I give too little attention here at Secondhand Smoke to the anti-human minions of the Deep Ecology movement. Deep ecologists view human beings as vermin that afflict the earth, which many believe is a living entity called Gaia. This story illustrates the twisted mindset by describing the anti-human advocacy among several notable intellectuals. We read again about the Texas academic that called humans “bacteria” and hoped for mass extinction, which I did blog. But it also reports this little bit of misanthropy, which I had not heard of before even though I know Jay Richards:
“William Burger decried ‘the devastation humans are currently imposing upon our planet.’ The curator emeritus for botany at Chicago’s Field Museum of Science last Nov. 9 wrote then-Discovery Institute scholar Jay Richards regarding his book, The Privileged Planet. Burger continued, ‘Still, adding over 70 million new humans to the planet each year, the future looks pretty bleak to me. Surely, the Black Death was one of the best things that ever happened to Europe: elevating the worth of human labor, reducing environmental degradation, and, rather promptly, producing the Renaissance. From where I sit, Planet Earth could use another major human pandemic, and pronto!’” I guess this flowers-over-people advocate is rooting for Bird Flu.
Of course, non of these deep ecologists volunteer offer up themselves or their children for the yearned-for mass human extinction.
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