The Environmentalist Evil

by David Holcberg
Capitalism Magazine

David Holcberg, a former civil engineer and businessman, is now a writer living in Southern California. He is also a writer for the Ayn Rand Institute in Irvine, CA.

Environmentalism regards man as a spreading cancer that must be eliminated at any cost. And its leaders mean it. Environmentalism is at root a movement against man. As novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand observed, "… [their] ultimate motive [is]…hatred for achievement, for reason, for man, for life."

Most people would not believe this to be true. A great number of people tend to regard Environmentalism as a movement for cleaner air and water, for a better environment for man. But the environmentalists' actions demonstrate otherwise.

Clear evidence of their disregard for human life is their decades-long campaign to ban the insecticide DDT, even for specific use against malaria-carrying mosquitoes. Whatever the long-term effects of DDT on human health, they should certainly be an option for the people at risk from the ravaging short-term effects of malaria.

Every year, about half a billion people become ill with malaria -- that's ten percent of Earth's population -- and several million die, mostly children.

Since its inception in the 1940's, the use of DDT has prevented the deaths of about six hundred million people, an average of ten million a year.

From 1993 to 1995 DDT was banned in Bolivia, Paraguay and Peru. Malaria increased ninety percent. In the same period, DDT's use was increased in Ecuador, and the incidence dropped sixty percent.

Its introduction in India, in 1960, reduced in the span of a year the number of malaria victims from a million to a hundred thousand, and in Sri Lanka from half a million down to almost zero. Soon after DDT was banned there, the number of victims climbed back to previous levels. Still today, environmentalists keep advocating a worldwide ban on DDT. They must be proud of their record.

Environmentalists are not only against DDT, but also against all insecticides. They aim to eventually ban them all, causing death and disease on a global scale. Their campaign makes perfect sense if we remember that one of the central tenets of Environmentalism is to eliminate overpopulation. As Jacques Cousteau, the famous French oceanographer admitted, "In order to stabilize world populations, we must eliminate three hundred and fifty thousand people per day. It is a horrible thing to say, but it's just as bad not to say it."

More proof of the their hatred for human life is their persisting campaign to stop chlorinization of water, which kills the germs in it. Their partial success in Peru resulted in thousands of deaths in a single cholera epidemic in 1992. So far they have not succeeded to ban it in the US, though they are hard at it.

Note the Environmentalists' ferocious attack on genetically engineered foods, despite the advantage that they dispense with insecticide use. This new technology promises to enhance the quality of lives by tailoring foods to our specific needs. An example is the invention of engineered rice with beta-carotene, a substance that the body can convert into vitamin A. Every year two million people worldwide go blind and a hundred million more suffer from lack of vitamin A.

If environmentalists really cared about human life and suffering they would have welcomed the new rice and revised their position on banning GE foods. Why don't they?

Maybe David Brower, former head of the Sierra Club and founder of Friends of the Earth has part of the answer: "Human suffering is much less important than the suffering of the planet."

The most glaring proof that Environmentalism is anti human is their stand for animal rights and their opposition to animal use in medical research. Given the alternative of sacrificing a few mice or letting a billion humans die, only the lowest kind of man haters could choose the latter.

How many more people will have to go blind, get sick or die before we see Environmentalism for what it truly is?

A movement of pure hatred for man disguised as a false love of nature.

Listen to Dave Foreman, founder of Earth First, whose primary goal is cutting the world's population by ninety percent: "We humans have become a disease, the Humanpox."

David M. Graber, a biologist with the National Park Service also puts it in the open: "Human happiness [is] …not as important as a wild and healthy planet. Somewhere along the line…we quit the contract and became a cancer. We have become a plague upon ourselves and upon the Earth."

He is right that there is indeed a cancer growing on Earth. But it is not man. It is Environmentalism, and the sooner we get rid of it, the better.