The truth about environmentalists
Environmentalism may be a poppycock fad.
Or not. Anyway, sadly it is persisting a long time, but I am living my life patiently waiting to see what new fad comes along next to sweep away people’s will-o-the-wisp fancies. And, I hope there will come a time in my lifetime when others will stop telling me how to dispose of my rubbish, what foods to eat, how warm to keep my home, how to use water and electricity (that I pay for), and advise me on my travel strategies.
The weakness of environmentalism is not that it is wrong. It is a sad and common feature of too many environmentalists that they seem often to be people who, full of enthusiasm and ideas, are lacking a proper education in related fields. Environmentalism lacks justice and it lacks an appropriate sense of priorities. Placing non-human animals on a par with or even above humans; placing more emphasis on saving trees and wildlife than saving people, or women’s rights in Afghanistan, or genocide in Africa, or government racism in Australia; crying “Save the planet!” when that is more like an evangelical exhortation than an actual plan do nothing to recommend it to me as a philosophy of life or as a political agenda.
For the record, I take it as a cardinal rule that nothing is as people think that it is, nothing is as people say that it is, and that people cannot possibly really know anything at all - and even if they could, they could not communicate it. Such convictions color my interpretation of everything I hear, everything I see, everything I learn and they inform my disposition towards everything. Everything I say is also colored by that conviction, which leads some to ponder that it effectively undermines my words. But for my part I think that it instead reinforces my belief that language is more a decoration for our lives than a means of accurately or meaningfully saying anything.
Environmentalism lacks justice and it lacks an appropriate sense of priorities.
Now on the matter of environmentalists I suggest that they are more akin to environmental terrorists - not because they engage in socially disruptive or criminal behavior (which some of them do), but because their philosophy leads them towards prejudicial insistence on preserving a make-believe planetary climate that is inappropriately prejudiced in favor of our species - in other words, environmentalism is an active commission of the crime of speciesism.
Homo-centric motivation is criminal discrimination against other species.
It is not that we humans are not compromising our climate. We are. It is not that the global ambient temperature is not rising. It is. It is not that human activity is not contributing to the rise in ambient temperature. It is. It is not that any efforts to contain or retard further greenhouse gas emissions are without merit. They are not. And, it is not that we should not try to contain or retard our polluting behavior. We should. On all of these I agree with the green people. But what it also is is that planet Earth has nobaseline climate, no ‘normal’ climate away from which global warming is moving us. The climate has always been in flux and in the planet’s more than four billion years of history and evolution a wide variety of global climates have been ‘normal’ at one time or another before the conditions that gave rise to modern homo sapiens. On what grounds, then - other than on purely species-centric grounds and narrow self interest - do current environmental advocates advocate rescuing the very modern conditions that contributed to our success? I can say with profound certainty that there is no possible way that any human activity can “hurt” the planet, or the climate as some Greens are wont to say. Indeed, the human species will fall into extinction some day as all species do, and the planet will outlive us by billions of years. You can bet on it. What we can say is that we are hurting ourselves, or at least, hurting the environmental conditions that contribute to our existence and which sustain us. What makes us think that we are so special and that our own particular environment is the one that deserves to prevail?
Therein lies the terrorist crime of speciesism. For human beings, and mammals as a family, have not existed long enough to legitimately claim to be normative life forms for the planet, or representative of Earth. Sure, mammals are currently the dominant family and human beings the current dominant species of the family. But remember the reptiles. Dinosaurs prevailed much longer than we have - dominating the planet for 200-million years before finally being overtaken by events. And before them, earlier marine life forms reigned even longer. So I am suggesting - just a suggestion, mind you - that it is reptilian life, not mammalian life that has a stronger claim to the planet. Therefore, if current environmentalists want to be true to their creed I suggest that they ought to be advocating raising the global ambient temperature several more degrees to what it was during the reign of the dinosaurs. And, they ought to be advocating the melting of the polar ice caps. Plus, they ought to be advocating the killing of all the whales and the restocking of the oceans with plesiosaurs, etc. as mechanisms for restoring the planets ‘true’climate - or, at least, the climatic conditions possessing a greater claim to planetary authenticity.
The fact that they do not indicates that their motives are entirely homo-centric, which I am suggesting now can be framed as a crime of discrimination. Homo-centric motivation is criminal discrimination against other species.
The seminal question needs answering - what makes us think that we are so special and that our own particular environment is the one that deserves to be saved? I understand the position that human beings are special - again, the discriminatory crime of speciesism - because only we are conscious, only we have developed civilization and, some will say, only we are made in the image of God - not the antediluvian reptiles. Therefore it behooves us to work to preserve our environment, the environment conducive to our survival. Such work has the virtue not only of satisfying the driving force of self preservation, but it is also righteous. And it’s rational. The environments that sustained the dinosaurs are as extinct as they are, so it is not only meaningless to look towards restoring them, but stupid to suggest it as well.
But I disagree on the grounds that much of what passes under the environmental banner today is at least deserving of being called stupid as my suggestions that point towards species suicide may be.
What poppycock! Environmentalism is poppycock at least so long as it does not acknowledge its baseline assumptions
- which are assumptions, after all. Take them. Leave them. Question them.