TheAgitator.com
Environmentalism as Religion
Thursday, December 11th, 2003Fabulous speech by Michael Crichton from a few months ago.
Extremist religion kills, and as Crichton notes, we can probably credit post-Earth Day environmentalism with 10-30 million human deaths, the majority of those coming from third world malaria outbreaks that could have been prevented were it not for DDT hysteria.
For an example of the warped sense of risk assessment environmentalists have when it comes to public policy, check out this story detailing an alarmist UN report claiming that 150,000 people per year are dying of malaria because of global warming!
In other words, we need to completely reengineer our industrial, transportation, and energy systems because it’s possible that fossil fuels may warm the earth a bit, which might cause extra rain in some places, which can pool and give rise to mosquitos, which can carry malaria, which might kill an additional 150,000 people per year.
Meanwhile, millions of people already die of malaria every year — and virtually all of those deaths could probably have been prevented if we hadn’t rushed to ban DDT before really examining whether claims that it is a carcinogen were true.
Environmentalists have no problem calling for radical overhauls to industrial development (oblivious to the lives of the millions who are bettered by it) in order to prevent 150,000 theoretical deaths from malaria. But dare to suggest that we bring back DDT to save the millions we know die of the disease each year, and the greens scream about thinning eggshells and bogus claims of cancer.
I’ve been told that Crichton can be something of a kook at times. I’ve never really read him on matters of public policy before now. He seems fairly sane to me, at least in this speech.
Exactly.
And the sick part is my father actually works in teh Rachel Carson State Office Building in Harrisburg, PA.
Nice Radley.
You know, this really is no laughing matter. I mean, hell, I almost swallowed a pine cone the other day!
Freaking tree hugging hippies! It’s all their fault!
I hate environmentalists.
Didnâ??t uber-environmentalist Al Gore just endorse Howard Dean for president? Iâ??m surprised that blip didnâ??t show up on the radar in this Blog?
True, but . . .
The Cuyahoga River actually caught on fire not so long ago. The air in the Los Angeles basin was terrible. The amount of DDT being used was, in fact, causing avian mortality. Car makers claimed that the installation of catalytic converters would bankrupt the industry. and on, and on, and on.
The EPA organic statute, Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, FIFRA, RCRA, CERCLA, ESA . . . Industry claimed that each of these statutes would destroy the american economy. Yet somehow the rivers are cleaner, drinking water is cleaner, the air is cleaner, habitat is being protected, cradle-to-grave processing for toxic materials is expanding, all without the utter destruction of the american economy.
The extreme faction of the environmental movement is guilty as charged. BUT, that faction would have much less power if the anti-enviros hadn’t completely destroyed their own credibility by being wrong time after time about the costs of compliance.
rational use of pesticides, herbicides and antibiotics are in the interest of the world society as a whole. but the ag. community purports to be OUTRAGED when governments try to regulate farming practices. Is it any wonder, therefore, that the enviro. community finds that simply banning certain products is easier?
When the ag community is willing to talk about allowing regulation over the tons of raw sewage, pesticides, herbicides, and nutrients that they dump into the nation’s water systems, then the enviro community will silence its own extremists. until then, both sides bear the blame.
For a good read on what Chrichton is all about, I’d suggest everyone read his non-fiction memoir, Travels. Safe to say, I enjoyed it a whole lot more than any of his fiction.
My dad used to define religion as a “body of beliefs immune to evidence.” He always referred to socialists and environmentalists as religious kooks because they are two movements that behave like religions. Any questioning of the dogma is shouted down as heresy. Scaremongering is the main tool of the trade because you have to freak people out about the apocalypse to come, or else they won’t feel the need to join up. Villification of your opponents is necessary in order to induce an emotionally-based hatred of them among your followers, which has the effect of suppressing any real independent thought.
This is largely why any conversation with an environmentalist or socialist contains almost no real facts and instead closely resembles a conversation you might have with a Jehovah’s Witness or Mormon missionary.
Excellent speech. He said everything I was thinking, and more, and has facts to back it up.
The effort to label everyone concerned with environmental issues as an “Environmental Wacko” is akin to likening all anti-aboriton supporters to abortion doctor assasins.
Both efforts leave a detestable taste in my mouth.
1. FDL raises a real good point… both sides in the debate must be held to high standards of scientific accuracy
2. DougB, I’m not sure who you’re alluding to, but Crichton is himself clearly concerned with the environment, so I don’t think he’s trying to ‘label everyone concerned with environmental issues as an “Environmental Wacko”‘
Anyhoo. It was a great speech, I thought–much better than his crappy books. You could pretty much make the same speech about economics, as well: there is an enormous religious/irrational element to a lot of people’s ideas on economic policy.
