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Make Every Day Earth Day — But Do It The Right Way

Earth Day is upon us again. It all began on April 22, 1970, when a United States Senator named Gaylord Nelson founded “an environmental teach-in” which he called, somewhat inauspiciously, Earth Day.

The first Earth Day was confined to the United States, but the first Earth Day national coordinator, one Denis Hayes, soon made it international, organizing events in approximately 140 nations.

This year rather than celebrating Earth Day by advocating still more government bureaus, which will then determine for the rest of us what we can do with our property, I suggest we instead celebrate the only real way to clean up and beautify the planet: private property rights and private stewardship.

The right to property is, as James Madison said, “the guardian” of every other right. Freedom and private property are inseparable. Property is freedom: you cannot be free if you are not free to produce, use, and dispose of those things necessary to your life.

“Control the property, control the person,” said Lenin, whose birthday, not quite coincidentally, is April 22nd.

Property, like every other right, is first and foremost the right to act: specifically, it is the right to produce, exchange, and use.

“Property is not only money and other tangible things of value, but also includes any intangible right considered as a source or element of income or wealth…. It is the right to enjoy and to dispose of certain things in the most absolute manner” (Electric Law Library).

Money is property.

The only alternative to private property is government or communal ownership of property, both of which amount to the same thing in the end: a bureau of centralized planners controlling the property.

“That alone is a just government which impartially secures to every man whatever is his own,” said James Madison.

If you desire to know precisely what someone’s political viewpoint is, all you need do is find out his or her stance on property; for it is through the stance on property that the entire political philosophy is disclosed. You needn’t listen to anything anyone says about “freedom” or “liberty” or any of these other easy platitudes: no one in her or his right mind will go against those things. Instead, simply check the stance on property. If someone doesn’t believe in full private property rights, that person is, to the exact extent he or she denies private property rights, a statist.

Property is the sine-qua-non of human freedom.

To defend freedom, therefore, you must start by defending the unalienable right to property.

The diversity in the faculties of men, from which the rights of property originate, is not less an insuperable obstacle to a uniformity of interests. The protection of these faculties is the first object of government (James Madison, Federal Papers 10).

Government is instituted no less for protection of the PROPERTY, than of the persons (James Madison, Federalist Paper #54, emphasis in the original).

The true foundation of republican government is the equal right of every citizen in his person and property and in their management (Thomas Jefferson to Samuel Kercheval).

A right to property is founded in our natural wants, in the means with which we are endowed to satisfy these wants, and the right to what we acquire by those means without violating the similar rights of other sensible beings (Thomas Jefferson to Pierre Samuel Dupont de Nemours).

The political institutions of America, its various soils and climates, opened a certain resource to the unfortunate and to the enterprising of every country and insured to them the acquisition and free possession of property (Thomas Jefferson: Declaration on Taking Up Arms).

The moment the idea is admitted into society, that property is not as sacred as the laws of God and that there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence (John Adams).

Environmentalism has so thoroughly permeated world culture that the saving-the-planet rhetoric is accepted even by those who don’t really regard themselves as dyed-in-the-skein environmentalists. It is taught as holy writ in public schools, and it’s espoused by poets, priests, and politicians alike.

This monstrous ideology would, given the first opportunity, destroy humankind, a fact of which the leaders of this movement make no secret.

It is therefore of great importance to expose this ideology for what it actually is: a neo-Marxist philosophy that masquerades as something benevolent and life-affirming, but which in reality explicitly calls for humans to be subordinated to nature, via an elite bureau of centralized planners who, as you would suspect, are the ones that get to decide for the rest of us how we must live.

It was Jean-Jacques Rousseau who first began propounding the immanent-goodness-of-nature-untouched-by-man ideology. Rousseau also deplored “the corrupting influence of reason, culture, and civilization.” In fact, Rousseau, like many of our current politicians, also preached economic egalitarianism and tribal democracy, the “collective will,” and the primacy of the group over the individual. In a great many ways, Rousseau is the founder of present-day environmentalism.

His so-called Eden Premise was picked up by all the pantheists and transcendentalists, such as Henry David Thoreau, John Muir (founder of Sierra Club), Aldo Leopold (who helped found the Wilderness Society), and of course the propagandist Rachel Carson.

When, in 1860, Thoreau wrote that forests untouched by humans grow toward “the greatest regularity and harmony,” he inadvertently changed the life of a biologist named George Perkins Marsh, who in 1864 wrote a book called Man and Nature. In this extraordinarily influential book, George Marsh also tried to convince us that, absent humans, mother nature and her processes work in perfect harmony:

“Man” (said Marsh) “is everywhere a disturbing agent. Wherever he plants his foot, the harmonies of nature are turned to discord…. [Humans] are brute destroyers … [Humans] destroy the balance which nature had established.”

