"We need to return to a philosophy of reason and individualism, a philosophy that makes life on earth possible."
Earth Hour came and went. Media were filled with headlines about the coming end of the world because of climate change. However, a graver danger faces us. The danger is not from global warming, pollution, plastic, or the logging of rain forests, as environmentalists would have us believe. The danger to us is from environmentalism itself.
The fundamental goal of environmentalism is not clean air and clean water; rather, it is the demolition of technological/industrial civilization. Environmentalism’s goal is not the advancement of human health, human happiness, and human life; rather, it is a subhuman world where “nature” is worshipped like the temple of some primitive religion.
Environmentalists have made “development” an evil word. They inhibit or prohibit the development of offshore drilling, oil and gas, nuclear power—and every other practical form of energy. Housing, business, and jobs are sacrificed to endangered animals. Medical research is sacrificed to the “rights” of mice. Logging is sacrificed to the “rights” of trees. No instance of the progress that brought us out of the cave is safe from the onslaught of those “protecting” the environment from us, whom they consider as rapists and despoilers by our very essence.
Nature, they insist, has “intrinsic value,” to be revered for its own sake, irrespective of any benefit to us. As a consequence, we are to be prohibited from using nature for our own ends. Since nature supposedly has value and goodness in itself, any human action that changes the environment is necessarily immoral. Of course, environmentalists invoke the doctrine of intrinsic value not against wolves that eat sheep or beavers that gnaw trees; they invoke it only against us, only when we want something.
The ideal world of environmentalism is not 21st century Western civilization; it is the Garden of Eden, a world with no human intervention in nature, a world without innovation or change, a world without effort, a world where survival is somehow guaranteed, a world where we have mystically merged with the “environment.” Had the environmentalist mentality prevailed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, we would have had no Industrial Revolution, a situation that consistent environmentalists would cheer—at least those few who might have managed to survive without the life-saving benefits of modern science and technology.
The expressed goal of environmentalism is to prevent us from changing our environment, from intruding on nature. That is why environmentalism is fundamentally anti-human. Intrusion is necessary for human survival. Only by intrusion can we avoid pestilence and famine. Only by intrusion can we control our lives and project long-range goals. Intrusion improves the environment, if by “environment” one means our surroundings—the external material conditions of human life. Intrusion is a requirement of human nature. But in the environmentalists’ paean to “Nature,” human nature is omitted. For environmentalism, the “natural” world is a world without us. We have no legitimate needs, but trees, rivers, and bacteria somehow do.
They don’t mean it? Heed the words of the consistent environmentalists. “The ending of the human epoch on Earth,” writes philosopher Paul Taylor in Respect for Nature: A Theory of Environmental Ethics, “would most likely be greeted with a hearty ‘Good riddance!'” In a glowing review of Bill McKibben’s The End of Nature, biologist David M. Graber writes: “Human happiness [is] not as important as a wild and healthy planet… Until such time as Homo sapiens should decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along.” Such is the naked essence of environmentalism: It mourns the death of one whale or tree but actually welcomes the death of billions of people. A more malevolent, human-hating philosophy is unimaginable.
The guiding principle of environmentalism is self-sacrifice, the sacrifice of longer lives, healthier lives, more prosperous lives, more enjoyable lives—the sacrifice of human lives. But we, as individuals are not born in servitude. We have a moral right to live our own lives for our own sakes. We have no duty to sacrifice it to the needs of others and certainly not to the “needs” of the nonhuman.
To save us from environmentalism, what’s needed is not the appeasing, compromising approach of those who urge a “balance” between our needs and the “needs” of the environment. To save us requires the wholesale rejection of environmentalism as hatred of science, technology, progress, and human life. To save us requires the return to a philosophy of reason and individualism, a philosophy that makes life on earth possible.
