By William Walter Kay
Propaganda does not drive policy-making; it accompanies it. The Climate Change campaign is not driving energy policy-making; quite the contrary.
This posting comes on the heels of the September 21, 2012 passage, by the US House of Representatives, of a Bill entitled: Stop the War on Coal Act. While unlikely to soon become law, this Bill signals an overdue awakening to the threat presented by the War on Coal and hopefully heralds a robust counter-offensive. This posting juxtaposes the recent histories of coal-fired power in Germany and the USA.
This posting comes on the heels of the September 21, 2012 passage, by the US House of Representatives, of a Bill entitled: Stop the War on Coal Act. While unlikely to soon become law, this Bill signals an overdue awakening to the threat presented by the War on Coal and hopefully heralds a robust counter-offensive. This posting juxtaposes the recent histories of coal-fired power in Germany and the USA.
More History of Environmentalism; Look how little the leopards have lost their spots!
By William Walter Kay
Look how little the leopards have lost their spots!
Professor Gasman’s Haeckel’s Monism and the Birth of Fascist Ideology provides insights into the coherent fascist intellectual doctrine that, by 1920, was embraced by a wide swath of European academics and artists. Defining features of this cohort were:
They referred to themselves as: ecologists, naturalists and socio-biologists.
They were pseudo-scientists bent on subverting real science.
Their mantras were: natural, holistic, and organic.
Their Religion of Nature was basically a revival of Pantheism. They worshipped Earth as a divine living organism. Human achievements were disparaged as scant and fleeting compared to Nature’s glory.
They desired scientist-led governance. Scientists probed Nature’s divine realm, hence scientists alone understood the political implications of Nature’s laws.
They were pessimistic and denied the existence of progress.
They exhibited a longing for primitivism.
They were organizationally and ideologically linked to the organic foods movement.
They were organizationally and ideologically allied with the occultist/neo-pagan milieu.
They were divided between those who wanted to replace Christianity and those who wanted to modify Christianity.
They dreaded human overpopulation and were active in eugenics/population control strategizing.
They considered humanitarianism to be scientifically incorrect.
They described society as an organism that grew organically out of Nature.
They saw direct continuity between biological and sociological laws, and contended that bio-evolutionary laws should literally be the basis for human laws.
They believed human survival required abject conformity to the environmental totality. Human liberation would come not through dominion over Nature but through submission to Natural Law.
They opposed capitalist industrialization and sought to reinvigorate beleaguered countryside interests undermined by the rise of industrial cities. Hostility to industrial capitalism manifested in criticism of what was deemed lifeless scientific-mechanical thinking.
They stridently opposed democracy.
Gasman did not set out to expose similarities between environmentalism and fascism. His book makes no reference to environmentalism nor ventures off the topic of European academic trends circa 1870-1920.
Delingpole’s Watermelons
By William Walter Kay
A British Libertarian Bristles Amidst Blustery Times - James Delingpole (b. 1965) has an MA in English from Oxford. His science education peaked at high school physics; a class he took as prep for fighter pilot training. His main career fantasy at the time was to be an SAS commander who would win a Victoria Cross fighting the Soviets. Delingpole’s hostility to environmentalists does not extend to plants, animals, and countrysides. He and his wife rent a holiday cottage in Wales where they and their two children stride across near-deserted hills, forage for bilberries, and gawk at unspoiled views. He shudders at the thought of these vistas blighted by wind turbines. He claims rainforests are devastated by biofuel policies. He has a soft spot for whales and considers wildlife corridors sensible…….In 1992 Prince Charles flew to Rio to proclaim there were 100 months left to prevent climate catastrophe. He then flew home, boarded the biofuel-powered Royal train, and toured Britain to lecture his future subjects on the need to live sustainably. To share the burden, he converted his vintage Aston Martin to run on biofuels. Delingpole recently deprecated Charles as a spoiled and loony prat......Delingpole parallels the 1930s fascist sweep to modern climate alarmism. He likens becoming a climate activist to joining the Nazis. He views the fascistic facets of environmentalism as un-severable. Anti-capitalism, suppression of growth, contempt for democracy, curtailment of liberty, misanthropism, world domination are as integral to environmentalism as lebensraum and death camps were to Nazism.
He contends: “What we’re seeing with the Climate Wars, writ large, is the phenomenon Hitler described in Mein Kampf when he talked about the Big Lie.” Hitler and Mussolini were fans of socio-psychologist Le Bon who argued masses are only as clever as their dullest members; hence, propaganda must be simple and repetitive......The Third Reich was the first regime to pass national environmental laws and to champion organic foods (an obsession of Himmler’s) and vegetarianism (a fad of Hitler’s). Goring was an animal rights activist. The Third Reich was the first to attack overpopulation with rigorous planning and mechanised efficiency.......
Dowie's Conservation Refugees
By William Walter Kay
The author of Conservation Refugees, Mark Dowie, is the former publisher and editor of Mother Jones magazine. Six books and 200 articles have won him 18 awards. Researching this peer-reviewed M.I.T. Press-published text involved years of globe-trotting and the interviewing of many conservation and indigenous leaders. Dowie was privy to several leaked documents from major conservation organizations. Unusually, this book has no Acknowledgements section and does not mention Dowie’s patrons.