“But” (he continued) “nature avenges herself upon the intruder, [bringing humans] deprivation, barbarism, and perhaps even extinction.”

Just as Thoreau influenced George Marsh, so George Marsh influenced a man named Gifford Pinchot, and also a man named John Muir.

Gifford Pinchot was a utilitarian who loathed private ownership of natural resources. He was also the first chief of the United States Forest Service under Republican President Theodore Roosevelt.

Gifford Pinchot was a collectivist who believed in sacrificing individuals and their property for the sake of “the greatest number.”

It was in large part because of Pinchot that the United States’ federal government increased its land holdings dramatically, so that today over one third of America is owned by the federal government — which holdings comprise over half of America’s known resources, including “a third of our oil, over 40 percent of salable timber and natural gas, and most of the nation’s coal, copper, silver, asbestos, lead, and other minerals.”

In his excellent account of American environmentalism, Philip Shabecoff says this:

“Pinchot wanted the forests managed for their usefulness, not for their beauty… He was not interested in preserving the natural landscape for its own sake.”

At the very least, Pinchot, a conservationist, was, however, still semi pro-human.

John Muir, on the other hand, Pinchot’s nemesis, was not pro-human. In fact, he was the diametric opposite.

It was John Muir, a Scottish immigrant, who introduced misanthropy into the environmental pseudo-philosophy, which misanthropy reigns supreme to this very day.

“How narrow we selfish, conceited creatures are in our sympathies!” said John Muir, also an unapologetic racist. “How blind to the rights of all the rest of creation! Well, I have precious little sympathy for the selfish propriety of civilized man, and if a war of races should occur between the wild beasts and Lord Man, I would be tempted to sympathize with the bears.”

From John Muir, it was only a short step to one Ernst Haeckel (1834 – 1919), a German zoologist, who told us that individuals don’t actually exist. Human individuals do not possess an individual consciousness, he said, because humans are only a part of a greater whole, and 1866 Haeckel coined that fated term “ecology,” which he defined as “the whole science of the relations of the organism to the environment.”

It was an Oxford botanist named A. G. Tansley who, in 1935, introduced the word “ecosystem.”

According to this same Tansley, individual entities don’t exist but are merely part of “the basic units of nature on the face of the earth.”

Aldo Leopold’s wildly popular Sand County Almanac was published in 1948. It preached “the pyramid of life,” and in order to preserve this pyramid, Leopold told us that federal governments must “enlarge the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals [which] changes the role of Homo Sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it.”

A Norwegian named Arne Naess (1913 – 2009) also believed that human individuals don’t actually exist. Only ecosystems do. It was Naess who first argued that the “shallow ecology,” as he called it, “of mainstream conservation groups” benefits humans too much. Thus, Naess began calling for “deep ecology” — i.e. “biospheric egalitarianism with the equal right [of all things] to live and blossom.”

These are just a small handful of the phrases and catchphrases that have now frozen into secular dogma, and which Rachel Carson, with her puerile pen, brought to the mewling masses. Her book Silent Spring opens like this:

There once was a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings. The town lay in the midst of a checkerboard of prosperous farms, with fields of grain and hillsides of orchard where, in spring, white clouds of bloom drifted above the fields. In autumn, oak and maple and birch set up a blaze of color that flamed and flickered across a backdrop of pines. Then foxes barked in the hills and deer silently crossed the fields, half hidden in the mists of the fall morning… The town is almost devoid of robins and starlings; chickadees have not been present for two years, and this year the cardinals are gone too… ‘Will they ever come back?’ the children ask, and I do not have the answer.

Most sane people see through this pablum like a fishnet. It’s the insane people who have swallowed it hook, line, and sinker.

The rest, of course, is history.

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UN Document Would Give ‘Mother Earth’ Same Rights As Humans

This is for all the folks out there — you know who you are — who over the years have told me that I caricaturize environmentalism and environmentalists; that I present the environmental position “unfairly,” as “too extreme” when I call it what it actually is: namely, neo-Marxism at its blackest, a quasi-secular religion that hates human beings and worships at the shrine of death — e.g.: “Human beings, as a species, have no more value than slugs” (John Davis, editor of Earth First! Journal).

“In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill. All these dangers are caused by human intervention, and it is only through changed attitudes and behavior that they can be overcome. The real enemy then, is humanity itself” (Al Gore, Club of Rome executive member).

“Mankind is a cancer; we’re the biggest blight on the face of the earth” (president of PETA and environmental activist Ingrid Newkirk).

