QUOTE: "The extinction of the human species may not only be inevitable, but a good thing…"

I mentioned yesterday in the debate about Charlie Pedersen’s speech some pretty horrifying quotes from some relatively mainstream environmentalists. I’m posting them here after being challenged by a commenter who argus that mainstream environmentalism isn’t as misanthropic as I’ve claimed. , so here’s the ‘money part,’ answering a question from a chap called Den:

It is manifestly clear that mainstream environmentalism does not always recognise mankind’s right of survival, does not put human beings first (indeed, quite the opposite), and values the so-called ‘intrinsic values’ of wild nature and natural processes over the human values of human wealth and happiness — in opposition to the so-called ‘anthropocentric’ view that ‘deep ecology’ specifically opposes. In fact, this might be said to be characteristic of the ‘deep ecology’ mindset that is now mainstream.

“Humans,” says my commenter, “are important primarily in their capacity to provide stewardship for the eco-system.” As Phil H. says in response, “Why?” We’re primarily important because we get to sweep the rain forests and rake the beaches? Is that the real answer to the question, “Why are we here?”

If you want examples of mainstream ecologists who subscribe to a ‘dep ecology’ mindset, I could mention how mainstream environmentalists opposed the fighting of the fires that tore apart Yellowstone Park — these fires were “natural” and so sacrosanct; I could mention the opposition by environmentalists to the harvesting of the Pacific yew from 1989 to 1997 in a bid to develop paclitaxel (Taxol), a revolutionary anti-cancer drug; or the local Green party’s opposition to Ruakura’s research to find a cure for multiple scleroris; or the worldwide opposition to the production of Golden Rice, which can help with third-world anaemia, blindness and death.

Or I could point out that mainstream environmentalists are happy to continue with the DDT ban, despite it not even being clear that DDT is toxic to birds as claimed, and despite the ban arguably being responsible for the deaths by malaria of 55 million people due to malaria.

Or I could just offer you these views below from environmentalists within the mainstream, and that make clear that positions I’ve mentioned above are not surprising, given the view within mainstream environmentalism that human beings come second, at best. (I’ve included the Muir and Graber quotes just so they’re all in one place:

• World Wildlife Fund leader Prince Phillip of England told the UN in 1990 he wished to be reincarnated as “a killer virus to lower population levels.”

