By Peter Hannaford on 5.13.09 @ 6:06AM
The Deep Ecologists are riding high in the Obama era.
America's "mainstream" media missed it, but April 17 was a
red-letter day for its Deep Ecologists. Red letter because it was
the day the Obama Administration declared that carbon dioxide and
five other gases emitted by industry threaten "the health and
welfare of current and future generations." This opens the door
to regulations by the Environmental Protection Agency to "cap"
emissions. The Deep Ecologists see this as the path to their
cherished dream of a less populous nation with greatly reduced
industrial production. It will also lead to a poorer (they would
call it "simpler") standard of living.
The Deep Ecologists' philosophy came together in 1973 with a
treatise by a Norwegian philosopher, Arne Naess. He and his
followers disdained the "utilitarian" environmentalists who,
up to that time, had been working on clean air or water and
saving this or that species. The facts of science and logic were
not enough, he believed. They lacked an ethical framework that
required deep questioning and commitment. Naess said that humans
didn't rank above other creatures. That is, "the right of all
forms [of life] to live is a universal right which cannot be
quantified. No single species of living being has more of this
particular right to live and unfold than any other species."
In this, Naess and his followers resembled the mid-19th century
pantheists who believed that all species were interrelated. For
example, they called fish, "the finny tribe."
The Deep Ecologists went well beyond this romantic view. In a
1985 book, two of them, W. Devall and G. Sessions, spelled out
eight principles the world should live by. Here is Number Four:
"The flourishing of human life and cultures is compatible with a
substantial decrease of the human population." Number Five reads,
"Present human interference with the non-human world (flora and
fauna) is excessive, and the situation is rapidly worsening." It
leads to Number Six: "Policies must therefore be changed. These
policies affect basic economic, technological and ideological
structures. The resulting state of affairs will be deeply
different from the present."
Whether they admit it or not, most active environmentalists
believe in the Deep Ecology thesis that mankind has despoiled the
land, misused natural resources, and is greedy and wasteful. (A
friend once said of the Sierra Club, "It believes that mankind is
but a passing disaster on this planet.")
Deep Ecology has been the underlying drive of Green Parties and
the rush to declare Global Warming a coming disaster. This,
despite the fact, as Steve Milloy puts it in a new book, "the
fatal flaw of global warming alarmism is that there is no
scientific evidence indicating that carbon dioxide, much less
man-made carbon dioxide emissions, control or even measurably
impact global climate." (Green
Hell: How Environmentalists Plan to Control Your Life and
What You Can Do to Stop Them. Regnery Publishing.)
Global Warming hysteria is based on hypothetical computer models
that have never been validated against real world experience. The
fact that many scientists accept the hypotheses does not make
them true. For that matter, many scientists actively dispute
those same hypotheses.
The EPA's license to cap emissions may take some time to play out
through such things as a carbon tax ("cap and trade"). Once it
does, this would serve another of Obama's objectives, income
redistribution. As the carbon tax is imposed on industry, the
cost to consumers of most goods and services will go up. The
administration would use the tax receipts to provide "rebates" to
lower income households to soften the effect.
In time, the coming regimen will decide what kind of car you will
drive, what kind of house you live in and what kind of products
you'll buy. Congress, in response to pleas from various affected
interests, may soften the plan around the edges, but will not
stop it in its tracks.
The Deep Ecologists have worked for nearly four decades silently
but persistently through many environmental organizations to
reach what they consider to be Utopia. You and your neighbors may
decide it is more like Hell.
topics:
Environmentalism, Environmental Protection Agency