“If you haven’t given voluntary human extinction much thought before, the idea of a world with no people in it may seem strange. But, if you give it a chance, I think you might agree that the extinction of Homo Sapiens would mean survival for millions, if not billions, of Earth-dwelling species…. Phasing out the human race will solve every problem on earth, social and environmental” (Ibid).

Quoting Richard Conniff, in the pages of Audubon magazine (September, 1990): “Among environmentalists sharing two or three beers, the notion is quite common that if only some calamity could wipe out the entire human race, other species might once again have a chance.”

Environmental theorist Christopher Manes (writing under the nom-de-guerre Miss Ann Thropy): “If radical environmentalists were to invent a disease to bring human population back to ecological sanity, it would probably be something like AIDS.”

Environmental guru “Reverend” Thomas Berry, proclaims that “humans are an affliction of the world, its demonic presence. We are the violators of Earth’s most sacred aspects.”

A speaker at one of Earth First!’s little cult gatherings: “Optimal human population: zero.”

“Ours is an ecological perspective that views Earth as a community and recognizes such apparent enemies as ‘disease’ (e.g., malaria) and ‘pests’ (e.g., mosquitoes) not as manifestations of evil to be overcome but rather as vital and necessary components of a complex and vibrant biosphere … [We have] an antipathy to ‘progress’ and ‘technology.’ We can accept the pejoratives of ‘Luddite’ and ‘Neanderthal’ with pride…. There is no hope for reform of industrial empire…. We humans have become a disease: the Humanpox” (Dave Foreman, past head of Earth First!)

“Human happiness [is] not as important as a wild and healthy planet. I know social scientists who remind me that people are part of nature, but it isn’t true. Somewhere along the line we … became a cancer. We have become a plague upon ourselves and upon the Earth…. Until such time as Homo Sapiens should decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along.” (Biologist David Graber, “Mother Nature as a Hothouse Flower” Los Angles Times Book Review).

“The ending of the human epoch on Earth would most likely be greeted with a hearty ‘Good riddance!’”(Paul Taylor, “Respect for Nature: A Theory of Environmental Ethics”).

“If we don’t overthrow capitalism, we don’t have a chance of saving the world ecologically. I think it is possible to have an ecologically sound society under socialism. I don’t think it is possible under capitalism” (Judi Bari, of Earth First!).

“Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?” (Maurice Strong, Earth Summit 91).

David Brower, former head of the Sierra Club and founder of Friends of the Earth, calls for developers to be “shot with tranquilizer guns.”

Why?

“Human suffering is much less important than the suffering of the planet,” he explains.

Also from David Brower, Executive Director of the socialist Sierra Club: “The goal now is a socialist, redistributionist society, which is nature’s proper steward and society’s only hope.”

Quoting the Green Party’s first Presidential candidate Barry Commoner:

“Nothing less than a change in the political and social system, including revision of the Constitution, is necessary to save the country from destroying the natural environment…. Capitalism is the earth’s number one enemy.”

From Barry Commoner again:

“Environmental pollution is a sign of major incompatibility between our system of production and the environmental system that supports it. [The socialist way is better because] the theory of socialist economics does not appear to require that growth should continue indefinitely.”

So much for your unalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Indeed:

“Individual rights will have to take a back seat to the collective” (Harvey Ruvin, International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives, Dade County Florida).

Sierra Club cofounder David Brower, pushing for his own brand of eugenics:

“Childbearing [should be] a punishable crime against society, unless the parents hold a government license. All potential parents [should be] required to use contraceptive chemicals, the government issuing antidotes to citizens chosen for childbearing.”

That, if you don’t know, is limited government environmentalist style.

“There’s nothing wrong with being a terrorist, as long as you win. Then you write history” (Sierra Club board member Paul Watson).

Again from Paul Watson, writing in that propaganda rag Earth First! Journal: “Right now we’re in the early stages of World War III…. It’s the war to save the planet. The environmental movement doesn’t have many deserters and has a high level of recruitment. Eventually there will be open war.”

And:

“By every means necessary we will bring this and every other empire down! Mutiny and sabotage in defense of Mother Earth!”

And so on.

But, Ray, this is just the extremist fringe; these folks do not represent the true spirit of the environmental movement, as a reader of this website once told me.

Uh-huh. I suggest you keep telling yourself that so that you don’t have to confront the totality of the philosophy you’ve accepted.

And now there’s this:

UN document would give ‘Mother Earth’ same rights as humans:

UNITED NATIONS — Bolivia will this month table a draft United Nations treaty giving “Mother Earth” the same rights as humans — having just passed a domestic law that does the same for bugs, trees and all other natural things in the South American country.

