To The Source asked me to comment on the birth of the 7 billionth living human being a few weeks ago. I decided to take a different approach than the usual hand wringing and calls for increasingly intense efforts at population control. Instead, I decided to point out that some are using the blessed or worrying event—take your pick—to promote an explicit anti humanism. From “There Are 7 Billion of Us:”
The birth of the 7 billionth person threatens to add fuel to the fire of a virulently destructive anti humanism that threatens to keep the most destitute in the world mired in desperate poverty—as a policy choice—in the name of “saving the planet.” Indeed, we already see serious proposals that would use our supposed over population as a pretext for imposing policies that are both authoritarian in implementation and destructive of universal human thriving.
What am I writing about? I note that some global warming hysterics have extolled China’s “one child” policy as a model for the world—despite its leading to forced abortion and female infanticide, among other evils. Then, there is the “rights of nature” movement:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident,” Thomas Jefferson wrote, “that all flora and fauna are created equal, that mountains are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights.” Yes, I know Jefferson actually referred to human beings in the Declaration of Independence. But many within the contemporary environmental movement now would support a revised version granting human-style “rights” to nature...
I quote from the “Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth, and opine:
Make no mistake: The Nature Rights movement is a neo earth religion that seeks to turn human beings into the equivalent of mere animals in the forest. Its nihilistic intent is to shrink economies, reduce wealth, and depress living standards. In the West, that would create damaging recessionary policies. But in the destitute areas of the world, granting equal rights to bushes, mosquitoes dirt, viruses, and swamps—all parts of nature—would thwart the ability of people to liberate themselves from destitution, leading to shorter and more brutal human lives, and ironically, a higher birthrate since poverty and large families go hand in hand.
Perhaps even more threatening is the new advocacy for creating a new international crime called “ecocide:”
The concept of Ecocide is profoundly subversive. First, equating resource extraction and/or pollution with genocide trivializes true evils such as the slaughter in Rwanda, the killing fields of Cambodia, the gulags, and the death camps. Second, ecocide elevates undefined environmental systems to the moral status of human populations. Even more elementary is the fact that ecocide’s promoters want to destroy prosperity by criminalizing necessary economic activities. Indeed, one could say that human “over population” is ecocide since the space we need to live involves removing the natural “inhabitants from the peaceful enjoyment of that territory.”
I conclude:
Radical environmentalists plan to use the fear of human population growth as an insidious weapon turning us against ourselves. The anti-humanistic threat that these interrelated movements pose to human exceptionalism not only risk the health of our economies, but pose an acute threat to human freedom.
Whether or not one believes we have an over population problem, we sure have a growing anti humanism problem. My point in writing this essay was to note that as we debate the former we must not fall prey to the dark temptation of the latter.
