There is a hostage drama ongoing in which a man–apparently an enviro nut–has invaded the Discovery Channel (of all places) to make demands. From the story:
Lee appears to have posted environmental and population-control demands online, saying humans are ruining the planet and that Discovery should develop programs to sound the alarm. “I want Discovery Communications to broadcast on their channels to the world their new program lineup and I want proof they are doing so. I want the new shows started by asking the public for inventive solution ideas to save the planet and the remaining wildlife on it,” the alleged manifesto reads, adding:”Nothing is more important than saving … the Lions, Tigers, Giraffes, Elephants, Froggies, Turtles, Apes, Raccoons, Beetles, Ants, Sharks, Bears, and, of course, the Squirrels. The humans? The planet does not need humans.”…Lee said he experienced an ‘‘awakening” when he watched former Vice President Al Gore’s environmental documentary ‘‘An Inconvenient Truth.”
I bring this up because we often hear legitimate advocacy in the public square (on a variety of issues) blamed for the violence committed by a nut or two who support that movement: In other words, some use the criminality of the rogue to smear and discredit one’s political/ideological opponents. But one nut does not define a movement and people who argue in the public square on behalf of controversial issues are not responsible for the actions taken by said nuts. Thus, Al Gore has zero responsibility for this terrorism, even though his movie is propaganda, just as technology skeptics have no responsibility for the Unabomber, or the pro life movement for the man who murdered the late term abortionist, Dr. Tiller.
However, when a group of ideologues organize for the specific purpose of engaging in terrorism/lawlessness as a tactic–such as the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) and the Earth Liberation Front (ELF)–that is a different matter altogether. In such cases, it is incumbent upon the movement leaders, in support of which the terrorism is being mounted, to unequivocally denounce such tactics and cooperate with authorities in bringing the responsible to justice. Silence or winking approval in such cases amounts to praise by faint or non-damnation. In that case, I believe some blame can fairly be laid at the movement’s doorstep.
But that is clearly not the case here. In viewing this situation, it appears to be the work of a lone nut and one nut does not a movement besmirch no matter how influenced he was by the movement’s advocacy. Or to put it another way, radical environmentalism is not to blame for this man’s radical acts.
Update: The Discovery Channel victims are safe and, alas, the gunman is dead. Again, it isn’t the fault of anti humanist radical environmentalism, to which he clearly subscribed, but (I suspect), mental illness.
September 1st, 2010 | 4:25 pm
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Vince Humphreys and Cynthia, Wesley J. Smith. Wesley J. Smith said: Radical Environmentalism Not to Blame For Radical Act of Environmentalist Nut » Secondhand Smoke | A First Things Blog http://t.co/J48LhlB [...]
September 1st, 2010 | 5:24 pm
Someone ought to tell this nut that one of the children he doesn’t want born may be slated to find a way to save any number of species from extinction. If his anti-birth plans go into effect, this child may be the very one whose birth is prevented, thus ensuring the extinction of the species that child would have grown up to save. If he cares about the animals so much, maybe he better back off on this no birth nonsense.
On a separate, but related note, back in 9 th grade we were taught about overpopulation, and how it was going to be standing room only on the planet; how an unsustainable world population was going to lead to a horible death for all of us, and ultimately human extinction. It sounded scary.
But back then, I didn’t know God. Now I do know God. If you don’t know there’s a God in heaven, who knows what He’s doing when He sends people to live on the earth, then it looks like there’s nothing higher than humans to control what happens on this planet. It’s easy to see how a person of that mindset would think that we better get it together fast, because if we don’t we’re doomed.
Now that I know God, I’m not worried about overpopuation anymore. The Lord knows what He’s doing when He sends people to live on this planet. He knows a lot beter than we do about who needs to be here, and what He plans for the work they’ll do.
September 1st, 2010 | 9:08 pm
Ceecee, God has allowed many species to overpopulate themselves into disaster, and those species didn’t have the gift of free will. Because we do, we are responsible for our own well-being. We’ve been given all the tools we need to do so, and to mindlessly overpopulate would be to squander our gifts. Overpopulation is not God’s doing, it’s ours.
September 2nd, 2010 | 12:19 am
Throughout history, the extant generations have always thought the the earth was teeming, filled to capacity, and unable to contain more people.