The bid aims to have the UN recognize the Earth as a living entity that humans have sought to “dominate and exploit” — to the point that the “well-being and existence of many beings” is now threatened.

The wording may yet evolve, but the general structure is meant to mirror Bolivia’s Law of the Rights of Mother Earth, which Bolivian President Evo Morales enacted in January.

That document speaks of the country’s natural resources as “blessings,” and grants the Earth a series of specific rights that include rights to life, water and clean air; the right to repair livelihoods affected by human activities; and the right to be free from pollution.

It also establishes a Ministry of Mother Earth, and provides the planet with an ombudsman whose job is to hear nature’s complaints as voiced by activist and other groups, including the state.

“If you want to have balance, and you think that the only (entities) who have rights are humans or companies, then how can you reach balance?” Pablo Salon, Bolivia’s ambassador to the UN, told Postmedia News. “But if you recognize that nature too has rights, and (if you provide) legal forms to protect and preserve those rights, then you can achieve balance.”

The application of the law appears destined to pose new challenges for companies operating in the country, which is rich in natural resources, including natural gas and lithium, but remains one of the poorest in Latin America.

Read the full article here.

This, what you just read above, is merely the logical elaboration of the mainstream environmental philosophy, and, among many, many other things, it demonstrates a profound and fatal misunderstanding of the concept of rights, which by definition are compossible.

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Environmental Propaganda And The 10:10 No Pressure Campaign

As I’ve often said, environmentalism as a political philosophy is a cult of death, the highroad to hell, truly neo-Marxism at its blackest. For all those who have so stridently claimed that my criticisms are unjust, that they are divorced from reality and wildly exaggerated, I offer you this latest inanity from the 10:10 propaganda machine:


And here’s another one from the World Wildlife Fund.

More on the matter from Ed Driscoll’s James Delingpole and also this thorough article.

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The Great Outdoors Initiative

Not quite ten years ago, in May of 2001, Robert Tracinski wrote the following:

Past regulations have been imposed in the same manner that the new, less-restrictive process is being adopted: by executive-branch decree. The result of those decrees over the past three decades has been a vast environmentalist land grab, with millions of acres of land sealed off from logging, mining, grazing and even recreation. This is a basic technique used by the Left to achieve through the regulatory agencies what they could not achieve in an open vote. The technique is to introduce legislation to achieve some vague, positive-sounding generality, such as “worker safety” or “environmental protection” – things no politician will want to go on record voting against….

Consider that federal regulatory agencies make thousands of rulings each year, adding about 80,000 pages annually to the Federal Register. Do you think Congress can exercise “oversight” by debating all 80,000 pages of these regulations? Do you think the president, his advisors and his cabinet officers can consider and personally approve all of these decrees?

Of course not.

And the very process which Robert Tracinski describes above, far from diminishing, has suddenly accelerated. To wit:

On April 16th, 2010, Barack Obama released a so-called Presidential Memorandum, which he and his clownish administration termed “A 21st Century Strategy for America’s Great Outdoors.” Did you hear about it? You’re not alone. In fact, that’s part of the point: legislation by stealth.

Quoting Michelle Malkin:

Across the country, White House officials have been meeting quietly with environmental groups to map out government plans for acquiring untold millions of acres of both public and private land. It’s another stealthy power grab through executive order that promises to radically transform the American way of life….

Take my home state of Colorado. The Obama administration is considering locking up some 380,000 acres of Bureau of Land Management land and private land in Colorado under the 1906 Antiquities Act. The Vermillion Basin and the Alpine Triangle would be shut off to mining, hunting, grazing, oil and gas development and recreational activities. Alan Foutz, president of the Colorado Farm Bureau, blasted the administration’s meddling: “Deer and elk populations are thriving, and we in Colorado don’t need help from the federal government in order to manage them effectively.”

The bureaucrats behind Obama’s “Great Outdoors Initiative” plan on wrapping up their public comment solicitation by November 15. The initiative’s taxpayer-funded website has been dominated by left-wing environmental activists proposing human population reduction, private property confiscation, and gun bans, hunting bans and vehicle bans in national parks.

Make no mistake: this issue is entirely about private property, which is the crux of freedom, and which the religion of environmentalism explicitly seeks to do away with.

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The Truth About Sierra Club

Sierra Club is the oldest environmental group in America. It was founded in 1892 by a Scottish immigrant named John Muir, whose stated goal was “to make the mountains glad.” In many ways, that puerile policy compendiates perfectly the essence of Sierra Club.

