Many Believe The Enviromentalist Direction To “Save the Planet, Kill Yourself” Is Absolutely Necessary by Tim Ball
We are at a bizarre stage in history when the words and actions of a Catholic Pope are part of an article on climate change: When 190 world leaders brag about an agreement to spend trillions of dollars on a completely non-existent problem and the Pope supports them: When the Pope suggests Catholics have fewer children: When the Pope hints at advocating Birth Control: When a group of educated people recommend getting rid of all the people on Earth.
Pope Francis became embroiled in the Climate Change debate because he said in his encyclical
2. This sister (Mother Earth) now cries out to us because of the harm we have inflicted on her by our irresponsible use and abuse of the goods with which God has endowed her. We have come to see ourselves as her lords and masters, entitled to plunder her at will. The violence present in our hearts, wounded by sin, is also reflected in the symptoms of sickness evident in the soil, in the water, in the air and in all forms of life. This is why the earth herself, burdened and laid waste, is among the most abandoned and maltreated of our poor; she “groans in travail” (Rom 8:22). We have forgotten that we ourselves are dust of the earth (cf. Gen 2:7); our very bodies are made up of her elements, we breathe her air and we receive life and refreshment from her waters.
This statement is a reflection of the views of the chief climate change advisor to the Pope. Hans Schellnhuber is Director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK). He is a product of the former East Germany who simply transposed the ideas of total government control under the guise of saving the planet. He is a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change IPCC, which likely explains his appointment. However, his wider view is from being a Pantheist, which one dictionary defines as
the doctrine that God is the transcendent reality of which the material universe and human beings are only manifestations: it involves a denial of God’s personality and expresses a tendency to identify God and nature.
Pantheists also believe in the underlying theme of the use of global warming as a political vehicle to challenge the real problem, namely that the world is overpopulated. They believe the Earth is their god, much like Gaia, and she should only have to be burdened with fewer than one billion people. In a presentation in Copenhagen in 2009 Schellnhuber said that if global temperatures rose 9 degrees Fahrenheit (about 2.5°C) Earth’s population would be devastated. He commented,
“In a very cynical way, it’s a triumph for science because at last we have stabilized something –- namely the estimates for the carrying capacity of the planet, namely below 1 billion people,”
The irony that is lost on environmentalists and advocates against global warming is that if overpopulation is the real problem then according to Schellenhuber global warming offers a solution. The same argument holds for Malthusian population controls, such as disease, wars, and famine. If overpopulation is THE problem then why stop these natural controls?
Pope Francis aligned himself with Schellnhuber and the IPCC in Paris apparently not realizing they are neo-Malthusian’s. That is they think we must limit population and development because we are using up all resources at an unsustainable rate. This created a moral and philosophical dilemma for Francis amusingly noted by the National Catholic Reporter.
Pope Francis said Pope Paul VI, whose 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae outlined the contraceptive ban, was warning against a “Neo-Malthusianism, ” a reference to a theories that suggested in the 1960s and ’70s that exponential global population growth would lead to an irreversible world food crisis.
Citing the low rates of birth specifically in Italy and Spain, Francis said such Neo-Malthusianism “seeks to control humanity.”
At the same time, however, Francis made a statement that seems without precedent for a pope, suggesting that parents may have a responsibility to limit the number of their children, saying: “This does not signify that the Christian must make children in series.”
This parallels the remark he made earlier,
While in flight, returning home from the Philippines capital, Manila, on Monday, Pope Francis had some plain words for Catholics about family planning. The church’s ban on contraception doesn’t mean Catholics should breed “like rabbits,” the pontiff said during an hour-long news conference.
What the Pope clearly doesn’t understand, or possibly, want to understand, is the real objective of the group he partners with, known as the Club of Rome in the battle against global warming is to reduce the population.
The relationship between population and resources is an issue throughout history. Confucius (551 – 479 BC) discussed the relationship when he talked about carrying capacity, a phrase now used mostly in agriculture. In the 19th century Thomas Malthus claimed the population would outgrow the food supply. Charles Darwin took his book Essay on Population with him on the Beagle and said it was the major influence on his theory.
The current alarmism over population growth was a key piece of the ideas of the Club of Rome and their now discredited book “Limits to Growth”, which combined with Paul Ehrlich’s book, “The Population Bomb.” The ideas combined at the 1994 world conference on population in Cairo, where Al Gore led the US delegation and gave the keynote speech. Here is the philosophy from Section 3.1 of the material used to justify the conference.
