We Need Mass Pandemic to Save the Planet!
I give too little attention here at Secondhand Smoke to the anti-human minions of the Deep Ecology movement. Deep ecologists view human beings as vermin that afflict the earth, which many believe is a living entity called Gaia. This story illustrates the twisted mindset by describing the anti-human advocacy among several notable intellectuals. We read again about the Texas academic that called humans "bacteria" and hoped for mass extinction, which I did blog. But it also reports this little bit of misanthropy, which I had not heard of before even though I know Jay Richards:
"William Burger decried 'the devastation humans are currently imposing upon our planet.' The curator emeritus for botany at Chicago's Field Museum of Science last Nov. 9 wrote then-Discovery Institute scholar Jay Richards regarding his book, The Privileged Planet. Burger continued, 'Still, adding over 70 million new humans to the planet each year, the future looks pretty bleak to me. Surely, the Black Death was one of the best things that ever happened to Europe: elevating the worth of human labor, reducing environmental degradation, and, rather promptly, producing the Renaissance. From where I sit, Planet Earth could use another major human pandemic, and pronto!'" I guess this flowers-over-people advocate is rooting for Bird Flu.
Of course, non of these deep ecologists volunteer offer up themselves or their children for the yearned-for mass human extinction.
posted by Wesley J. Smith @ 10:23 AM
2 Comments
2 Comments:
Perhaps this is the call that needs to be made to them. "We will take you seriously when you take your proposition seriously and kill yourself, until then you are just blowing hotair".
I personally wouldn't claim that the present state of affairs in the world is optimal, but Burger's comments are just plain silly, not to mention historically ignorant. The Black Death in itself did not "elevate the worth of human labor, reduce environmental degradation, or produce the Renaissance," however coincidental it may have been with any of those "results." We don't need a mass human extinction to achieve any of those results. The worth of labor, environmental stewardship, and cultural development are dependent upon the presence of people, not on their absence. Each cultural phenomenon is in some sense unique, and any attempt to reduce a range of such phenomena to the level Burger wishes lacks an awareness of the complexity involved. In Burger's case, such reductive thinking would seem to have a companion in his reduction of humans to vermin.
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