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Babies: The Newest Environmental Plague
Children may be the next addition to the list of environmental threats. An astonishing article in a British newspaper reveals a new trend among young environmentalist couples: sterilizing themselves in an effort to save the planet. In their own words:
“Every person who is born uses more food, more water, more land, more fossil fuels, more trees and produces more rubbish, more pollution, more greenhouse gases, and adds to the problem of over-population.”
“That’s why I had a vasectomy. It would be morally wrong for me to add to climate change and the destruction of Earth.”
Many would dismiss such a position as a fanatical stretch of environmentalist ideas. But the conclusion that babies equal pollution is actually perfectly logical and consistent from the standpoint of environmentalism, which holds the sanctity of nature as the paramount moral value and human life as subordinate.
Notice the language used by the environmentalists quoted above. The victims of the harms they cite are not people, but parts of “nature” – forests, rivers, oceans, and wildlife. And it is not only pollution that they object to, but also to human consumption of basic life necessities like food, water and land.
Starting with the premise that nature is the paramount value, the logic follows easily. As human beings we need to change nature in order to live – we grow food, build homes, schools, and hospitals, use energy for heating, manufacturing, and communication. Even the simplest lifestyle requires some amount of intrusion upon our surroundings. Thus, human beings – even the most environmentally conscious – are by our nature a “detriment to the planet.”
Every child born contributes to this modification of nature inasmuch as he or she achieves a life full of the things that make modern life a pleasure to live: abundant food, warm homes, advanced healthcare and efficient transportation. Far from being outlandish, therefore, the conclusion that babies should be forsaken for the sake of nature is a consistent application of environmentalism. It serves as evidence of its hostility toward human life and as a reminder to those who value it that given the choice between human happiness and wilderness devoid of mankind, environmentalism chooses the latter.
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Objectivism
The Undercurrent's cultural commentary is based on Ayn Rand's philosophy, Objectivism. Objectivism, which animates Ayn Rand's fiction, is a systematic philosophy of life. It holds that the universe is orderly and comprehensible, that man survives by reason, that his life and happiness comprise his highest moral purpose, and that he flourishes only in a society that protects his individual rights.Event Calendar
What’s also interesting about this view of newborns representing a burden on Mother Earth is that the environmentalists — that is, leftists — who hold it see human beings only as consumers, not as producers. According to them, a new baby represents just another wide-open mouth waiting to be fed, one that just consumes the earth’s resources. But the reality is, they will one day grow up into independent adults who create and produce: growing more food to eat, planting more trees to chop down to build houses, creating more synthetic pharmaceuticals to prolong people’s health and lives, turning deserts into thriving cities with endlessly running water, etc. The way the green’s paint life, when another human being is born, and that just means he’s going to consume, consume, consume—and deplete the earth’s resources.
This view is perfectly compatible with leftist’s basic economic views, which is the primacy of consumption, not production.
~ Joseph Kellard
For me, this is a desperately needed recrystalization of the essential philosophical link uniting the liberal fanatic and the religious fanatic. Immediately, after reading the quoted passage, I thought of religiously inspired vows of poverty and celibacy.
It’s pitiful just how poorly the “progressive” left attempted to rebel against the old, religious order. They tried to leave one irrational, man-hating ideology only to end up all that much more irrational and self-loathing.
But the worst part is how they express it. The childish superficiality of their irrationalities (especially in art) and the sophisticated, tightly-woven mess of rationalizations which makes their self-hatred that much more believeable and that much more pernicious.
It really is a gut wrenching phenomenon to have to live with because it’s just so completely and utterly pathetic.