Environmentalism is mutating from a movement organized around conserving resources, maintaining proper standards of environmental cleanliness, and protecting endangered species, as it promotes human prosperity, into a quasi-earth religion that seeks to “save the planet”—from us. This has resulted—as we have discussed here often as SHS—in an explicit and implicit anti-humanism that endangers our belief in human exceptionalism and human flourishing.
Moreover, “green” is fast becoming the color of raw power. Here’s a minor example: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s is in China pushing for cooperation on the fight against climate change, where she spilled the beans about the audaciousness of the green agenda. From the story:
In a meeting Wednesday, the head of China’s national legislature, Wu Bangguo, told Pelosi that climate change was a common challenge and that Beijing stood ready to work with Washington. Turning around her usual criticisms about human rights, Pelosi linked global warming to environmental justice, saying the right to a clean environment is also a human right.
“I do see this opportunity for climate change to be ... a game-changer,” she said at Tsinghua. “It’s a place where human rights” looking out for the needs of the poor in terms of climate change and healthy environment” are a human right.”...
In answering a question from a student about how Pelosi was going to get Americans to cut back on their carbon emissions, the leading Democratic lawmaker said it was important to educate children on how to conserve energy and for citizens to build more environmentally friendly homes.
“We have so much room for improvement,” she said. “Every aspect of our lives must be subjected to an inventory ... of how we are taking responsibility.”
Imagine the intrusive power of government subjecting each of our individual lives to “an inventory.” Worse, mislabeling the scientifically dubious quest to “stop global warming” as a “human rights” agenda—while ignoring true human rights abuses, such as China’s eugenics policies and killing prisoners for their organs—is an audacious Orwellian maneuver that would destroy individual liberty in the name of promoting human rights.
Whatever good it once stood for, today, the Green Movement seeks to stifle freedom as it undermines human flourishing.
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