If you want to roll on your side laughing until your belly hurts, read the Church Father Tertullian’s thoughts on overpopulation from about 100 years after Christ. He talks about how “the population is much greater now than it was even a short while ago, and now all places are known, all the wilderness is settled and filled with human activity; thus there is no longer any more room for the number of people alive to grow very significantly without overburdening the entire world.” (Interesting sidenote – Tertullian used the fact that the number of people alive at the same time grew over the generations to disprove some of the Greek mystics/Gnostics who argued for a kind of reincarnation and recycling of souls.) (Double sidenote – bonus points for uninterrupted, consecutive sidenotes! – recycling of souls is the ultimate in wastefulness and inefficiency, most likely even worse for the environment than Big Coal.)
Well, Tertullian was/is much smarter than I will ever be, but using the very potent power of hindsight, we can see just how wrong he was.
I will submit the following thought/question, and then my opinion of the correct answer: To ask if anybody has the right to “reproduce at will” is to ask if you yourself have a right to exist.
Well? Do you?
And the answer to that is: What is human life? (Dangit! That’s another question! Fine, I’ll answer the first question…) If it’s just a slimy happenstance, a nihilist’s down-hill slalom across a thermodynamically-favorable energy landscape, then No, or more accurately, it doesn’t eff’ing matter. Yet if we are created, loved, en-souled and serve a Divine Purpose, then Yes.
September 2nd, 2010 | 9:57 am
Wesley, have radical environmentalits come out and condemned this? I got the news about Tiller on the golf course and couldn’t get done fast enough to get my press release out. We had people on the air in our region that night disowning and condemening what happened even though we considered what he was doing evil, inhumane acts. We didn’t make excuses for the murderer despite what we thought of Tiller. That reaction happened all over the country. Have the radical environmentalists or the mainstream ones condemned this? Do they disown ELF, ALF etc? Have they actively taken them on like the pro-life movement did in the 90s when people were taking the pro-life cause into their own hands against the will of everyone in the movement?
September 2nd, 2010 | 10:57 am
Chris, we’ve expanded our population by taking over more habitat and improving our methods of growing and storing food so we can feed more people with fewer productive acres. All well and good, but can it go on forever?
You can find far more recent doom & gloom predictions than Tertullian, btw. They’re all based, to different degrees of accuracy, on food production vs. projected population growth at the time of writing. Things change and we’ve managed to stay ahead of the wave. We’ve done that by changing and adapting, and by NOT clinging to old methods, like, for instance, fossil fuels.
September 2nd, 2010 | 3:42 pm
Padraig,
It’s been a while. Good to see you’re still posting. You’re probably better read on the subject than myself, but I seem to remember that many of the “more recent” doom and gloom predictions have been spectacular both in the destruction, suffering, and death they foresaw, and how wrong they were. The most popular example in the last 40 years was of course “The Population Bomb” by the Stanford entomologist Paul Ehrlich. And you probably recall the famous bet he and current Science Adviser to President Obama, physicist John Holdren, made with the late economist Julian Simon back in the 1980s. Another absolute failure on the side of Team Malthus. [Both also subscribed to the "Global Cooling" theory and its associated prognostications of catastrophe in the mid 70s.]
Again, I’m no expert, but it would seem that their default assumption is that human population dynamics are similar to that of insects or other community-oriented animals. In assuming as much, they discount human intuition, and a major side effect of increased wealth and production: smaller families. The almost neutral or negative population replacement rates in North America and Europe are obvious examples of this.
(As a side note, it’s intriguing to me that most doom and gloomers in the general scientific community – of which I’m a member – rarely get called out for their mostly far-from-accurate predictions, whether it be regarding AGW, population control, or a combination.)
September 2nd, 2010 | 4:03 pm
Note that these nutjobs never, ever consider killing themselves to help save the planet. The cops have to do it for them.
September 2nd, 2010 | 5:21 pm
True, Jon, because they feel that THEY can use the earth’s resources and THEY have the right to be here. They just don’t think that the children you might have five years from now have those same rights.
September 3rd, 2010 | 10:16 am
Thanks Jon. I’m not particularly well-read in this area, haven’t even read “The Population Bomb,” mostly because this seems like common sense to me. Most species follow an eat-and-multiply-until-you-run-out-of-food strategy (locusts for example) and then their population crashes, then the survivors lay eggs and the cycle begins again. Since we as humans don’t particularly like population crashes, we have to be a tad more foresighted than grasshoppers. And to me, that’s about all there is to it.
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