• Honorable representatives of the great saurians of older creation, may you long enjoy your lilies and rushes, and be blessed now and then with a mouthful of terror-stricken man by way of a dainty.
  – A benediction to alligators by John Muir, founder of the Sierra Club, quoted with approval as “a good epigram” by environmentalist Bill McKibben in ‘The End of Nature’ (New York: Random House, 1989) pg. 176
• We have wished…for a disaster or for a social change to come and bomb us back into the stone age…
  – Environmentalist Stewart Brand in ‘The Whole Earth Catalog’ [Stewart might recently have seen the light, if his recent comments are anything to go by, that that “Over the next ten years … the mainstream of the environmental movement will reverse its opinion and activism in four major areas: population growth, urbani­zation, genetically engineered organisms, and nuclear power.”]
• You think Hiroshima was bad, let me tell you, mister, Hiroshima wasn’t bad enough!
  – Faye Dunaway as the voice of “Mother Earth/Gaia” in the 1991 WTBS series ‘Voice of the Planet’
• Given the total, absolute, and final disappearance of Homo Sapiens, then, not only would the Earth’s Community of Life continue to exist but … the ending of the human epoch on Earth would most likely be greeted with a hearty ‘Good riddance!’
  – Paul W. Taylor, ethics professor at City University, NYC, in ‘Respect for Nature’ (Princeton Univ Press, 1989) pg. 115
• If you’ll give the idea a chance … you might agree that the extinction of Homo Sapiens would mean survival for millions if not billions of other Earth-dwelling species.
  – The ‘Voluntary Extinction Movement,’ quoted by Daniel Seligman in ‘Down With People,’ in ‘Fortune’ magazine, September 23, 1991
• The extinction of the human species may not only be inevitable, but a good thing…
  – Editorial in ‘The Economist,’ December 28, 1988
• A cancer is an uncontrolled multiplication of cells; the population explosion is an uncontrolled multiplication of people … We must shift our efforts from treatment of the symptoms to the cutting out of the cancer… We must have population control … by compulsion if voluntary methods fail.
  – Paul Ehrlich, ‘The Population Bomb’ (Ballantine Books 1968) pg. xi, pg. 166
• …Man is no more important than any other species … It may well take our extinction to set things straight.
  – David Foreman, ‘Earth First!’ spokesman, quoted by M. John Fayhee in ‘Backpacker’ magazine, September 1988, pg. 22
• I see no solution to our ruination of Earth except for a drastic reduction of the human population.
  – David Foreman, ‘Earth First!,’ quoted by Gregg Easterbrook in The New Republic, April 30, 1990, pg. 18
• If radical environmentalists were to invent a disease to bring human populations back to sanity, it would probably be something like AIDS.
  – from a good old Earth First! periodical, quoted in ‘Access to Energy,’ Vol.17 No.4, December 1989
• As radical environmentalists, we can see AIDS not as a problem but a necessary solution.
  – ‘Earth First!’ periodical, quoted in ‘Planet Stricken’ by Alan Pell Crawford and Art Levine, Vogue magazine, September 1989, pg. 710
• I founded Friends of the Earth to make the Sierra Club look reasonable. Then I founded the Earth Island Institute to make Friends of the Earth look reasonable. Earth First! now makes us look reasonable. We’re still waiting for someone to come along and make Earth First! look reasonable.
  – “Mainstream” environmentalist David Brower, quoted by Virginia Postrel in ‘Reason’ magazine, April 1990, pg. 24
• We are not interested in the utility of a particular species, or free-flowing river, or ecosystem to mankind. They have…more value – to me – than another human body, or a billion of them…Until such time as Homo Sapiens should decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along.
  – David M. Graber, National Park Service biologist, in a review of Bill McKibben’s ‘The End of Nature,’ in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, October 22, 1989, pg. 9
• Childbearing [should be] a punishable crime against society…all potential parents [should be] required to use contraceptive chemicals, the government issuing antidotes to citizens chosen for childbearing.
  – Herr David Brower, founder of Friends of the Earth, quoted in ‘The Coercive Utopians’ by Rael Jean Isaac and Erich Isaac (1985 Regnery Gateway Inc.)
• I got the impression that instead of going out to shoot birds, I should go out and shoot the kids who shoot birds.
  – Paul Watson, a founder of ‘Greenpeace,’ quoted in ‘Access to Energy’ Vol.17 No.4, December 1989
• We, in the Green movement, aspire to a cultural model in which the killing of a forest will be considered more contemptible and more criminal than the sale of 6-year old children to Asian brothels.
  – Carl Amery of the Green Party, quoted in ‘Mensch & Energie,’ April 1983
• A reporter asked Dr. Wurster whether or not the ban on the use of DDT would not encourage the use of the very toxic materials, Parathion, Azedrin and Methylparathion, the organo-phosphates, [and] nerve gas derivatives. And he said ‘Probably’. The reporter then asked him if these organo-phosphates did not have a long record of killing people. And Dr. Wurster, reflecting the views of a number of other scientists, said ‘So what? People are the cause of all the problems; we have too many of them; we need to get rid of some of them; and this is as good a way as any.’
  – Victor J. Yannacone, Jr., lawyer and co-founder of the Environmental Defense Fund, on EDF co-founder Dr. Charles Wurster, at a May 20, 1970 speech at the Union League Club in New York City. Published in the Congressional Record as Serial No.92-A of Hearings on Federal Pesticide Control Act of 1971, pg.266-267
• Shit happens. They were in the croc’s territory.
  – A commenter at ‘Not PC’ in response to the death of two human beings by crocodile attack.

TAGS: Environment, Conservation, Ethics, Quotes

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Nandor wants more government, less freedom

I offer you the spectacle of a self-declared “anarchist” who wants to get more government into your business. Nandor Tanczos’s proposed private members’ bill on waste minimisation would require every one of NZ’s 250,000 businesses to:

• write a detailed waste management plan;
• have it approved by your local bureaucrats;
• risk a $40,000 fine if you don’t;
• display a politically correct A3 poster espousing do-gooder government policies on recycling;
• give every customer a a politically correct flyer espousing do-gooder government policies on recycling.

Thanks Nandor. Once again, we see that the Greens instinctive answer to every fashionable concern is to call for either:

1. a ban; or
2. more meddling;
3. more bureaucrats.

The good news is that Nandor is reconsidering. A bit.

…Part 7, which requires every organisation to develop a waste minimisation plan, needs to be either removed or significantly amended. My own business experience tells me that this provision would be a significant burden to business owners.

Yes. It would.

One suggestion put to me is to clarify the law so that waste minimisation plans are not compulsory, but could be required by councils in certain cases, such as a large public events or significant building developments, as part of the consent process.

I wonder how “significant” a building development would need to be? Or how “large” a public event? I wonder who would decide?

Do yourself a favour and just try and think of any feel-good government programme like this that hasn’t gone hog wild once it was introduced. Ponder the thought that the next step will be rationing the number of sheets you use to wipe your bum: sheets that have been compulsorily printed with politically correct poetry espousing do-gooder government policies on recycling. Ponder it and then do yourself a favour and make a submission against the Bill.