Highlights:Laframboise and McKitrick on the IPCC
Between 1900 and 1950 about 600 wilderness parks were created worldwide. 400 were added in the 1950s. Today there are 110,000 such parks. 12% of Earth’s land is now conservationist controlled. This is an area larger than Africa. This is an area equal to half of humanity’s farmland.
There is nothing civil about Third World environmental activism. Truckloads of armed men arrive at frontier villages. They torch shacks, wreck wells, rustle livestock, and confiscate firearms. This has happened thousands of times.
The global tally of conservation refugees is somewhere between 5 and 20 million. Dowie estimates 10million. One scholar estimates 14 million conservation refugees in Africa alone. The topic of conservation refugees has been assiduously neglected by academia. Conservation refugees are invisible because visibility raises the price of conservation.
After 1970, in a top-down process, elite enviro-organizations recruited and indoctrinated an auxiliary from the world’s most atavistic indigenous peoples. This puppet sub-movement is now fronting much environmentalist obstruction.
Conservationists are divided between those who advocate complete depopulation of hinterlands and those who want indigenous-environmentalist auxiliaries to govern these areas.
By William Walter Kay
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is at the forefront of the global warming hoax. IPCC Assessment Reports are gospels to politicians and journalists. Two recent publications – investigative journalist Donna Laframboise’s woefully titled The Delinquent Teenager who was Mistaken for the World’s Top Climate Expert, and economics professor Ross McKitrick’s What is Wrong With the IPCC? – slam-dunk these Assessment Reports into the dumpster. What follows is a collated, abridgement of these two documents.
Markham's Environmental Organizations in Modern Germany
By William Walter Kay
Professor Markham’s nine-year project, Environmental Organizations in Modern Germany, is another inside job. Markham thanks Professor Wiesenthal for opening doors to the German environmental movement and to the Green Party. He also thanks: two officials from the German Nature Protection League, the former President of the German League for Environment and Nature Protection, and the faculty at Wageningen University’s Environmental Policy Group. While writing this book Markham was supported by the German Academic Exchange Service and the Wageningen Institute for Environment and Climate Research. He spent weeks at Neubrandenburg’s Study Archive for Environmental History and Bonn’s Federal Nature Protection Library. He interviewed two dozen German enviro-organization leaders and he watched a lot of German TV. As ever with enviro-scholars, Professor Markham knoweth not what he hath wrought.
Highlights:
Germany is driving the Climate Change campaign.###
Many major international enviro-organizations (Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace, Birdlife International, etc.) are controlled by their German chapters.
Several militant leaders of Germany’s confrontational early-1980s environmentalist protests were, a decade later, running government ministries.
While Germany’s big enviro-organizations masquerade as citizens’ crusades, they are in fact top-down bureaucracies full of cynical well-paid careerists who work in tandem with state and corporate elites.
Only 40 (forty) persons within Greenpeace-Germany’s half million members may vote for the board of directors. WWF-Germany has a self-perpetuating board and zero internal democracy.
The League for Homeland and Environment, League for Nature Protection, and League for Environment and Nature Protection have intertwined histories, memberships, and goals. They were reactionaries before, and raving Nazis during, the Third Reich. Collectively they now have one million supporters spread over 4,000 local clubs. These are “mainstream” German enviro-organizations.
Although it came as a revelation to Professor Markham, beneath the surface of Germany’s 9,000 “mainstream” enviro-organizations lurks a huge sub-movement that can only be described as Neo-Nazi. Markham concludes this sub-movement retains the potential to take over the entire movement.
By William Kay
An important feature environmentalism shares with fascism is the centrality, within each movement, of the European aristocracy. However, while aristocrats flaunt their environmental credentials, they conceal their past involvement with fascism. This is why Jonathon Petropoulos’ Royals and the Reich (Oxford, 2006) is so useful.
Highlights:
270 German princes and princesses were Nazi Party members. A sampling of 312 “old aristocratic” families found 3,592 Party members. Every noble family east of the Elbe River had at least one member in the Party. A third of Nazi-aristocrats joined the Party before Hitler became Chancellor; a majority supported the Nazis, or like groups, before this date. Nobles were the most fascistic of any demographically identifiable cohort. Royal Hohenzollern princes were high-profile Nazi campaigners during the Nazis’ struggle for power. Aristocrats occupied thousands of top government posts during the Third Reich.
King Edward VIII was a Nazi. He was definitely guilty of treason and possibly guilty of attempted regicide. Edward did not abdicate in order to marry Wallis Simpson. He was forced from the throne by PM Baldwin because Edward was heading up a Nazi fifth column in the UK. George V, George VI, the Duke of Kent and scores of British aristocrats promoted “appeasement.” This “peace movement” was an effort to steer Britain into the Axis.
Western Europe’s aristocracy, including most German princes, survived World War II. They retained, even supplemented, their land holdings. Over the past few decades they have engineered a remarkable renaissance.
