Environmental Gurus Have a Change of Heart
Two propagators of the modernist environmental movement who had an enormous influence over a generation of hippies and their progeny are now realizing they may have overstepped and that their youthful ideology may have been irresponsible. James Lovelock, a former NASA scientist who published among other books The Vanishing Face of Gaia, and ecologist Dr. Patrick Moore, a former Greenpeace warrior, first member and president admit that they were alarmists and are currently speaking up calling the green agenda “meaningless green drivel” and “a green fantasy.”
What do these guys have to do with exurbia and “free-range humans”?
Since the early 1700s to today there have been socialists, secularists and atheists who admonished man as an unforgivable creature who if “left to his own devices, […] is wholly incapable of coexistence without formidable government control and regulation.”1 The uniquely American idea that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” is an affront to them.
John Locke, an English philosopher, was particularly despised by anti-humanists like Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels because of his beliefs that “the necessity of pursuing happiness [is] the foundation of liberty.”2 His views on the importance of the right to private property were intolerable to these men.
Locke declared in his work Two Treatises of Government
“that human happiness is directly linked to one’s personal property, and that property included tangible elements, such as land, natural resources, and material good, and , as well, the intangible elements of speech, thought, and beliefs.”3
Why would such thoughts be antagonistic to people like Marx, Engels, and later Edward Goldsmith, founder of The Ecologist? Because atheists are not guided by a supreme power; their alternative to a supreme deity is that certain men must rule over other men. In The World Turned Upside Down, Melanie Phillips explains,
“Whereas the religions of Judaism and Christianity place man at the center of Creation, the religion of ecology seeks to boot man out of Eden.”4
“Deep ecology—like its less extreme manifestation, environmentalism—is founded on the premise that the only thing wrong with the planet is the human race. The earth is important and has value; mankind merely corrupts and destroys it.”5
These anti-humans of yesterday and today place the value of man at the same level as all creatures including inanimate objects. Thus all creatures, alive or inert, have equal rights and deserve equal justice. They also proselytize that the human masses are incapable of managing earth’s natural resources and that all resources (including man himself) belongs to the collective.
In Chapter 1 of Eco-Tyranny, author Brian Sussman writes, “Marx was incapable of envisioning prosperity in a positive light, and his followers are beset with that same problem today, in fact, in Das Kapital, Marx sounds like a modern-day environmental activist:
“All progress in capitalistic agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the laborer, but of robbing the soil; all progress in increasing the fertility of the soil for a given time, is a progress towards ruining the lasting sources of that fertility. The more a country starts its development on the foundation of modern industry, like the United States, for example, the more rapid is this process of destruction.”” ~Karl Marx6
In one of the sections of Chapter 1 called Marx Goes Green, Sussman ends his thoughts with this statement.
“Today’s followers of Marx have not changed. They continue to perceive capitalism as unjust, the use of natural resources for profit immoral, and the human population something that must be controlled.”7
The current trend of sustainable development is directly related to the anti-humanist notion that man—whose main distinguishing characteristic from all other creatures is reason—does not have the capability to manage his property which includes his thoughts, beliefs, speech, and his land, natural resources and material goods. Only through a centralized government with the power to regulate the masses will the earth survive man’s occupation.
When influential socialists, environmentalists and eco-scientists like Marx, Engels, Goldsmith, Ehrlich, Lovelock, Moore and many others cast their beliefs into the pond of human ideology, the ripple effect is significant. The consequences are felt throughout our culture and have a direct effect on us. Unbelievably, living on and off of the land we own, has been declared unsustainable and we are now subjected to governance by man rather than by our Divine Creator—God.
A change of heart by these gurus could do us all a lot of good.
Below is a synopsis of each man’s journey. [Read more on www.exurbiachronicles.com]
