Radical Environmentalism And The Creep

Wesley J. Smith writes a story at The Weekly Standard that everyone needs to see.  On the one hand, this is so ridiculously unbelievable that it is borderline funny.  On the other hand, it is completely believable because it is simply the logical conclusion to the picture painted by radical environmentalism.  Check it out:

At the request of the Swiss government, an ethics panel has weighed in on the "dignity" of plants and opined that the arbitrary killing of flora is morally wrong. This is no hoax. The concept of what could be called "plant rights" is being seriously debated.

First, the obvious question: if we can't eat meat (naturally, this goes hand in hand with animal rights), and if we can't eat plants, then what are we supposed to eat?  Dirt, apparently.  Maybe some rocks for extra roughage.  I've suggested it before, and I'll suggest it again: the only thing that will truly satisfy these radical environmentalists is for the human race to die out!  But I digress...

While the suggestion of 'plant rights' is something straight out of a Saturday Night Live sketch, what is sobering is the fact that this discussion is in the context of a constitutional change in Switzerland.  There are people who really believe this stuff, and want the Swiss constitution modified to protect the rights of plants!  You might be asking yourself how anyone could be so dim-witted as to arrive at this conclusion.  Smith explains:

Our accelerating rejection of the Judeo-Christian world view, which upholds the unique dignity and moral worth of human beings, is driving us crazy. Once we knocked our species off its pedestal, it was only logical that we would come to see fauna and flora as entitled to rights.

The intellectual elites were the first to accept the notion of "species-ism," which condemns as invidious discrimination treating people differently from animals simply because they are human beings. Then ethical criteria were needed for assigning moral worth to individuals, be they human, animal, or now vegetable.

Rising to the task, leading bioethicists argue that for a human, value comes from possessing sufficient cognitive abilities to be deemed a "person." This excludes the unborn, the newborn, and those with significant cognitive impairments, who, personhood theorists believe, do not possess the right to life or bodily integrity. This thinking has led to the advocacy in prestigious medical and bioethical journals of using profoundly brain impaired patients in medical experimentation or as sources of organs.

The animal rights movement grew out of the same poisonous soil. Animal rights ideology holds that moral worth comes with sentience or the ability to suffer. Thus, since both animals and humans feel pain, animal rights advocates believe that what is done to an animal should be judged morally as if it were done to a human being. Some ideologues even compare the Nazi death camps to normal practices of animal husbandry. For example, Charles Patterson wrote in Eternal Treblinka--a book specifically endorsed by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals--that "the road to Auschwitz begins at the slaughterhouse."

Eschewing humans as the pinnacle of "creation" (to borrow the term used in the Swiss constitution) has caused environmentalism to mutate from conservationism--a concern to properly steward resources and protect pristine environs and endangered species--into a willingness to thwart human flourishing to "save the planet." Indeed, the most radical "deep ecologists" have grown so virulently misanthropic that Paul Watson, the head of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, called humans "the AIDS of the earth," requiring "radical invasive therapy" in order to reduce the population of the earth to under a billion.

This is a brilliant explanation of what I mean when I say humans come first (see here, here, and here).  It is also an equally brilliant way of explaining the precise danger of allowing this mentality to take hold and win the day.  The rejection of the 'special-ness' of humanity has allowed such tremendous evil to be visited upon millions throughout history because they are seen as somehow not human, or not human enough.

And, if these nutjobs have their way, the evil of history is nothing compared to what they want to see in the future - did you catch the part about reducing the world's population to under 1 billion?  The world's current population is about 6.6 billion people.  If we were to follow this radical environmentalist's suggestion, that means killing 85% of the population!  If you're one of the fortunate few to survive this environmental purge, you'd literally be one of just under 10 people left alive.  My suggestion of environmentalists wanting humans to die out isn't so silly now, is it?

Now, let's be real: are they likely to succeed in the near future?  Of course not.  No one even remotely close to their right mind is going to accept such a catastrophic action.  That's not the danger (at least not yet).  The danger is the mentality that these people possess which allows the slow, creeping changes that transform a culture over time.  If you would have asked Americans in the 1950's if they could ever conceive of a time when prayer would be outlawed in schools, yet homosexuality would be mandated and kids had to pass through metal detectors to prevent handguns from entering the school, do you think most would have believed you?  Not a chance.  And yet, half a century later, here we are.

That is the problem.  That is the creep of liberalism.

Environmentalism is a core tenet of liberalism, and it is the slow progression of liberalism that has brought us to 2008, where we can't pray while we listen to lectures on racism, sexism, environmentalism, and who knows how many other 'isms' in schools, where we value grass more highly than the life of an unborn child or terminally ill grandparent, and where we dismiss life when it becomes inconvenient.

This place and time is screwed up, and if people would take a step back and look at it from a larger perspective, they'd realize it.  But, the creep is almost invisible on the scale of daily life, so most people miss it entirely.

It's time to wake up.  See the creep.  It starts with small steps, like plant rights and 'green' legislation.

There's my two cents.