Submissions close on August 4. You can go here for details, but don’t go there using your Firefox browser since the Parliamentary website real, really jams it up. And if you’d like some ammunition you coud do worse than have a look at these two recent ‘Not PC’ posts:

• Recycling – Not PC
• Cardiganned councillors get out the red armband over recycling – Not PC

The first one starts with PJ O’Rourke’s point,

that when used items have real value — Ferraris for example — they don’t need to be ‘recycled,’ they get sold. ‘Recycled’ is what happens to stuff with no value, or with so little value only a government regulation can make enough people care.

LINKS: Have your say: Waste Minimisation (Solids) Bill – Clerk.Parliament.Govt.NZ

TAGS: Environment, Conservation, Politics-NZ, Politics-Greens

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Richard Goode – New Zealand’s national drug policy

Richard Goode on a subject that is a sticking point for many libertarians, and potential libertarians.

Often said by libertarians that people are entitled to make mistakes, and that taking drugs is one of those. RG has a different view: that taking drugs is good.

“Let me explain.”

To do that, we have to go all the way back to the Stone Age.

Technologically primitive then. Not so now. Stone, wood, pottery … now steel, concrete, glass, titanium. Then, not even the wheel .. now the car, the rocket and the Segway.

Many, many examples of enormous advances in technology since the Stone Age. But not in the technology of recreational mood alteration.

Alcohol a blunt instrument, a lot good, and a lot bad. Essential to the selection of Libz office-holders.

Hungover in the morning as if you were poisoned? You have been: with acetaldehyde.

From book ‘Life Extension’: An ideal solution to the problem with alcohol would be to designa drug like alcohol but without the side effects. Fortunately, such a thing has already been done. Designed by Alexander Shulgin, it emulated the effect of two martinis; taken by test subjects, who enjoyed it a great deal, it became called ‘Empathy.’ It was prohibited in NZ in 1986.

There are others. All banned.

NZ has had a National Drug Policy since 1988. It has an overarching goal: to prevent and reduce harms caused by alcohol, tobacco and drug use. RG suggests if we are to achieve sucess we must address this ‘harm minimisation’ approach.

3 drug-related harms:

1. harms inflicted by people on themselves by choice, or on others by their choice (for example in a smoky bar).
2. harms inflicted on others without their consent
3. harms inflicted by governments on their citizens.

Here on this last is where we Libz can can truly engage the debate. To point out the latter harms, and explain that the harms caused by governments in exercising prohibition are far greater than the harms that people voluntarily choose for themselves.

1. punishments handed out to dealers and users, including sentences of life imprisonment
2. hands the provision and supply of recreational drugs to the underworld, on a plate.

And arguably, the greatest harm caused by the War on Drugs has been to stifle research into new and better and safer recreational drugs.

Questions from the floor.

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When politics masquerades as science

George Reisman has two related guest posts currently up at his blog, the first by Mark Humphreys on the politics of much climate ‘science’:

The global warming crusade is politics masquerading as “science”. One indication of this bait and switch tactic is the argument, continually promoted by left-wing Greens, that a “consensus” of climate scientists supports this officially sanctioned thesis. Aside from the questionable truth of this claim (more on this below), consensus has nothing to do with the process of identifying evidence, facts, and the logical integrations that lead to new scientific breakthroughs. So scientists properly ought not to be concerned with consensus. Consensus is the obsession of politicians maneuvering to impose their will by force on other people.

Another example of “the deceit that emerges when science is distorted by a regime of coercion” is offered by another guest post at Reisman’s blog on the grand old lady of much of today’s environmental activism: the campaign based on Rachel Carson’s book ‘Silent Spring’ that led to the ban of DDT, and the subsequent deaths of 800,000 African children a year to the malaria that DDT had been curing. The war on malaria, once being won, was lost due to politicised ‘science’:

So why has the war on malaria failed? Because governments banned the cure. Now they claim to wonder why people are sick and dying. DDT was discovered during World War II to be a great means of stopping infection from typhus and malaria. Its inventor, Paul Hermann Mueller, won the Nobel Prize in 1948. It was used throughout the 1950s and ’60s and was on the verge of wiping out mosquito-borne diseases from the planet. Then something very peculiar came along. A book called Silent Spring by Rachel Carson was published in 1962, and it eventually created a fantastic backlash against progress. The spring was silent supposedly because of the lack of birds, all killed off by DDT. The only problem is that Carson’s claims were never scientifically validated. Indeed, it was a hoax… Even so, governments acted.

“Even so, governments acted.” The message — the dangers of government action in the face of politicised science — is one today’s politicians and activists might ponder. And while pondering, you might find it worthwhile to reconsider George Reisman’s classic arguments from his ‘Toxicity of Environmentalism,’ available online at his Capitalism site, that such an outcome is no surprise given the philosophical roots of the anti-human strand of environmentalism.

LINKS: Politics masquerading as science, by Mark Humphreys – George Reisman’s blog
The spring is silent on DDT, by Llewellyn Rockwell, Jr. – George Reisman’s blog
The Toxicity of Environmentalism – George Reisman

TAGS: Environment, Science, Global Warming

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