Among other things, John Muir was an unapologetic racist, writing in 1894 that the Indians of Yosemite Valley were “mostly ugly, and some of them altogether hideous. [They] seemed to have no right place in the landscape,” and they disturbed his “solemn calm.” Sierra Club has never successfully shed its elitist roots — not, let it be noted, that it really cares to. Accordingly, their website has this resolution:

“State and federal laws should be changed to encourage small families and discourage large families.”

Government bureaucrats, in other words, should tell us how many children we are allowed to have — as they do in Communist China, for instance.

Sierra Club cofounder David Brower advocates eugenics, of a milder sort:

“Childbearing [should be] a punishable crime against society, unless the parents hold a government license… All potential parents [should be] required to use contraceptive chemicals, the government issuing antidotes to citizens chosen for childbearing.”

Sierra Club also calls for “a moratorium on the planting of all genetically engineered crops and the release of all genetically engineered organisms (GEOs) into the environment, including those now approved.”

Why?

“All technology should be assumed guilty until proven innocent,” says Brower.

This is also known as the precautionary principle.

In addition to many other things, the precautionary principle assumes that an elite group of centralized planners are qualified to determine for the rest of us whether something is technologically guilty or innocent. As you would perhaps guess, Sierra is only too happy to assume that elitist role:

“We call for acting in accordance with the precautionary principle … we call for a moratorium on the planting of all genetically engineered crops,” reads Sierra’s official policy on agricultural biotechnology.

Dr. Robert Paarlberg, however, notes that Sierra Club and other environmental groups “argue that powerful new technologies should be kept under wraps until tested for unexpected or unknown risks as well. Never mind that testing for something unknown is logically impossible (the only way to avoid a completely unknown risk is never to do anything for the first time).”

Technophobe and Sierra sympathizer Martin Teitel, former head of Responsible Genetics, puts it this way: “Politically, it’s difficult for me to go around saying that I want to shut this science down, so it’s safer for me to say something like, ‘It needs to be done safely before releasing it.’” He adds, correctly: [”The precautionary principle] means they don’t get to do it. Period.”

The precautionary principle was summed up nicely by Dr. Henry Miller, formerly of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA): “For fear that something harmful may possibly arise, do nothing.”

Technophobia, however, is not Sierra’s only motivation:

In 2002, the Broward Sierra Newsletter spoke of “a vegetarian lifestyle as the way to counter the abuse animals endure to feed a hungry and growing global population.” The newsletter plugged PETA and their message that meat-eating in general, and livestock operations in particular, are a cause of world hunger and animal abuse. Sierra Club chapters in New York and Michigan promote the “Vegetarian Starter Kit” distributed by the misnamed Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (a PETA front group), as a way to fight “corporate greed.”
And quoting Sierra Club’s board-of-director executive Lisa Renstrom: “The Club could begin to include animal rights positions in decades to come as members and the American public acknowledge the impact of our high animal protein diet on sustainability. [Sierra Club’s] sustainable consumption committee [issued a report in 2000 that listed] eating less meat as a Priority Action for American Consumers.”

Sierra’s ultimate goal here?

“Stronger ties with vegetarian organizations,” says Sierra Club committee leader Joan Zacharias.

Robert W. Tracinski had Sierra partly in mind when he wrote the following:

Past regulations have been imposed in the same manner that the new, less-restrictive process is being adopted: by executive-branch decree. The result of those decrees over the past three decades has been a vast environmentalist land grab, with millions of acres of land sealed off from logging, mining, grazing and even recreation. This is a basic technique used by the Left to achieve through the regulatory agencies what they could not achieve in an open vote. The technique is to introduce legislation to achieve some vague, positive-sounding generality, such as “worker safety” or “environmental protection” – things no politician will want to go on record voting against…

Consider that federal regulatory agencies make thousands of rulings each year, adding about 80,000 pages annually to the Federal Register. Do you think Congress can exercise “oversight” by debating all 80,000 pages of these regulations? Do you think the president, his advisors and his cabinet officers can consider and personally approve all of these decrees?
Most environmentalists embrace this goal, but few dare to admit it openly – so they peddle a variety of ruses to hide their meaning, ranging from “sustainable development” to “shrinkth,” a term suggested by the editor of Earth Island Journal as a less negative-sounding “antonym for growth.”

Of course, no discussion of Sierra Club would be complete without at least a cursory mention of the spotted owl. Author Bonner Cohen, in The Green Wave, says this: “[The spotted owl campaign] was brilliantly orchestrated and thoroughly dishonest.” He goes on to cite the now-infamous words of an attorney with the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund named Andy Stahl:

“The spotted owl is the species of choice to act as a surrogate for old growth protection. And I’ve often thought that thank goodness the spotted owl evolved in the Northwest, for if it hadn’t, we’d have to genetically engineer it.”

