Environmentalism Isn't Science....

PoliticalChic

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...ecology is.

1. "When the environmentalism movement began searching fro its identity in the 1970s, its members often called themselves ecologists. The public went along....reports wrote about the 'ecology movement.' Professional ecologists- that is, working scientists- did not protest....they should have. Being able to distinguish ecologists from environmentalists is as important as knowing the difference between surgeons and witch doctors.

2. Ecology is a science. It produces knowledge. Environmentalism is a political and religious movement. It produces judgment and laws."



These are the words of Professor Wallace Kaufman, from his book, "No Turning Back," p. 92. He knows whereof he speaks, as the former president of several environmental groups, and a long time activist.

3. "Most environmentalists have college degrees and think of themselves as sophisticated....Like all true believers, however, they have assumptions that limit their ability to absorb new ideas, assumptions that define their friends and enemies and by which they know what is right and wrong. Those assumptions...are the principles that the environmental movement wants written into law and regulation:

a. Nature is good

b. Altering or destroying any part of nature is bad.

c. Nature has a balance that humans always disrupt

d. The more power humans get, the more damage they do to nature.
These are the beliefs of a religion...not one of science.



4. Environmentalists are almost always political liberals who have little sympathy for Christian fundamentalists....Yet environmental faith is quite rigid, and its story, biblical.....[matching] the story of the Garden of Eden....Innocent pre-industrial, pre-scientific cultures show what we could have been, while civilized cultures show how low we have fallen. In Eden and in the environmental story, the harmony of nature and its ability to nurture human kind are destroyed by ambition, greed, and sin. These sins are inflicted on nature and native peoples almost exclusively by white males."
Kaufman, Op. Cit. chapter seven.

One can see why these ideas are de rigueur in university today.



Professor Kaufman makes quite a powerful witness. He endorses exactly what many of us have said about the political and religious nature of the environmental movement.
 
Amusing the ignorance of some. According to the Bible you love to use when it suits you, God made us as caretakers of the Earth.

Numbers 35:33 ESV

You shall not pollute the land in which you live, for blood pollutes the land, and no atonement can be made for the land for the blood that is shed in it, except by the blood of the one who shed it.

Revelation 11:18 ESV

The nations raged, but your wrath came, and the time for the dead to be judged, and for rewarding your servants, the prophets and saints, and those who fear your name, both small and great, and for destroying the destroyers of the earth.”

Stick to political theory, it's the only thing you're good at.
 
The Sixth Day: Creatures on Land
25God made the beasts of the earth after their kind, and the cattle after their kind, and everything that creeps on the ground after its kind; and God saw that it was good. 26Then God said, "Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the cattle and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth."27God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.…
Genesis
 
The Sixth Day: Creatures on Land
25God made the beasts of the earth after their kind, and the cattle after their kind, and everything that creeps on the ground after its kind; and God saw that it was good. 26Then God said, "Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the cattle and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth."27God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.…
Genesis



If only it included dominion over stupid people as well....then the environmental movement would be obviated.
 
5. Take a look at those assumptions of the environmental movement, and see how simple they are to dispel.

a. Nature is good

b. Altering or destroying any part of nature is bad.

c. Nature has a balance that humans always disrupt

d. The more power humans get, the more damage they do to nature.



6. "The ancient balance of nature that many people love and want to save is often a figment of their imagination. In the 1992 movie The Last of the Mohicans, the action takes place in what the viewers thought was a primeval wilderness where the Indians had lived for thousands of years without disturbing the great forest.
The movie opens and continues to the end almost entirely in deepest woodland shade. Most viewers thought this was a virgin forest the way the colonists found it. The primeval forest, however was not in the Mohican's New York but in North Carolina. The virgin forest has not been a virgin for one hundred years. Most trees averaged some twenty years."
Op. Cit.


a. At the heart of the debate lies a romantic notion of the great forest's eternal presence. Not so: if nature has its way, the forest would disappear. Without the millions of dollars spent on fire-fighting programs, most would have burned down long ago.
 
7. In fact, the picture would not just be battling nature.....

At the heart of the beliefs of the gullible is the image of Indians in the mold of Hiawatha, of Longfellow's epic poem....the noble, fearless hunter, who made bonds with all the animals of the forest, and maintained nature as he found it.....

