Poverty is the Answer: Radical Environmentalism Leading Us to a New Form of Human Sacrifice

I have written how radical environmentalism is becoming distinctly anti-human. With the fervent ideology of Deep Ecology, it is explicitly stated. But some of what we are witnessing among the neo Greens is a drive to sacrifice human flourishing and prosperity—without the explicitly stated misanthropic dogmas.

This willingness to sacrifice human welfare is reaching a fever pitch among those who believe that global warming is a crisis of unimagined proportions—a belief that can border on quasi-religion or pure ideology. An article by David Owen—pushing the importance of economic decline to saving the planet—in the New Yorker illustrates the point. From his column:

[T]he world’s principal source of man-made greenhouse gases has always been prosperity. The recession makes that relationship easy to see: shuttered factories don’t spew carbon dioxide; the unemployed drive fewer miles and turn down their furnaces, air-conditioners, and swimming-pool heaters; struggling corporations and families cut back on air travel; even affluent people buy less throwaway junk.

Most of us view our current economic crisis with alarm. Apparently, Owen sees it is a positive:

The environmental benefits of economic decline, though real, are fragile, because they are vulnerable to intervention by governments, which, understandably, want to put people back to work and get them buying non-necessities again—through programs intended to revive ordinary consumer spending (which has a big carbon footprint), and through public-investment projects to build new roads and airports (ditto).

And the answer, apparently, is more of the same decline we are now experiencing:

The ultimate success or failure of Obama’s [anti-global warming] program, and of the measures that will be introduced in Copenhagen this year, will depend on our willingness, once the global economy is no longer teetering, to accept policies that will seem to be nudging us back toward the abyss.

So, people need to be poorer, with all the concomitant increase in human suffering and shorter lives that would result from lower levels of prosperity. And remember, he only writes here about the well off areas of the world. But you can bet that he and his co-believers would strive mightily to stifle development in now destitute areas of the world—dooming perhaps billions of people to lives of continued squalor, disease, and lower life expectancies.

More to the point of what we discuss here at SHS, human beings are a logical species: We take our ideas where they lead! (Thus, once Americans accepted the verity of Jefferson’s “We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal...”it doomed slavery, because servitude and equality are incompatible.) For the same reason, once we accept the fundamental premise of the piece—that we must sacrifice human prosperity to “save the planet”—the misanthropic ideology of Deep Ecology—humans as a viral infection afflicting Gaia—with radical depopulation as the cure—consider the genocidal implications—become a logical next step

And thus we see how the healthy environmentalism that cleaned up filthy rivers and reduced Los Angeles air pollution is quickly mutating into an implicit and explicit anti-humanism that is in danger of leading to becoming so degraded in our self perception, that we could reach the point of being urged (forced?) to become human sacrifices on Gaia’s altar.