The results of this campaign: from 1988 to 1993 timber harvest in the Northwest fell by 80 percent. The Mexican spotted owl in New Mexico and Colorado came next, and President Bill Clinton quickly deemed 4.6 million acres of forest “critical habitat.” Thus, over “three thousand timber-related jobs were lost” (Wall Street Journal, October 2005). In addition to that, the fauna and flora of these wilderness areas were devastated by forest fires that raged because of the lack of logging. There was also, of course, the millions and millions of dollars in human property loss because of these forest fires, but that’s quibbling.

Finally, the leftwing lovefest with Castro’s communist Cuba has for decades continued more or less unabated among elitist in this country, and socialist Sierra Club does nothing to break with this venerable tradition. Says Club president Jennifer Ferenstein:

Faced with challenges, Cubans have proven to be survivors. With a meat shortage in the city, they’ve turned to raising guinea pigs in cramped urban backyards. When rural farms couldn’t provide enough food to Havana due to the lack of refrigerated transport as much as production problems, the government encouraged the cultivation of fruit and vegetable gardens in Havana’s abandoned lots. When pesticides became unavailable following the collapse of the USSR, worm bins and organic gardening were celebrated. I will never forget my trip to Cuba, the beauty of the landscape, the passion of the people for baseball, and above all, the fragility of an island country struggling to improve its quality of life in a sustainable manner.

As if these poor people have any choice concerning which autocratic dictator they live under. As if there have not been untold thousands who have died on innertubes trying make it ninety miles across shark-infested oceans just to get out of that country she finds so romantic, and into the brutal U.S. of A, where she herself lives in complete comfort. As if the millions of innocents murdered and imprisoned under Castro’s bloody hand are no real big deal.

We are not surprised, therefore, to hear this same Sierra Club woman telling, in 2003, Range magazine:

“I’m a big proponent of bio-regionalism. The closer you can live off the land and the products you can use, the better off we all are … Fact is, I think people in Montana can get along without strawberries in December.”

But what of those people who want to actually grow strawberries in December and then sell them to people in Montana?

According to this woman, they shouldn’t be allowed to.

That is just a glimpse of the socialist agenda of Sierra Club.

There’s also, of course, the billions of dollars that Sierra Club has raked in with its bandwagon babble, a partial listing of which runs thus:

In 2002, the Sierra Club reported $23,619,830 in revenues, and disclosed $107,733,974 worth of assets to the IRS. Among its financial supporters are the Bauman Family Foundation; the Beldon Fund; the Compton Foundation; the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation; the Ford Foundation; the Scherman Foundation; the Bullitt Foundation, the Energy Foundation, the Foundation for Deep Ecology, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the Joyce Foundation, the Blue Moon Fund; the Morris and Gwendolyn Cafritz Foundation; the J.M. Kaplan Fund, Pew Charitable Trusts, the Nathan Cummings Foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Turner Foundation, and many more (Discoverthnetworks.org).

Sierra Club, ladies and gentleman, friends of the earth.

But with friends like that, we must obviously ask ourselves: who needs friends?

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Environmentalism: Cult Of Death


The following is excerpted from Chapter 10 of my book.

Environmentalism, with its attendant army of politicos all armed to the teeth with environmental laws, is, let us make no mistake, the highroad to hell.

Before going all the way green, I urge you to take a longer look into exactly what horse you’re backing here: it may well turn out to be a horse of an entirely different color than you think.

Environmentalism is a philosophy that upholds a profound hatred of humankind:

“Human beings, as a species, have no more value than slugs” (John Davis, editor of Earth First! Journal).

“Mankind is a cancer; we’re the biggest blight on the face of the earth” (president of PETA and environmental activist Ingrid Newkirk).

“If you haven’t given voluntary human extinction much thought before, the idea of a world with no people in it may seem strange. But, if you give it a chance, I think you might agree that the extinction of Homo Sapiens would mean survival for millions, if not billions, of Earth-dwelling species…. Phasing out the human race will solve every problem on earth, social and environmental” (Ibid).

Quoting Richard Conniff, in the pages of Audubon magazine (September, 1990): “Among environmentalists sharing two or three beers, the notion is quite common that if only some calamity could wipe out the entire human race, other species might once again have a chance.”

Environmental theorist Christopher Manes (writing under the nom-de-guerre Miss Ann Thropy): “If radical environmentalists were to invent a disease to bring human population back to ecological sanity, it would probably be something like AIDS.”