This version, from the less than astute:
"Before the settlers, the rivers were full of fishes and air was clean."

The myth of the Noble Savage, i.e., one who understood nature andlived in harmony with Mother Earth.


Puhhhleeeeezzzzzzze!


a. Let's start with the fastest way to destroy natural surroundings...forest fires: how many times have we heard that such a destructive attitude towards the environment is the product of Western man’s alienation from nature?

American Indians were forest-burners par excellence:it was not the forests which impressed the early settlers but the absence of them.

Thomas Morton, a Puritan, wrote in 1637:

"...the Savages are accustomed to set fireof the Country in all places where they come, and to burne it twize a year, vixe at the Spring, and the fall of the leafe. The reason that mooves them to doe so, is because it would other wise be a coppice wood, and the people would not be able in any wise to passe through the Country out of a beaten path."
Morton, T., "New English Canaan: or, New Canaan, 1637," rpt. pp.52-4, quoted in Chase, "Playing God in Yellowstone: The Destruction of America's First National Park," p. 94.


b.Those Noble Savages? They hated the forests...they burned them down so they could see the animals they hunted. " Once the forests have been burnt, however, and the land transformed to grasslands and savannah, these desirable species become available. The species which the Indians most wanted to hunt, like bison, moose, elk and deer, are found most easily in areas of recently burnt forest, which is why they burnt the forests over and over again."
Chase, Op. Cit.

OK....so....Hiawatha exists only in the environmentalist's fevered imagination.
Amazing how many have been tricked into believing it, huh?
 
What you fail to appreciate is that when the environmental movement got started in the 60s, there were serious problems that the free market had created and then ignored for decades. Factories and mill dumping tons of pollutants into the air, toxic waste just being thrown in the woods, PCBs and dioxins dumped into every major river (and coincidentally water source), heavy metal groundwater contamination, mill towns constantly covered in graphite dust, so on and so forth. And let's not forget multiple species like the bald eagle were either extinct or close to it. Now, I like the free market and thing less regulation tends to be better, but the truth is something had to be done. If private industry wasn't going to get around to fixing the problem, government would have to force them.
 
What you fail to appreciate is that when the environmental movement got started in the 60s, there were serious problems that the free market had created and then ignored for decades. Factories and mill dumping tons of pollutants into the air, toxic waste just being thrown in the woods, PCBs and dioxins dumped into every major river (and coincidentally water source), heavy metal groundwater contamination, mill towns constantly covered in graphite dust, so on and so forth. And let's not forget multiple species like the bald eagle were either extinct or close to it. Now, I like the free market and thing less regulation tends to be better, but the truth is something had to be done. If private industry wasn't going to get around to fixing the problem, government would have to force them.


"....in the 60s, there were serious problems that the free market had created and then ignored for decades."

Well, then...you must have written dozens of posts demanding sunset provisions in the fascistic regulations, huh?

Love to see you reprise some of 'em.
 
Environmentalism is constructed from equal parts religion, and politics.

And the politics is not of American origin.


8. The history of ecology provides support for the view that ecology was born of the same roots as Progressivism....Germanic thought.
The Germans have a history of embracing authoritarian rule. As the German philosopher Hegel said, “The state says … you must obey …. The state has rights against the individual; its members have obligations, among them that of obeying without protest” (Ralf Dahrendorf, "Society and Democracy in Germany").


a. One spin-off of the Enlightenment was the desire to find new myths that would transcend daily existence and take one to a higher level of purification. Proto-fascist, and founder of ecology, Ernst Haeckel, invested nature-worship with the belief that all matter was alive and possessed mental attributes.

In ‘monism,’ he brought together hostility to Christianity and propaganda for Darwinism, a nature cult and theories of hygiene and selective breeding.
J.W. Burrow, “The Crisis of Reason: European Thought, 1848-1914,” p. 218-19




b. “In 1867 the German zoologist Ernst Haeckel coined the term 'ecology' and began to establish it as a scientific discipline dedicated to studying the interactions between organism and environment. Haeckel believed in nordic racial superiority, strenuously opposed race mixing and enthusiastically supported racial eugenics.

