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Pro:
Con:
The latter sentiment, in which we protect the earth for the sake of humans, sounds more like conservationism than environmentalism. It seems to me that environmentalists want to protect the earth even if (or preferably if) it kills every last human being while for conservationists enhancing human life is what a clean and fertile earth is all about.
Watch for negative attitudes toward the human race among the replies to this post. I don't expect to see much conservationism sentiment.
Meanwhile, here are some quotes from environmentalists. They are taken out of context, but I hardly see how the context would make them less harsh:
It seems to me that environmentalists are enemies of mankind, and mankind should respond to them accordingly.
...beginning in the late 1960s, a subversive misanthropy began to gestate within environmentalism. This view does not see the earth and the fullness thereof—in the Biblical turn of phrase—as ours to develop responsibly for human benefit, but instead castigates humans as a “disease” (or “parasites,” “maggots,” “cancer,” take your pick) afflicting the planet, best treated with the antibiotic of radical human depopulation and implacable opposition to economic growth.
Declaring war on humans won’t make for a cleaner planet. To the contrary, the green misanthropes harm the cause by undermining environmentalism’s good public standing.
Con:
I hope this “environmentalists hate people” saw, which must be as old and moth-eaten as Teddy Roosevelt’s union suit, gets packed away for good. Since we’re pulling quotes out of context to suit our needs, I’m going to turn to one from the late Thomas Berry. I think it starts to get at the root of the real concern, which is not that humans don’t belong on the planet, but that we should understand our place. “Any progress of the human at the expense of the larger life community must ultimately lead to a diminishment of human life itself,” Berry wrote. “A degraded habitat will produce degraded humans.”
The latter sentiment, in which we protect the earth for the sake of humans, sounds more like conservationism than environmentalism. It seems to me that environmentalists want to protect the earth even if (or preferably if) it kills every last human being while for conservationists enhancing human life is what a clean and fertile earth is all about.
Watch for negative attitudes toward the human race among the replies to this post. I don't expect to see much conservationism sentiment.
Meanwhile, here are some quotes from environmentalists. They are taken out of context, but I hardly see how the context would make them less harsh:
- The right to have children should be a marketable commodity, bought and traded by individuals but absolutely limited by the state. - Kenneth Boulding, originator of the "Spaceship Earth" concept (as quoted by William Tucker in Progress and Privilege, 1982)
- We have wished, we ecofreaks, for a disaster or for a social change to come and bomb us into Stone Age, where we might live like Indians in our valley, with our localism, our appropriate technology, our gardens, our homemade religion -- guilt-free at last! -- Stewart Brand (writing in the Whole Earth Catalogue
- Free Enterprise really means rich people get richer. They have the freedom to exploit and psychologically rape their fellow human beings in the process . . . Capitalism is destroying the earth. -- Helen Caldicott, Union of Concerned Scientists
- We must make this an insecure and inhospitable place for capitalists and their projects . . . We must reclaim the roads and plowed land, halt dam construction, tear down existing dams, free shackled rivers and return to wilderness millions of tens of millions of acres of presently settled land. -- David Foreman, Earth First!
- Everything we have developed over the last 100 years should be destroyed. -- Pentti Linkola
- If you ask me, it'd be a little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy because of what we would do with it. We ought to be looking for energy sources that are adequate for our needs, but that won't give us the excesses of concentrated energy with which we could do mischief to the earth or to each other. -- Amory Lovins in The Mother Earth - Plowboy Interview, Nov/Dec 1977, p. 22
- To feed a starving child is to exacerbate the world population problem -- Lamont Cole
- The only hope for the world is to make sure there is not another United States: We can't let other countries have the same number of cars, the amount of industrialization, we have in the U.S. We have to stop these Third World countries right where they are. And it is important to the rest of the world to make sure that they don't suffer economically by virtue of our stopping them. -- Michael Oppenheimer, Environmental Defense Fund
It seems to me that environmentalists are enemies of mankind, and mankind should respond to them accordingly.