Environmental guru “Reverend” Thomas Berry, proclaims that “humans are an affliction of the world, its demonic presence. We are the violators of Earth’s most sacred aspects.”

A speaker at one of Earth First!’s little cult gatherings: “Optimal human population: zero.”

“Ours is an ecological perspective that views Earth as a community and recognizes such apparent enemies as ‘disease’ (e.g., malaria) and ‘pests’ (e.g., mosquitoes) not as manifestations of evil to be overcome but rather as vital and necessary components of a complex and vibrant biosphere … [We have] an antipathy to ‘progress’ and ‘technology.’ We can accept the pejoratives of ‘Luddite’ and ‘Neanderthal’ with pride…. There is no hope for reform of industrial empire…. We humans have become a disease: the Humanpox” (Dave Foreman, past head of Earth First!)

“Human happiness [is] not as important as a wild and healthy planet. I know social scientists who remind me that people are part of nature, but it isn’t true. Somewhere along the line we … became a cancer. We have become a plague upon ourselves and upon the Earth…. Until such time as Homo Sapiens should decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along.” (Biologist David Graber, “Mother Nature as a Hothouse Flower” Los Angles Times Book Review).

“The ending of the human epoch on Earth would most likely be greeted with a hearty ‘Good riddance!'”(Paul Taylor, “Respect for Nature: A Theory of Environmental Ethics”).

“If we don’t overthrow capitalism, we don’t have a chance of saving the world ecologically. I think it is possible to have an ecologically sound society under socialism. I don’t think it is possible under capitalism” (Judi Bari, of Earth First!).

“Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?” (Maurice Strong, Earth Summit 91).

David Brower, former head of the Sierra Club and founder of Friends of the Earth, calls for developers to be “shot with tranquilizer guns.”

Why?

“Human suffering is much less important than the suffering of the planet,” he explains.

Also from the socialist Sierra Club: “The goal now is a socialist, redistributionist society, which is nature’s proper steward and society’s only hope.”

Quoting the Green Party’s first Presidential candidate Barry Commoner:

“Nothing less than a change in the political and social system, including revision of the Constitution, is necessary to save the country from destroying the natural environment…. Capitalism is the earth’s number one enemy.”

From Barry Commoner again:

“Environmental pollution is a sign of major incompatibility between our system of production and the environmental system that supports it. [The socialist way is better because] the theory of socialist economics does not appear to require that growth should continue indefinitely.”

So much for your unalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Indeed:

“Individual rights will have to take a back seat to the collective” (Harvey Ruvin, International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives, Dade County Florida).

Sierra Club cofounder David Brower, pushing for his own brand of eugenics:

“Childbearing [should be] a punishable crime against society, unless the parents hold a government license. All potential parents [should be] required to use contraceptive chemicals, the government issuing antidotes to citizens chosen for childbearing.”

That, if you don’t know, is limited government environmentalist style.

“There’s nothing wrong with being a terrorist, as long as you win. Then you write history” (Sierra Club board member Paul Watson).

Again from Paul Watson, writing in that propaganda rag Earth First! Journal: “Right now we’re in the early stages of World War III…. It’s the war to save the planet. The environmental movement doesn’t have many deserters and has a high level of recruitment. Eventually there will be open war.”

And:

“By every means necessary we will bring this and every other empire down! Mutiny and sabotage in defense of Mother Earth!”

Lisa Force, another Sierra Club board member and quondam coordinator of the Center for Biological Diversity, advocates “prying ranchers and their livestock from federal lands. In 2000 and 2003, [Sierra] sued the U.S. Department of the Interior to force ranching families out of the Mojave National Preserve. These ranchers actually owned grazing rights to the preserve; some families had been raising cattle there for over a century. No matter. Using the Endangered Species Act and citing the supposed loss of ‘endangered tortoise habitat,’ the Club was able to force the ranchers out” (quoted from Navigator magazine).

It is a sad fact for environmentalists that in free societies, humans are allowed to trade freely.

Among other things, the right to private property means: that which you produce is yours by right.

Private property is the crux of freedom: you cannot, in any meaningful sense, be said to be free if you are not allowed to use the things that you own, including those things necessary to sustain your life. Everything you need to know about a political ideology is contained in its attitude toward property.

It comes as no surprise therefore to learn that “private property,” in the words of one environmental group, “is just a sacred cow” (Greater Yellowstone Report, Greater Yellowstone Coalition.)

That is also known as socialism.

