Environmental Fraud and Fanaticism

Environmentalism on its face seems a worthy cause. Who doesn't like animals? Who doesn't want to preserve the beauty of the world around us?

As practiced, however, environmentalism has become a religion. Despite the fact that humans evolved from goo just like every other species of creature, plant, and microorganism (I say this for argument's sake, not from a closely held belief, mind you), we alone seem to attract the environmentalists' ire. All plants, animals, and microorganisms affect their environments, some with disastrous results for other species and their habitats. Yet environmentalists condemn only humans for "destructive" habits.

Environmentalists routinely value animals and even plants above the lives of mere humans. One example is the discouragement of use of DDT to end malaria in Africa because it might harm birds' eggs. While the harm to birds' eggs is debatable (junkscience, for example, says there is no connection between DDT and harmful thinning of birds' eggs), the number of dead and sickly Africans due to malaria is not. Yet they insist on continuing ineffective means for combating malaria, rather than condoning the use of the one thing that can save people from this wretched disease. Perhaps there is a reason that most environmentalists come from Europe and the U.S. where living conditions are so good that they need not fear this deadly and debilitating disease.

These fanatics will not only fudge data to get their way, but they will even create it if that's what it takes. John Stossel reported that in Washington State, government biologists, determined to prove that lynx lived in Washington, "nailed pieces of carpet soaked with catnip onto trees, hoping a lynx would rub up against them and leave some fur -- evidence of the lynx's existence in this particular area." Of course they found hairs on the carpet, and they sent samples to the lab which showed that they were in fact lynx hairs. This would be bad news indeed for ranchers and farmers in the area who could lose their land rights in favor of an threatened species. As it turns out, the biologists, those impartial proponents for Truth, had rigged the tests. "[T]he regulators went to a zoo, got hair samples from captive lynx, and sent those hairs to the lab to be tested. "

From "Religious Fanatics Terrorize American Farmers" by John Stossel:
Science-fiction author Robert A. Heinlein once wrote, "In declaring his love for a beaver dam (erected by beavers for beavers' purposes) and his hatred for dams erected by men (for the purposes of men) the 'Naturist' reveals his hatred for his own race -- i.e., his own self-hatred." The "Naturist" religion, which today we call "environmentalism," elevates every other form of life above human life.
This is madness.

Surely, we can and should take steps toward preserving the environment. In truth, we have been, and the environment is much cleaner than it was thirty years ago. That's a good thing. But when radicals for whom environmentalism is a religion attempt to destroy the Constitutional rights of American citizens and trample the inalienable rights to life of dying and sickly Africans, they've gone too far. The fraud and the fanaticism have to stop.

Related posts:
Some Good News on Earth Day
A Green in Support of Nuclear Energy?
Gore on the Importance of Over-representation of "Fact"