News Wednesday afternoon that an armed gunman had entered
the cable TV headquarters of Discovery Communications in Silver
Spring, Maryland and begun taking hostages alarmed people
throughout the Washington, D.C. area and around the country. As law
enforcement officials negotiated with the suspect, posts on social
media outlets inevitably began arguing over the ideological
motivations of the hostage-taker, James J. Lee. Conservatives were
quick to point out the suspect’s radical environmentalist
manifesto, while left-leaning sources disclaimed any connection.
News a few hours later that the suspect had been shot and killed by
police spawned a round of smug black humor, concluding that he had
been successful in accomplishing one of his chief demands, a
smaller world population.
The immediate verdict from the online world seems to be
that Lee was simply insane, even as differently motivated voices
tried to pin the source of his insanity on each other. If we take a
step back, though, we can look at the demands he made — which law
enforcement officials said “mirrored” those in his online manifesto
— and see the wider context of Lee’s beliefs.
His focus on population control is clear from the
beginning. Lee demands that the Discovery Channel and its
affiliates must “Focus…on how people can live WITHOUT giving birth
to more filthy human children since those new additions continue
pollution and are pollution.” On the topic of immigration, he
recommends that we “find solutions to stopping ALL immigration
pollution and the anchor baby filth that follows that” and in order
to safeguard the future of wildlife, he writes that doing so “means
stopping the human race from breeding any more disgusting human
babies!”
While his rhetoric is crude and offensive, that doesn’t
mean his ideas don’t have wider currency. From the time of Paul
Ehrlich’s infamous 1968 manifesto The Population Bomb to
the work of groups like Zero Population Growth (first re-branded as
simply “ZPG” and currently known as “Population Connection”), the
specter of unsupportable population growth has been one of the
environmental movement’s greatest scare stories. It’s the kind of
all-encompassing disaster that was supposed to be hard to ignore —
even if you didn’t care about the environment, the pitch goes, you
have to be worried about overpopulation! You don’t want millions of
people to starve to death or see wars spawned by a fight over food
and scarce natural resources, do you?
But how does a concern over famines and resources
depletion translate into the vicious anti-human ideology of a James
Lee? The answer is clear — combine one old theory about the
inherent limitations of mankind with one new theory about the
alienation of human beings from the rest of the natural world. Lee
provides us with all of the leads we need when he demands that the
Discovery Channel “develop shows that mention the Malthusian
sciences.”
The Rev. Thomas Malthus (1766-1834) is the godfather of
all population scaremongers. Malthus was an Anglican clergyman and
political philosopher whose ideas have influenced a wide range of
scientists and thinkers through the centuries. His central insight,
however, comes from his “Essay on the Principle of Population,”
where he posits that times of prosperity encourage greater
population growth, and that a larger population will inevitably
resulting in less food and fewer resources for all, thus leading to
widespread poverty and misery. Malthus’s anti-utopian outlook was
based on deep skepticism of the ability of human beings to rise
above their biological constraints and solve the problems posed by
limited resources and an expanding population. It was Malthus’s
fatalistic view of the world that would, unfortunately, inspire
generations of scholars and eventually help give birth to the
modern environmental movement itself.
Prior to the first Earth Day in 1970, Friends of the Earth
and Ballantine Books co-published The Environmental Handbook:
Prepared for the First National Environmental Teach-In,
featuring essays from such acclaimed environmental thinkers as
population alarmist Paul Ehrlich (three chapters) and the staff of
the Berkeley Ecology Center, which advised that the most important
environmental goal was to reduce world population by half. These
secular saints from the dawn of environmentalism were also
startlingly honest about how to accomplish this goal. Garrett
Hardin, who at the time was a professor of biology at the
University of California, Santa Barbara, gave one of his chapter
sections the bracing title “Freedom to Breed is Intolerable.” In
fact, the original Environmental Handbook is riddled with
melodramatic claims about the evils of overpopulation and
authoritarian recommendations for countering it.
Given this gold-star pedigree, it’s not difficult to
imagine why a man with an unhealthy fixation on environmental
propaganda would become obsessed with population control, even to
the point of looking at a newborn baby and seeing nothing but the
threat of future pollution. Which brings us to the final piece of
the puzzle — the inherently anti-human nature of environmental
philosophy.
Lee, like many modern environmentalists, goes beyond the
warnings of the founding generation of green thinkers when it comes
to overpopulation. Many of the early activists merely made
practical arguments about the kind of Malthusian misery that would
be inflicted on the poor of the world if resources were stretched
too thin by too many people. Since then, however, environmental
awareness has been raised much higher, by writers who have argued
that the planet itself is a living entity, an idea generally
credited to ecologist James Lovelock and referred to as the “Gaia
theory.” In this view of the world, all other species contribute to
the creation of a harmonious, unified whole, with only the
unsustainable burden of human civilization causing
trouble.
These acolytes like to refer to human beings as a “plague”
or a “disease” infecting the planet. For them, and by their own
internal logic, no number of human beings is small enough. Saving
the earth isn’t about providing clean air and water to our
grandchildren, it’s about restoring an Eden-like state of earthly
paradise. Only this time, human beings are both the Serpent and the
original sinners.
No doubt environmental activist groups will deny any
connection between the violent action of James J. Lee and their own
work. And on the surface, that may appear to be so. But the flawed
theories and anti-human prejudices of modern environmentalism’s
founders cast a long shadow — and the unflinching misanthropy of
the movement’s modern radicals continue to attract disaffected
individuals looking for something to believe in. Lee’s willingness
to endanger the lives of others is thankfully rare, but his
conviction that “the planet does not need humans” is anything
but.
