By Alan Caruba
As Earth Day 2012 occurs on Sunday, April 22, I offer a selection of quotes from leading figures in the environmental movement that are worth reading so that you can draw your own conclusions.
In 1970, the first Earth Day generated the following quotes:
“Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.” - George Wald, Harvard Biologist
“We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation.” - Barry Commoner, Washington University biologist
“Man must stop pollution and conserve his resources, not merely to enhance existence but to save the race from intolerable deterioration and possible extinction.” - New York Times editorial, the day after the first Earth Day
“Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make. The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.” - Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist
“It is already too late to avoid mass starvation.” - Denis Hayes, chief organizer for Earth Day in 1970.
Truth meant (and means) little to environmentalists.
“What we’ve got to do in energy conservation is try to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, to have approached global warming as if it is real means energy conservation, so we will be doing the right thing anyway in terms of economic policy and environmental policy.” – Timothy Wirth, former U.S. Senator (D-CO)
“It doesn’t matter what is true, it only matters what people believe is true.” – Paul Watson, co-founder of Greenpeace.
Many of the environmental movement’s leaders harbored genocidal dreams as the best way to “save the Earth.”
“We have wished, we eco-freaks, for a disaster or for a social change to come and bomb us into Stone Age, where we might live like Indians in our valley, with our localism, our appropriate technology, our gardens, our homemade religion—guilt-free at last!” – Steward Brand, writing in the Earth Catalog.
“Phasing out the human race will solve every problem on earth, social and environmental.” - Dave Forman, founder of Earth First
“I suspect that eradicating smallpox was wrong. It played an important part in balancing ecosystems.” - John Davis, editor of the Earth First Journal
“The extinction of the human species may not only be inevitable but a good thing….This is not to say that the rise of human civilization is insignificant, but there is no way of showing that it will be much help to the world in the long run.” - An editorial in The Economist.
Al Gore
One could devote an entire column to quotes by former Vice President, Al Gore, but one of my favorites is from his 1993 book, Earth in the Balance. “It ought to be possible to establish a coordinated global program to accomplish the strategic goal of completely eliminating the internal combustion engine over, say, a twenty-five year period.”
He was talking about the engine in every car, every truck, every tractor, every motorcycle, and every airplane, among other uses. Gore won a Nobel Peace Prize, shared with the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and an Oscar for his apocalyptic documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth.”
There are, of course, voices of reason who have sought to warn us against the true agenda of environmentalism.
“The study of history is a powerful antidote to contemporary arrogance. It is humbling to discover how many of our glib assumptions, which seem to us novel and plausible, have been tested before, not once but many times and in innumerable guises; and discovered to be, at great human cost, wholly false.” --Paul Johnson, historian
And, finally, this warning from the President of the Czech Republic, Vaclac Klaus: “They hate us, the humans, they consider us selfish and sinful creatures who must be controlled by them. I used to live in a similar world—called communism—and I know that it led to the worst environmental damage the world has ever experienced.”
Sources:
1970 Earth Day Quotes: http://www.ihatethemedia.com/earth-day-predictions-of-1970-the-reason-you-should-not-believe-earth-day-predictions-of-2009
Green Quotes:
http://pushback.com/issues/environment/ecofreak-quotes/
More Green Quotes:
http://redneckusa.wordpress.com/2012/04/16/in-their-own-words-the-truth-about-their-real-motivations/
© Alan Caruba, 2012
13 comments:
Alan, great truths you've expressed here. However, you should have included what Lord Thomas B. Macaulay said, back in 1830, in response to Thomas Malthus’ gloomy theory about mankind’s future expressed in 1795 :
“We cannot prove that those are in error who tell us that society has reached a turning point, that we have seen our best days. But so said all before us, and with just as much apparent reason. On what principle is that, when we see nothing but improvement behind us, we are to expect nothing but deterioration before us?”
Eduardo Ferreyra,
Argentina
Excellent article, Alan!
May I publish the complete article on my blog April 22nd?