Actually, I was referring to earlier comments and others attempting to lump Crichton in with all “Environmental Wackos.”
Ok, so since you hate Environmentalists, you clearly don’t care about our planet. I think you Anti-treehuger Conservatives should all go to the moon and destroy it instead of the planet we live on!
First of all, if by “our planet” you mean wilderness, as opposed to areas populated by humans, then there is no reason to suppose why it DOES have intrinsic value, or why humans should have a spiritual duty to it (a pagan notion, I might add). A lot of environmentalists ultimately care nothing about the condition of the human race, but are preoccupied by what they refer to as the “environment.” To them, the human race is a virus, an intrusion defiling sacred wilderness. David M. Graber, a research biologist in his Los Angeles Times book review of Bill McKibben’s “The End of Nature”, denounced the human race, hoping for the “right virus” to come along and wipe humanity out. The founder of Sierra Club (the leading and most respectable environmental organization), John Muir, was quoted approvingly by McKibben as wishing for alligators to be “blessed now and then with a mouthful of terror-stricken man by way of a dainty.” Besides the fact that leading environmental leaders are advocating the death of billions of humans, their romantic notion of nature is absurd (as Crichton points out). If anything, the industrial revolution has improved nature vastly. One of the principle environmental myths is that the bad outweighs the good with regards to air pollution; but they completely disregard the total elimination of tuberculosis and the radical reduction of pneumonia. Life expectancy doubled (as a result of better living conditions and medical innovations, all a product of the industrial revolution), the air condition in post-industrial countries like the United States was far better than it has ever been when the Industrial Revolution was still blooming; electricity and new forms of energy (as a result of technological and scientific advances) are being used more and more frequently. Water has never been more drinkable, and cars are a huge improvement over horses, which originally caused a huge pollution problem with vast droppings of manure and urine. In you want to find filth and squalor, look no further than a pre-industrial third world country. The ultimate goal of environmentalism is the halting of all economic and scientific progress -but so what, environmentalists say; humanity can make do without. But this assumption is based on ignorance. If we forsake all forms of energy (and indeed all ‘intrusion’ on nature), then economic progress will not be halted; it will collapse into a downward tailspin. A population of 300 million Americans NEED that energy, and if you cut the supply off, the population and standard of life will likewise be strangled. The only 2 forms of energy environmentalists approve (solar and wind) of are utterly impractical; even if they weren’t, environmentalists would still find grounds to accuse them of disturbing the “ecological sanctity” (itself a contradiction in terms) of the Earth. I am not addressing the issue of global warming here; I don’t intend to. While environmentalist policies value kangaroo rats more than human lives, scientists don’t know for sure WHAT causes global warming (hint: it happens without human intervention anyway), so that means the casual environmentalist doesn’t either. For the environmentalist, nature is every BUT humans, so they are perfectly justified by murdering thousands of humans as opposed to one endangered bear. (PETA has already claimed that even if, hypothetically, a cure for AIDS was found in monkeys, they would allow millions of humans to die rather than subjecting even one monkey to be experimented upon.) The environmentalistâ??s maniacal hatred of industrial society (and all forms of human intervention for that matter) is rooted in a disdain for technology, for science, and for man’s mastery over nature.
Finally, calm yourself. No one has the intention of “destroying” the planet, itself an absurd notion. If humans do cause extinction it will be nothing like the Cambrian extinction that killed 50% of all the animals on earth. Extinctions far bigger than you can comprehend have happened in a perpetually transforming environment as a result of evolution for billions of years (like when plants first released poisonous oxygen as a waste product). Even if (say) global warming or ozone depletion happened on a global scale, life would still thrive (although admittedly not humans -environmentalists would be overjoyed). In any case, the planet ITSELF is not in danger and never was. Technology has improved the standard of life in industrial countries to a point that is unimaginable by the kings and emporers of old; you are warm in the winter, cool in the summer, have hot water all year round and public washrooms. If anything, technology has been improving environment to an unprecedented level, if by environment you mean surroundings, and not just the narrow definition of it environmentalists use.
Crichton answers Emmerich
As profiled on 20/20 last night (by one of my favorite TV journalists, John Stossel), Michael Crichton’s new book State of Fear expresses a healthy dose of skepticism about the global warming alarm being raised by environmentalists, as exemplified in…
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