Committing Collective Suicide to Save the Environment

The radical environmental movement is crazy. I care about pollution and my wife and I have always grown our own vegetables, breastfed our children and recycled. But the environmental activists who are increasingly influential on government policy and who are infiltrating our school system are not focussed on common sense issues like recycling, breastfeeding and gardening. They have an anti-humanistic worldview and are pushing the culture of death.

They worship the Earth and believe that massive human sacrifice is necessary to honour the Earth Goddess. In fact, they believe (somewhat inconsistently, since they don't immediately commit suicide) that the human race should commit collective suicide in order to "save" the Earth from the impact of human activity. They talk about overpopulation and Global Warming in exactly the same apocalyptic terms as radicals in the 70's talked about overpopulation and worldwide famine. The predictions of one fifth of the world's population dying of starvation by the 80's didn't come true, so like the Jehovah's Witnesses they revised their end-times scenario and adopted Global Warming as their new mantra. But the goal remains the same: humans should die out so the earth can remain undisturbed and pure.

Paganism is not benign. To worship the earth is to make human beings merely a part of the ecosystem and it is to apply the "nature red in tooth and claw" amoralism to human beings. It is to reduce human beings to the level of animals, rather than understanding them as having been created in the image of God. And it is eventually to come to see the very existence of human culture as evil and in need of excising from the Earth. Environmental activists today like to clothe themselves in the robes of science, yet they are irrational, fanatical and anti-humanistic. They despise the Church and accuse Christians of all that is actually true of themselves; but Christians will defend the dignity and value of human life to the very end.

A case in point is this story from an environmental newsletter entitled: "Oregon State study says having fewer children is best way to reduce your carbon footprint." My comments are in [bold and brackets].
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,"Some people who are serious about wanting to reduce their "carbon footprint" on the Earth have one choice available to them that may yield a large long-term benefit - have one less child.

A recent study by statisticians at Oregon State University concluded that in the United States, the carbon legacy and greenhouse gas impact of an extra child is almost 20 times more important than some of the other environmentally sensitive practices people might employ their entire lives - things like driving a high mileage car, recycling, or using energy-efficient appliances and light bulbs. [Did it really take a study by university professors to come to the stunning new insight that more people consume more than fewer people? How could such an obvious truism be blown up into an actual scientific study? Is there any true science here? Or, could it be that this is an exercise in propoganda? Well, duh.]

The research also makes it clear that potential carbon impacts vary dramatically across countries. The average long-term carbon impact of a child born in the U.S. - along with all of its descendants - is more than 160 times the impact of a child born in Bangladesh. [This is true, but the obvious implications are not mentioned - that the real issue here is how we can change our lifestyles. Why is this not mentioned? Because people already born do not wish to change their high-consumption lifestyles. So the alternative to personal change is to continue the high consumption but agitate for fewer children so the high consumption lifestyle is sustainable - at least until we all die. The attraction of this radical environmental activism is that you and I can eat, drink and be merry and they next generation can be eliminated instead of us having to change.]

"In discussions about climate change, we tend to focus on the carbon emissions of an individual over his or her lifetime," said Paul Murtaugh, an OSU professor of statistics. "Those are important issues and it's essential that they should be considered. But an added challenge facing us is continuing population growth and increasing global consumption of resources."
In this debate, very little attention has been given to the overwhelming importance of reproductive choice, Murtaugh said. When an individual produces a child [strictly speaking: "individuals" do not and cannot produce children. It takes two. The individualism of this "movement" is never far below the surface.] - and that child potentially produces more descendants in the future - the effect on the environment can be many times the impact produced by a person during their lifetime. [Really! I wonder how many highly paid scientests it took and how many hard hours of slaving over computer models it took to come to that conclusion. Come on - nothing is being discovered here.]

Under current conditions in the U.S., for instance, each child ultimately adds about 9,441 metric tons of carbon dioxide to the carbon legacy of an average parent - about 5.7 times the lifetime emissions for which, on average, a person is responsible.

And even though some developing nations have much higher populations and rates of population growth than the U.S., their overall impact on the global equation is often reduced by shorter life spans and less consumption. The long-term impact of a child born to a family in China is less than one fifth the impact of a child born in the U.S., the study found. [So, maybe we should outsource baby-making to third world countries and stop doing it ourselves?]

As the developing world increases both its population and consumption levels, this may change. "China and India right now are steadily increasing their carbon emissions and industrial development, and other developing nations may also continue to increase as they seek higher standards of living," Murtaugh said. [Oops, looks like that would only be a temporary solution. Turns out that greed is a worldwide phenomenon. And here I thought that only white, male Westerners were greedy. Who knew?]

The study examined several scenarios of changing emission rates, the most aggressive of which was an 85 percent reduction in global carbon emissions between now and 2100. But emissions in Africa, which includes 34 of the 50 least developed countries in the world, are already more than twice that level.

The researchers make it clear they are not advocating government controls or intervention on population issues, but say they simply want to make people aware of the environmental consequences of their reproductive choices. [Ah, here is the point of the article. Why is there a felt need by the author of this article to deny this? Not wanting to come right out and advocate government control of fertility, the author nevertheless plants a seed. Maybe, if people can be sufficiently brainwashed and frightened, they can gradually be brought to support such measures. This article is part of that effort.]

"Many people are unaware of the power of exponential population growth," [Sounds like Francis Galton, Darwin's cousin in the 19th century. Apparently the message hasn't gotten through yet. The social Darwinism of the 19th century argued that helping the poor just facilitated out of control breeding and so the poor should be left to starve. We are so much more humanitarian today: we just abort them.] Murtaugh said. "Future growth amplifies the consequences of people's reproductive choices today, the same way that compound interest amplifies a bank balance." [You have got to stop of thinking of people as, well, people. You have to reduce them to inanimate objects or abstractions before you can build support for eugenics and fertility control.]

Murtaugh noted that their calculations are relevant to other environmental impacts besides carbon emissions - for example, the consumption of fresh water, which many feel is already in short supply." ["Many feel" - the scientific rigor just oozes out of this article!]
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Summary: This is radical environmental agiprop and should be understood as such. It is part of the dangerous movement to build support for the state control of human fertility and for the contraceptive mentality. It is anti-humanistic paganism dressed up in a lab coat.

Now a critic might say that this article does not advocate letting the human race die out, as the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement does. But the US is barely reproducing itself and Canada is far below replacement rate, as are 58 other countries in the world (so far). But the rules of propoganda requre that you not state your longterm goals in every mention of the strategy, especially when people might be startled by the extremism and start thinking for themselves. That is to be avoided at all costs. It is imperative that Christians and all people of good will practice recognizing this kind of propoganda for what it really is and speak up against it - because a lie repeated often enough without challenge will eventually be believed.