Haeckel contributed to that special variety of German thought which served as the seed bed for National Socialism. He became one of Germany's major ideologists for racism, nationalism and imperialism…he fulminated in anti-Semitic tones…played a key role in the establishment of the Nazi movement.”
Eco Fascism Fascist Ideology the Green Wing of the Nazi Party and Its Historical Antecedents by Peter Staudenmaier


Environmentalism didn't have far to go to be led astray: totalitarian political notions were there at the start.
 
What you fail to appreciate is that when the environmental movement got started in the 60s, there were serious problems that the free market had created and then ignored for decades. Factories and mill dumping tons of pollutants into the air, toxic waste just being thrown in the woods, PCBs and dioxins dumped into every major river (and coincidentally water source), heavy metal groundwater contamination, mill towns constantly covered in graphite dust, so on and so forth. And let's not forget multiple species like the bald eagle were either extinct or close to it. Now, I like the free market and thing less regulation tends to be better, but the truth is something had to be done. If private industry wasn't going to get around to fixing the problem, government would have to force them.


"....in the 60s, there were serious problems that the free market had created and then ignored for decades."

Well, then...you must have written dozens of posts demanding sunset provisions in the fascistic regulations, huh?

Love to see you reprise some of 'em.

The EPA has been abusive and needs reined in, I'll agree, but I fail to see how it is fascist to for government to tell private businesses to clean up their messes. If the private businesses had been doing that, government would never have been asked by the public do make them. I'm sure in your mind private enterprise was pacing themselves and were just about to start cleaning up their waste, but history suggests otherwise.

The failing of the libertarian is the same as the communist: they both fail to take human nature into account.
 
What you fail to appreciate is that when the environmental movement got started in the 60s, there were serious problems that the free market had created and then ignored for decades. Factories and mill dumping tons of pollutants into the air, toxic waste just being thrown in the woods, PCBs and dioxins dumped into every major river (and coincidentally water source), heavy metal groundwater contamination, mill towns constantly covered in graphite dust, so on and so forth. And let's not forget multiple species like the bald eagle were either extinct or close to it. Now, I like the free market and thing less regulation tends to be better, but the truth is something had to be done. If private industry wasn't going to get around to fixing the problem, government would have to force them.


"....in the 60s, there were serious problems that the free market had created and then ignored for decades."

Well, then...you must have written dozens of posts demanding sunset provisions in the fascistic regulations, huh?

Love to see you reprise some of 'em.

The EPA has been abusive and needs reined in, I'll agree, but I fail to see how it is fascist to for government to tell private businesses to clean up their messes. If the private businesses had been doing that, government would never have been asked by the public do make them. I'm sure in your mind private enterprise was pacing themselves and were just about to start cleaning up their waste, but history suggests otherwise.

The failing of the libertarian is the same as the communist: they both fail to take human nature into account.




"....but I fail to see how it is fascist...."

Because it obviates the Constitution.


But, a solution suggested by former NY Senator James L. Buckley .....

    1. While the officials in government agencies are generally good people, they become focused on their particular portfolio of duties, that, often, they cannot see the consequences on other parts of society. Put this together with human nature, and one can see bullying, and misuse of power, especially when these individuals are immune to penalty, and supported by free and extensive legal representation: they have sovereign immunity in their positions.
    2. A remedy would be the ability of citizens to sue the federal government to protect their legitimate interests, for damages. While currently unconstitutional, the Congress can waive sovereign immunity,
    3. Such a congressional waiver would not only protect the citizenry, but would go far toward defining the limits of federal authority.
 
Doesn't matter if I agree with them or not. The Supremes have ruled, so either come up with an argument they can't refute or amend the Constitution.

And no, I don't think the Supremes always get it right. There are any number of cases I disagree with them on.
 
Doesn't matter if I agree with them or not. The Supremes have ruled, so either come up with an argument they can't refute or amend the Constitution.

And no, I don't think the Supremes always get it right. There are any number of cases I disagree with them on.


I provide truth and rectitude.

I don't rule the nation.....



.....yet.
 
LOL. As for the subject of this thread, someone with less knowledge of science than the average high school student, is hardly fit to judge what is or isn't science.
 

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