There is also general agreement that unsustainable consumption and production patterns are contributing to the unsustainable use of natural resources and environmental degradation as well as to the reinforcement of social inequities and of poverty with the above- mentioned consequences for demographic parameters.
All the population predictions throughout history were wrong. By any measure the world is not overpopulated. At the Conference, the finger was pointed at African and Asian nations as poor because they were overpopulated. This ignores the fact that the Netherlands is the most densely populated country but is also one of the wealthiest.
The truth is environmentalism in its more virulent form is anti-humanity, anti-evolution, anti-development. It believes that human progress is not a natural evolution but an unnatural aberration. Ron Arnold, Executive Vice-President of the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise, said,
“Environmentalism intends to transform government, economy, and society in order to liberate nature from human exploitation.”
Somehow evolution, survival of the fittest and the most adaptable, doesn’t apply to humans. Consider this strange comment by David Graber, a research biologist with the National Park Service said,
“Human happiness, and certainly human fecundity, are not as important as a wild and healthy planet. I know social scientists who remind me that people are part of nature, but it isn’t true. Somewhere along the line – at about a billion years ago – we quit the contract and became a cancer. We have become a plague upon ourselves and upon the Earth. It is cosmically unlikely that the developed world will choose to end its orgy of fossil energy consumption, and the Third World its suicidal consumption of landscape. Until such time as Homo Sapiens should decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along.”
What contract did we quit? Who did we make it with? In his arrogance and narrowness, Graber does not consider a virus that wipes out Graber and his friends.
Christopher Manes author of “Green Rage” is similarly arrogant because he considers that “a large percentage of humanity is (an) ecological redundancy.” Manes, at least, considers a few are worth saving. David Foreman former chief lobbyist for the Wilderness Society doesn’t agree. He considers the optimum human population number is zero.
Prince Philip, like Schellnhuber, sees a value in diseases and virus. He said he would like to be reincarnated as a deadly virus to reduce world population. I would not object if the virus started with the people in the monarchy.
Canadian David Suzuki, a former genetics professor, might see the irony although I doubt it. He said.
“Economics is a very species – chauvinistic idea. No other species on earth – and there are may be 30 million of them – has had the nerve to put forth a concept called economics, in which one species, us, declares the right to put value on everything else on earth, in the living and non-living world.”
First, he is wrong because all other species do put a value on everything else – it is food, or it is not food. Assigning value doesn’t get more basic than that. Second, the 30 million number is pure speculation, but so are the statistics Suzuki uses about the rate of extinctions and most other issues.
The list of fatuous, bizarre, and illogical anti-human statements Ingrid Newkirk of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals said,
“Mankind is a cancer; we’re the biggest blight on the face of the earth.” “If you haven’t given voluntary human extinction much thought before, the idea of a world with no people in it may seem strange. But, if you give it a chance, I think you might agree that the extinction of Homo Sapiens would mean survival for millions if not billions, of Earth-dwelling species, Phasing out the human race will solve every problem on earth, social and environmental.”
Richard Conniff commented in “Audubon.”
“Among environmentalists sharing two or three beers, the notion is quite common that if only some calamity could wipe out the entire human race, other species might once again have a chance.”
Arne Naess, Norwegian Eco-philosopher and Ecologist says the “optimum human population of earth” is 100 million, so approximately 6.9 billion of us have to kill ourselves to save the planet.
The problem is these people gained enormous influence exploiting environmentalism for a political agenda. Their thinking controls our schools and the media. Ron Arnold provided a good summary in his book “Trashing the Economy”:
“It sneaks up on you. The novice environmentalist sees only the lofty and noble dream of a perfect physical environment. Then, headline after headline – acid rain, global warming, the ozone hole, oil spills – the environmentalist begins to harden. Negativity sets in. Perceptions change. There is a distinct shift toward seeing man as the systematic destroyer of the good, the systematic doer of evil. The image of humanity changes. A profound misanthropy develops and the environmentalist is unaware of it.”
I struggled for years with the role or function of extremists in society. I realize now their job is to define the limits of an idea or ideology. Most people are environmentalists, and should resent those who have usurped the concept or the title. A few, like David Suzuki, Al Gore, and now Pope Francis, grabbed the idea and from the moral high ground it provided, lorded it over the majority. The truth is they didn’t care about the environment; it was just a vehicle for their political agenda of total control.
Everyone cares about the environment; the question is how far do we pursue the concept. Those who are anti-humanity and anti-society, or don’t believe evolution applies to humans, have the ultimate in arrogance. Is there any other species that would advocate its own demise? However, in doing so, they define the limits of environmentalism for the majority and their world recognizes that humans and their activities are as legitimate as those of any other species.
