“Save the ocean. Kill a person.”
When you think about the way “environmentalism” has grown over the past fifteen years (that I have been aware of, considering my old twenty-six years of age), it all boils down to that statement. One of the reasons I despise the most vocal—squeaky wheels—of the environmental movement is because the gloom and doom with which they pollute their social circles is based on a very basic hatred of humanity.
Let us take, for example, the L.A. Times series called Altered Oceans. For your convenience here are links to the articles in the series: A Primeval Tide of Toxins, Sentinels Under Attack, Dark Tides, Ill Winds, A Plague of Plastic Chokes the Seas, and A Chemical Imbalance. Consider, however, after reading them all, that even this series isn’t as misanthropic as most of the bile that you would hear from some of usual suspects. One of the reasons I actually like Altered Oceans is that while it clearly details the effects of man on the environment and the growing chain reaction of these events, it does not take away the hope that it is still us who have the responsibility to start setting things right.
It is an irony that the very people who are creative enough to bring us ManBearPig theories can take something like this and use it as further proof that the only solution to human impact on the environment is the uncreative proposal of total removal of humanity from the planet, which Dean Esmay wrote about more than a year ago. This for me is what saddens me about this so-called “environmental awareness:” it offers nothing useful other than guilt for one’s own existence. I know I won’t kill myself in service of the environment. Whom do you know would do such a thing?
Even from a Biblical perspective of reasoning, humanity’s stewardship of the Earth never required our disappearance. Excuse me for superficially talking about this topic from a Christian point of view, but G-d made this world for us. He let the first man name the creatures of the Earth, which, if I recall a little of what I have learned going to school in Catholic institutions, is the basically the logical start to our dominion of the rest of creation.
Take away any Christian or other religious arguments out, and simply ask yourself the usual question: if a tree falls in the forest, and nobody is there to hear it, does it make a sound? If a rose is in full bloom and no one is there to appreciate it, is it still beautiful? We are the only species whose cognitive ability adds value to all of creation based on more than simply fulfilling our needs. It is this same ability that has led us to brand snakes, sharks, and bats as “evil” in the past, to associate them with phantom imaginings and lead us to try to exterminate them. And yet it is also in us to realize our mistakes and actually stop doing what we have done before and help their populations heal.
If it is in our ability to help heal the environment, why do so many environmentalists simply want us to disappear? I long for the day when any environmentally oriented political proposal is not based on a strong misanthropic principle: one where, not despite of, but rather, by taking advantage of the way we grow as a species, we could responsibly care for the world around us.
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