In 1990, a man named Benjamin Cone Jr. inherited 7,200 acres of land in Pender County, North Carolina. He proceeded to plant chuffa and rye for wild turkeys; he conducted controlled burns on his property to improve the habitat for deer and quail. And he succeeded: in no time, that habitat flourished. Inadvertently, however, he attracted a number of red-cockaded woodpeckers, a species listed as endangered. He was warned by a certain governmental agency that, on threat of imprisonment or stiff fines, he was not allowed to disturb any of these trees, which were all on his property. This put 1,560 acres of his own land off-limits to him, the owner. In response, Benjamin Cone Jr. began clear-cutting the rest of his land, saying: “I cannot afford to let those woodpeckers take over the rest of my property. I’m going to start massive clear-cutting.” (Richard L. Stroup, Eco-nomics p. 56-57.)

Socialist Eric Schlosser, author of the embarrassing Fast Food Nation, makes no secret of his statist agenda. As Doctor Thomas DiLorenzo points out, Schlosser lauds the “scientific socialists” (a generic term coined by comrade V.I. Lenin) and everything they stand for: government intervention and bureaucracy, public works, job-destroying minimum wage laws, OSHA regulations, food regulations, regulatory agencies to control ranching, farming, and supermarkets, bans on advertising and much more. Only then, he says, will that great day come when restaurants exclusively sell “free-range, organic, grass-fed hamburgers” (Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal).

All of which is simply by way of saying that individual consumers should not be allowed to choose what we want to eat, and that the supply of free-range hamburgers should not be determined by demand. Rather, by law, government bureaucrats must do this for us, regardless of whether we personally want to eat organic, grass-fed beef.

Colorado congressman Scott McInnis confessed that four firefighters burned to death in Washington state because bureaucrats took 10 hours to approve a water drop. The reason: using local river water is prohibited by the Endangered Species Act, on the grounds that it may threaten a certain kind of trout.

Further proof of the Sierra’s hatred of humanity can be found in their 1995 attempt to block an Animas River water diversion project, which project was designed to bring water to Durango and the nearby Ute Indian Reservation.

Dams and irrigation are often life-and-death matters in the arid west, a fact of which Sierra is well aware. Thus, after successfully getting the project slashed by more than 70 percent, thereby depriving the Ute Reservation of much-needed water, the Sierra Club lawyers went for the jugular: they demanded the project be cut still more.

Fortunately for the rest of us, they overplayed their hand.

Their shady methods and motives prompted the following quote from Senator Ben Nighthorse Campbell:

“The enviros have never been interested in a compromise. They just simply want to stop development and growth. And the way you do that in the West is to stop water.”

From a chairwoman of the Ute Indian tribe: “The environmentalists don’t seem to care how we live.”

Greenpeace is worldwide the largest and wealthiest environmental group. Of their co-founder Dave McTaggart, fellow co-founder Paul Watson said this:

“The secret to David McTaggart’s success is the secret to Greenpeace’s success: It doesn’t matter what is true, it only matters what people believe is true. You are what the media define you to be. Greenpeace became a myth, and a myth-generating machine.”

And since rather than addressing the actual data, environmentalists believe that citing the source of funding is the only argument one ever needs to refute a counterargument, environmentalists should be extraordinarily persuaded by this very partial list of Greenpeace’s funding.

Most people have no inkling that throughout Greenpeace’s tireless campaign against “Frakenfood” (i.e. biotech food – “Frakenfood” is a word coined by Greenpeace campaign director Charles Margulisto, who hates technology), the Third World has steadily perished from malnutrition and famine, as a direct result thereof.

Quoting Tanzania’s Doctor Michael Mbwille (of the non-profit Food Security Network):

“Greenpeace prints and circulates lies faster than the Code Red virus infected the world’s computers. If we were to apply Greenpeace’s scientifically illiterate standards [for soybeans] universally, there would be nothing left on our tables.”

(For an example of how to successfully expose Greenpeace’s lies, please read this relevant article.)

Candidly, I haven’t even begun.

And yet from this small sampling, you can probably get an idea of what an exceptionally gracious and non-politically motivated folk these environmentalists and environmental leaders are. Indeed, environmentalism is a benevolent and life-affirming philosophy, and the people who populate it are a kind, non-violent people, whose reasoning is sound and scrupulous, and who believe unreservedly in the individual’s inalienable right to life and property.

There is of course only one real problem with all that: these people are hypocrites, and environmentalism worships at the shrine of death.

The entire movement, replete, as it is, with its politicos and environmental politics, is not simply “wrong.” That would be too easy.

The environmental movement is criminal.

Reader, if you have even a vestigial love of freedom within you, you must denounce environmentalism with all your heart. You must see it for what it actually is: a statist philosophy of human-hatred and enslavement.

Environmentalism is neo-Marxism at its blackest.

More here on the toxicity of environmentalism.