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Although environmentalists sometimes couch their policies in terms of improving the world for human benefit—if they didn’t they wouldn’t get much cultural or political traction—fundamentally the environmentalist movement regards humankind as a blight on the earth whose productive activities are inherently immoral.
To take just two of innumerable examples, David Attenborough calls for human population control on the grounds that humans “are a plague on the Earth,” while David Graber openly condemns placing human happiness and fecundity above “a wild and healthy planet” and hopes “for the right virus to come along” to solve the “problem.”
Most recently, the Guardian reports a “plan to engineer a shorter, smaller human race to cope with climate change.” No, this is not an Onion story. The idea comes from a 2012 paper published by the journal Ethics, Policy & Environment, “Human Engineering and Climate Change.” The paper’s authors are S. Matthew Liao, a bioethics professor at New York University, and Rebecca Roache and Anders Sandberg from the University of Oxford.
The paper suggests the following possibilities for human engineering:
- Stimulate “the immune system against common bovine proteins” so that people feel sick if they eat meat.
- Make smaller humans by such means as using genetic tests to “select shorter children,” giving children hormone therapies to make them smaller, and drugging pregnant women to make their fetuses smaller.
- “Enhance” people cognitively such that they want fewer children.
- Drug people so that they are inclined toward altruism and self-sacrifice.
It’s as though the paper’s authors read the dystopian novels of the 20th century such as Brave New World and adapted them as a blueprint for their environmentalist agenda. What these modern-day Comprachicos are calling for is the intentional contortion of the human body and the human mind to serve an environmentalist agenda.
Ah, but never fear: “[A]s we envisage it, human engineering would be a voluntary activity—possibly supported by incentives such as tax breaks or sponsored health care—rather than a coerced, mandatory activity.” So these authors regard as “voluntary” government forcibly seizing people’s wealth if they do not agree to malform themselves or malform their children for the sake of “the environment.” Of course, if the author’s goals are legitimate, there is no reason for government not to employ more direct forms of coercion as well.
The only proper standard of moral action or policy is the requirements of human life and happiness on earth. Environmentalists repudiate this fact and seek to throttle and deform human beings to conform to their grotesquely immoral “standard” of untouched nature. For decades environmentalists have repeatedly made clear that they are anti-humanity. People who love their lives should take environmentalists at their word and evaluate them and their programs accordingly.
Related:
- Robert Zubrin on the Scourge of Antihumanism
- Nuclear Energy: The Safe, Clean, Cost-Effective Alternative
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