The New Luddites: Time to Rage Against the Machine
Drop that plastic spork (it's made from petroleum), let your babies go diaper-free (ewww!), give up air travel and join the movement. Defining "the movement" might be a wee bit tricky, but it's there and if you have a heart (brain not required) and haven't bathed recently, then why not go extreme green?
Mother Nature has finally met her match - mankind. And if we don't alter our everyday lives, _______ will happen and all nearly 7 billion of us will die.
You don't have to fill in the blank, the media and eco-nutballs are more than happy to do so in news or entertainment. Mankind is nearly wiped out in a cataclysm the Mayans predicted in "2012," but with the help of John Cusack, a few survive. Nukes created a post-apocalyptic wasteland for Denzel Washington to wander in 2010's "Book of Eli." Hollywood just gave us "Contagion" as a means of shrinking the surplus population.
And the latest is the TV epic "Terra Nova," which takes place in 2149. Naturally, "the world is dying." Why? "The planet is overdeveloped and overcrowded, with the majority of plant and animal life extinct." Humans are sent back in time to walk with the dinosaurs, "rebuild civilization and get it right this time." Like Al Gore meets "Land of the Lost," with Gore either as a consultant or maybe one of the dinosaurs.
Apocalyptic movies and TV aren't new. Hollywood has hyped the fears of the nuclear age with scary disaster films including giant grasshoppers, ants, spiders and moths. (No cockroaches yet, but there's still time.) Other disasters followed, creating memorable scenes of chaos from "Soylent Green" (it's people) to "Mad Max" to the ape movies old and new. ("Take your stinking paws off me you damn, dirty ape.")
In many, mankind does battle not with itself, but with nature. Plants, animals, weather, even meteors are all out to get us. It's not too surprising because that's exactly how the left sees the world. Just as Agent Smith explained in "The Matrix," "human beings are a disease."
Liberals don't just believe it, they embrace it. It's the only explanation for the anti-human attitudes that rule the left. As a result, eco-craziness abounds.
Forget for a minute about the global warming battle. Both left and right have an interest in keeping the earth a relatively decent place to live. It's why you don't litter near your home.
But conservatives see nature as there to serve mankind. Many take the view of Genesis with mankind having dominion over the earth. Many liberals have an almost pagan worship of the Earth Mother.
So every bit of mankind's (oops, personkind's) advancement is a rape of the land. That's the heart of the opposition to a proposed pipeline to bring oil from Canadian tar sands to the Gulf of Mexico. The 1,661-mile pipeline would cross six states and bring much-needed oil to refineries in Texas. Tar Sands Action, which opposes the Keystone Pipeline, said more than 1,200 people were arrested in White House protests. Ironically, what they want is Tar Sands in-action. No jobs, no development, no energy for mankind.
The left is using the same strategy against other forms of clean energy. Their dam strategy has meant 241 dams were "demolished between 2006 and 2010, more than a 40 percent increase over the previous five years." Not very dam friendly or people friendly, but people don't matter. According to The Washington Post, the Lower Elwha Klallam tribe "fought the Elwha Dam and the 210-foot Glines Canyon Dam upstream for years." Now they get to party like it's 2011 BC. "Robert Elofson, the tribe's river restoration director, said his clan has such a close connection to the fish that once flourished there that 'we were called the salmon people, to give them a status equal to the people.'" Soylent salmon anyone?
This stance naturally (ahem) leads the left to make fools of themselves over tiny bits of creation - giving up bathing, soap, diapers to feel good about themselves.
Perhaps because they usually feel so bad. Take the nutty eco-extremists at Earth First whose motto seems to be: "Screw people, we're green." Here's a classic example of such over-emotional nutbaggery. At a 2008 gathering in North Carolina, a group of Earth Firsters bemoaned the death of trees. "I want to mourn the loss of all the old growth trees," one woman wailed amidst a background of tears. "And tell them that we love them and we don't want them to die," she said … to the trees. The trees would have issued a press release, but would have had to pulp one of their own to make the paper.
In Britain, that backward attitude led to protesters from the aptly named "Plane Stupid" group to oppose government plans to expand London's Heathrow airport. Here in America, crazy libs are even dying to go green through "green burial," "a way of caring for the dead with minimal environmental impact that furthers legitimate ecological aims such as the conservation of natural resources, reduction of carbon emissions, protection of worker health, and the restoration and/or preservation of habitat."
To paraphrase Woody Guthrie, when they say Earth First, they mean humans last.
Dan Gainor is the Boone Pickens Fellow and the Media Research Center's Vice President for Business and Culture. His column appears each week on The Fox Forum. He can also be contacted on Facebook and Twitter as dangainor.
