Anti-Humanism

DDP Newsletter, May 2012, Volume XXX, No. 3

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) may cite numbers of human lives theoretically saved by its regulations, but the Green agenda is clearly the protection of Nature or the Planet. The effect of a technology on the environment may not even be the issue. The fact that it promotes prosperity may be the Greens’ main objection to it.

A recent study by Citi entitled “Energy 2020” concluded that the recovery of shale oil by fracking (hydraulic fracturing) portends nothing less than the “potential reindustrialization of the U.S. economy.” However, it is not clear who will win the policy war: “those who want to use the earth’s resources to achieve greater human progress or those who want to protect the earth from that progress” (Abby Schachter, “Energy Independence and Its Enemies,” Commentary, June 2012).

The Living Planet Report 2012 by the WWF (World Wildlife Fund) has stated that “economic growth should be abandoned, [and] citizens of the world’s wealthy nations should prepare for poverty,” writes Lewis Page (The Register 5/16/12, http://tinyurl.com/72t27mh). WWF assumes that global resources are limited, as measured in “biocapacity” expressed in hectares of earth’s surface. It goes on to assign numbers to how much biocapacity people are using—their “ecological footprint.”

The only human beings living within their means by this calculation are in the poorest nations. Thus, “only global poverty can save the planet.”

A major report by the Royal Society, Britain’s leading scientific academy, concludes that the world’s wealthiest people must urgently reduce their consumption to save the Earth from a “vortex of economic, socio-political, and environmental ills.” There’s a joint problem of population and consumption, and 23 prominent academics call for a radical “re-balancing” of global consumption to go hand in hand with attempts to curb further rapid rises in population (Steve O’Connor, The Independent 4/26/12, http://tinyurl.com/6v8fjqt).

“The report suggests, like the farcical carbon-trading scheme, a pseudo-market in consumption trading,” writes Raheem Kassam. However, “for developing countries to grow, it does not require developed economies to give up their prosperity or growth, but rather for developed countries and their partner NGOs to release their strangle hold from the throats of developing countries”  (The Commentator 6/7/12, http://tinyurl.com/7p3hhx9, cited by Benny Peiser, CCNet 4/27/12, also see www.thegwpf.org).

The Royal Society has embraced Malthus; it recently appointed Paul Ehrlich of The Population Bomb to fellowship. It calls on the June Rio+20 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro to tackle population growth. This is despite the fact that median fertility worldwide has sunk from 5.6 in the 1970s to 2.4 now. Total world population is expected to level off at 9 billion and remain there for 250 years (ibid.). Voluntary reduction in fertility appears to follow prosperity. Hundreds of millions are being lifted from abject poverty in China, India, and Africa, not through redistribution of wealth but through creation of wealth by means of trade, technology, and capital investment.

The Rio conference features “sustainable development” (Agenda 21) and will “tie population into green knots.” It demands “poverty eradication” [in some places], a global policy framework requiring all listed and large companies to integrate sustainability, and universal membership in a UN environmental agency located in Nairobi (Canada Free Press 1/12/12, http://tinyurl.com/7lo45lz)—the end of individual rights, including property rights, which are the mainspring of human progress.

BIODIVERSITY AND THE POPULATION CONTROL HOLOCAUST

Twenty years ago, the Earth Summit in Rio opened with a prediction that lack of governmental action would bring “by the end of the century, an environmental catastrophe which will  witness devastation as complete, as irreversible, as any nuclear holocaust.” The Summit resulted in the Convention on Biodiversity, now signed by 193 nations, to prevent species loss. The Earth was purportedly experiencing the greatest wave of extinctions since the age of the dinosaurs, with the loss of up to 150 species per day.

The International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) has identified a total of 801 species lost since 1500 A.D. Since 2000, only one animal, a mollusk, has been definitively shown to have gone extinct (CCNet 4/26/12).

Concerns about biodiversity and a “hard limit” on resources are always tied to calls for more human population control. “Around the world, the population control movement has resulted in billions of lost or ruined lives,” writes Robert Zubrin.

Acceptance of the idea that the world’s resources are fixed, with only so much to go around, means that “each new life is unwelcome, each unregulated thought or act is a menace, every person is fundamentally the enemy of every other person, and each race or nation is the enemy of every other race or nation.”

Zubrin notes that until the 1960s, American population control movements here and abroad were largely funded by private organizations, such as the Population Council and Planned Parenthood, with deep roots in the eugenics movement. Since then, the U.S. Congress has funded such programs, making billions instead of mere millions of dollars available for global campaigns of mass abortion and forced sterilization.

Speaking of biodiversity, there is evidence that all the pureblood women of the Kaw tribe in Oklahoma were sterilized in the 1970s, using Medicaid money, as reported by Angela Franks in her 2005 book Margaret Sanger’s Eugenic Legacy.

International programs frequently require participation as a condition of receiving loans, food aid, or public health assistance. “Disincentives” for refusing to consent to sterilization or IUD insertion have included dismissal from employment, destruction of homes, or denial of schooling or medical care. In India, some states denied irrigation water to villages that did not meet their quotas. One village was even threatened with aerial bombardment.

“You must consider it something like a war,” said a family planning director in Maharashtra. “Whether you like it or not, there will be a few dead people.”

Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, who capitulated to President Lyndon Johnson’s demand for aggressive population control as a condition for aid, was voted out of office in 1977. But financial pressure on India from the Word Bank and USAID continued. By the early 1980s, 4 million underclass Indian women were being coercively sterilized each year as part of the two-children-per-family limit.

Zubrin considers the U.S. taxpayer-funded population control programs abroad to be top-down dictatorial, dishonest, medically negligent, abusive of human rights, and racist. He provides extensive history (New Atlantis, spring 2012 (http://tinyurl.com/c6ucp7u).

Female infanticide or selective abortion of girls is frequent in countries where family size is limited and a male heir is considered essential. India has 37 million more men than women. Between 2000 and 2004, probably one-fifth of the baby girls in China were aborted or murdered. Sex-selective abortion is even coming to the U.S., with the collusion of Planned Parenthood, as under-cover videos show (http://tinyurl.com/7zw53vm).

Reducing human population is openly advocated as a means of controlling carbon emissions. Atrocities follow inevitably from the ideology that, in Zubrin’s words, believes that “the human race is a horde of vermin whose unconstrained aspirations and appetites endanger the natural order” and that “tyrannical measures are necessary to constrain humanity” (op. cit.).