I'll wager that there is a common thread amongst these folks (and many others) that leads to an almost worship-like reverence for Margaret Sanger and her thoughts on eugenics.
Margaret Sanger wrote "The Pivot of Civilization" in which she called for:
"The 'elimination of 'human weeds,' for the 'cessation of charity' because it prolonged the lives of the unfit, for the segregation of 'morons, misfits, and the maladjusted,' and for the sterilization of genetically inferior races."
And that's what this green movement is all about. Human life is evil, the mother planet must be preserved.
It will end sooner than that if we don't get Obama out of the White House.
AGW, or now repackaged as Anthrogenic Climate Change, is merely a created, secular religion to exert control over the gullible masses. Any effort to scientifically rebut their "settled science" is met with disdain. Remember Copernicus & Galileo with the conventional wisdom of their age....
M. Sanger likely didn't recognize that she was an integral part of the group that actually needs to sent to another (preferably airless) planet.
Alan, I love your writing, and here's a comment I just left at wuwt, inspired by a quote that you mentioned:
@James Bull. “Is it a requirement that these people all have similar hair and beard styles…”
James, you’ve hit on something that is bigger than meets the eye. Take the geek Gleick and over-emotive Zwick. The superficial outward similarity of appearance is weird, they certainly are conformists to some sort of unkempt “eccentric leftist intellectual” standard. They make a big huff about how they strive to lead the “simple” life, just as the hippies and econuts have dreamed of for decades.
Obama’s Science Czar John Holdren, as far back as 1973, expressed the rational front for the dream of these eccentric “simple life leftists” that dominate the Chicken Little Brigade. Holdren wrote that we need to create “a low consumption economy… with an equitable distribution of wealth.” There’s something a bit sterile about this dim vision. Yet, there is in fact, though infrequently expressed, a passion behind … it all. As Stewart Brand of the Whole Earth Catalogue put it, “We have wished, we ecofreaks, for a disaster… to bomb us into the stone age, where we might live like [American] Indians, with our localism, our appropriate technology, our gardens, our homemade religion.”
Eccentric bearded "super intellectual" neurotic leftist nuts, not impartial non-partisan scientists.
They have a bizarre dream, and 83% CO2 cuts by 2050 as passed in U.S. House in 2009 was meant to bring that dream to fruition. They’ll stop at nothing, even burning our houses down, to see their weird dream of the simple life imposed on everyone else.
Of course, it wouldn’t be a “nice simple life” as the leftists envision. No, wholesale cuts in economic production as mandated by the radical cap & trades schemes would be a recipe for societal collapse on an apocalyptic scale. I’ll spare you the details this time. But feel free to imagine it.
Why is it that all the folks that advocate drastically reduced population levels never lead by example and lower human population numbers by stepping in front of trains? With the Left whatever sacrifice they call for it is you not them that is expected to make it. In the immortal words of the church lady "Isn't that convenient".
"Gore won [...] an Oscar for his apocalyptic documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth."
No, he did not. This is a common attribution, but it is simply not true. Davis Guggenheim won the Oscar. Mr. Gore neither shared in nor received an Oscar. He did *hold* the Oscar briefly after being invited onstage by Guggenheim.
These flat earthers do not believe the evolutionary record.
Centillions of hominids have lived over the past million years and we still have plenty of resources.
A centillion of hominids have lived and died over the past million years.
Why do these nut cases suppose that the earth's resources will not support a scant few billion people?
I concur with Derfel: let them "lead" by example and go FIRST-- all of them. We will be FAR better off without such "academic" idiots. Let them turn their single-minded notions to helping people w/o destroying all that has been accomplished through out history. As to CO2, have they never heard of the Middle Ages when grapes were grown in Greenland? DUH!
Iagree with Derfel: these academic idiots should lead by example. But, they lace any integrity, honesty, or courage to do so. They have become selfish people who are totally bind to anything outside of what they believe to be "true". Have they never read history and learned of why Greenland got its name? of course now; that was written by nut-cases...right? What screwed up idiots.
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