Rex Murphy asks: "Does Environmentalism rot the mind?"

The Great Rex Murphy has his say on the recent attempt to create a worldwide religion built on anti-Capitalism and the worship of Mother Earth in a piece entitled: "Excuse me sir, that cockroach has rights."

"Does environmentalism rot the mind? I am beginning to believe that the more feverish and agitated greens are suffering from a morbid condition. There is, it appears, no intellectual folly to which they are immune, no frenzied leap off the pier of reason they will not joyfully execute, in their reliably bizarre efforts to horrify the rest of us into supporting their cause.

It was only a few months ago that I read an endearing article entitled “Was Genghis Khan history’s greenest conqueror?” on something called The Mother Nature Network. The article noted the “widespread return of forests after a period of massive depopulation,” which arose, of course, thanks to Genghis Khan’s hordes slaughtering 40-million people. An upside to ethnic cleansing?

And just this week, Bolivia’s president, Eva Morales, hailed national legislation that would enshrine the “rights of Mother Nature” — human rights extended to earth itself. Pause to marvel at the powers of the Bolivian legislature. May we note that Morales is a James Cameron fan? I think we may."

After noting that the new law is described by the Bolivian vice-president as being based on "a resurgent indigenous Andean spiritual world view" Murphy comments dryly:

"Remember this the next time someone says that the science of global warming is “settled,” for many environmentalists are inspired not by science, but by spirituality — Andean and otherwise."

Then he really cranks up the rhetoric (you can tell he is having fun!) and writes:

"What does the new Bolivian law mean? It means that tics that suck the blood, the choking sulphur pits of volcanic vents, the indestructible cockroach, the arid desert wastes and the bleak frigid spaces of the planet’s poles — everything from the locusts that despoil, to the great mountain ranges, the earth and all that is in it, are to have … rights. (About the other planets, Morales is silent.)

With Macbeth, let us lament: “O judgment, thou art fled to brutish beasts, and men have lost their Reason.”

The proposal combines the decayed anti-capitalism of Marxism with a veritable litany of new-age twaddle and camp spiritualism — paganism in the age of bluetooth and Twitter. Yet it more than just inane. It is Orwellian, in that it would summon into being something called the Ministry of the Earth, which will provide our planet with an ombudsman, “whose job is to hear nature’s complaints as voiced by activist and other groups, including the state.”

Why can’t the old hag, Mother Earth I mean, get her own ombudsman? And shouldn’t that really be, in this context, ombudsperson? I notice, too, how the earth’s “complaints” are to be those voiced by activists and the state, an always convenient ventriloquism."

It is pleasant to mock such ridiculous nonsense in the name of reason and common sense, but the Orwellian element ought not be missed. People with a lot of power take all this twaddle very seriously and we ignore it at our peril.