the United States, where malaria had become rarer. They managed to ban DDT’s agricultural use in the entire world through the Stockholm Convention. Today, DDT can only be used in extraordinary cases.
But what was the result of the environmentalists’ unholy crusade against the pesticide? Millions of people died from preventable diseases, the victims of the good intentions of the green zealots. In every country that stopped using DDT, malarial infections and other fatal tropical diseases skyrocketed once more. Africa suffered the worst. In an already impoverished continent, the environmentalists effectively forbade the use of one of the world’s cheapest, safest and most effective disease-preventing chemicals. As one scientist at the National Institutes of Health estimated in 2007, “the ban on DDT may have killed 20 million children.” Other sources place the death toll many millions higher.
The tragic prohibition of DDT is but one of the most egregious cases of the environmentalists’ short-sightedness and complicity in unintentional genocide. What’s more alarming is that some actually advocate even greater restrictions on population. Paul Ehrlich, the doyen of the environmental alarmists, wrote that population controls should be implemented “by compulsion if voluntary methods fail,” in his book “The Population Bomb.” Garrett Hardin, another famous proponent of the “Chicken Little” view of the future has called for “mutual coercion mutually agreed upon,” a perverse way of saying you had better like the violence the state will inflict upon you in the name of curbing resource consumption.
A common thread among environmentalists is the belief that humans are somehow unnatural and outside of the protections they simultaneously demand for animals. Many think the Earth would be a much better place without humans entirely, and it’s no surprise that the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement is largely founded on the pathetic belief that humans have no right to exploit the Earth’s resources to their advantage and survival. Sound familiar?
Philosopher Paul Taylor sums up the underlying environmentalist position succinctly in his book “Respect for Nature,” when he says, “the ending of the human epoch on Earth would most likely be greeted with a hearty ‘Good riddance.'”
In such a short column I can hardly convey to you the misinformation and propaganda that you, as students, have been spoon-fed since your earliest years. As Julian Simon has found, the Earth is not running out of resources any time soon. In a compilation of over 900 peer-reviewed scholarly papers available on PopularTechnology.net, you can see that global warming is not supported by scientific consensus. Carbon fuels like oil and coal are, in 2011, the best, cheapest, safest and most reliable sources of energy, while alternative sources like switchgrass and solar remain for the foreseeable future inchoate and prohibitively costly or inefficient.
Question with boldness the environmental narrative you have been given and verify for yourselves the data and weak logic behind the quest for “zero-emissions” and “sustainability.” Question whether the environmentalists have your best interests at heart or have other, more sinister designs. Ask yourself if the greens are serious about finding the best energy sources or if they would prefer the emergence of a primitive, anti-industrial society.
As far back as December 1993, analysts Fred L. Smith and Kent Jeffreys pointed out Ehrlich believed futuristic clean energy sources such as cold fusion would be like “giving a machine gun to an idiot child.” Smith and Jeffreys also drew attention to green guru Jeremy Rifkin’s proclamation that cold fusion would be “the worst thing that could happen to our planet.”
One can only wonder how benevolent the environmentalists really are. If the millions of annual preventable malarial deaths as a result of the DDT ban are any indicator, the answer to the question is not likely positive.
Just like the Jacobins and Bolsheviks centuries ago acted for your own good, today’s green crusaders claim to know what’s best for you and the rest of the world. I submit that only you, as adults, know what’s best for you, and that no activist or government bureaucrat has the right to take from you your incandescent light bulbs, gas-guzzling automobiles or your right to live with the conveniences that fossil fuels provide. You have been told to feel guilty for your resource consumption. Forget about it. You are as much a part of nature as the bald eagles and antelope, and you have as much a right to act for your own rational self-interest and survival. The trouble is, some environmentalists would rather you never lived at all.a