The founding philosopher of the deep green movement was a Nazi
Most of the Green thinkers of Nazism are now forgotten but Heidegger is still honored -- as is his authoritarian proclivities
One of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century, foundational to the academic left and deep ecology of the greens, was committed to Nazism.
The green Nazi/deep ecology connection in the life and works of Martin Heidegger have been routinely given a pass over the years by many western scholars who love his existential philosophy.
Green, brown and bloody all over
Nazism and ecology? The Nazi party as a green movement? At first glance such analogies seem ridiculous, absurd, outrageous. In 1985, historian Anna Bramwell published a book in which she claimed outright that the Nazi party was a "green party." She focused on Richard Walther Darre, the agricultural minister of Nazi Germany, and his "Blut und Boden" ("blood and soil") ideology. Darre, wrote Bramwell, was the head of the "green" faction of the Nazi party, which greatly influenced the thinking of leading Nazis, among them Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich. Bramwell called Darre the "father of the greens" for his support of organic agriculture, restrictions on the use of mechanized farming methods, and so on. In its time, if I am not mistaken, the book was quite esoteric. (This is an attempt to show that Nazi Germany was "not" a green government. If a government imposes green regulations on its society....it is a green government. The fact that they abandoned it because of the war is immaterial. RK)
Fascist Ecology:
The "Green Wing" of the Nazi Party and its Historical Antecedents
Peter Staudenmaier
"We recognize that separating humanity from nature, from the whole of life, leads to humankind’s own destruction and to the death of nations. Only through a re-integration of humanity into the whole of nature can our people be made stronger. That is the fundamental point of the biological tasks of our age. Humankind alone is no longer the focus of thought, but rather life as a whole . . . This striving toward connectedness with the totality of life, with nature itself, a nature into which we are born, this is the deepest meaning and the true essence of National Socialist thought." 1
In our zeal to condemn the status quo, radicals often carelessly toss about epithets like "fascist" and "ecofascist," thus contributing to a sort of conceptual inflation that in no way furthers effective social critique. In such a situation, it is easy to overlook the fact that there are still virulent strains of fascism in our political culture which, however marginal, demand our attention. One of the least recognized or understood of these strains is the phenomenon one might call "actually existing ecofascism," that is, the preoccupation of authentically fascist movements with environmentalist concerns. In order to grasp the peculiar intensity and endurance of this affiliation, we would do well to examine more closely its most notorious historical incarnation, the so-called "green wing" of German National Socialism.
Hitler: green guru
By Australian columnist Andrew Bolt
The big risk in making films about Hitler isn't that you make the Nazi dictator look too nice. It's the very opposite, as we saw this week with Channel 7's hit mini-series, Hitler: The Rise of Evil. The real danger is making Hitler seem plainly crazy and evil - leaving viewers unable to understand why such a man won so much support from so many people, and not only Germans. We need instead to know what led people to admire Hitler, rather than to see him for what he was: an enemy of freedom. We need to know this, because some of the same cultural forces that helped Hitler -- such as the green movement -- are among us again today.
Of course I'm not saying that green activists are closet Nazis. Nor do I think Australians will ever pull on jackboots, torch Parliament House and fling liberal politicians into concentration camps. Still . . .
Dominick's German Environmental Movement 1871 to 1971
By William Walter Kay
Intro
This is a critical condensation of Raymond H. Dominick III’s The Environmental Movement in Germany: Prophets and Pioneers, 1871-1971. Highlights:
In 1918 Prussia’s Government Nature-care Center sought a directory of major German Nature-protection organizations (ones with notable achievements). They came up with 264 organizations. The Center’s bibliography of German Nature-protection publications listed 10,000 titles. The German conservation movement counted 100,000 active participants and was led by hundreds of aristocrats.
German forestry, ornithology and ecology academies were created in the 19th century as auxiliaries of the conservation movement. The German conservation movement was overwhelmingly and durably aligned with Nazism. The Third Reich was a flamboyantly green regime.........Most arguments used by environmentalists today were articulated by conservationists during the reign of the Kaisers. Many conservation organizations operating in 1918 continue to operate. The line from 19th century Nature-protection to modern environmentalism is without gaps or reversals of direction.
The first “acid rain” scare was in 1864..........
The Pristine Myth: The Landscape of the Americas in 1492
by William M. Denevan
Department of Geography, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI 53706
Abstract. The myth persists that in 1492 the Americas were a sparsely populated wilderness, -a world of barely perceptible human disturbance.- There is substantial evidence, however, that the Native American landscape of the early sixteenth century was a humanized landscape almost everywhere. Populations were large. Forest composition had been modified, grasslands had been created, wildlife disrupted, and erosion was severe in places. Earthworks, roads, fields, and settlements were ubiquitous. With Indian depopulation in the wake of Old World disease, the environment recovered in many areas. A good argument can be made that the human presence was less visible in 1750 than it was in 1492.
Uekoetter’s “Green and Brown” Condensed and Critiqued
Intro By William Walter Kay
Culture wars like real wars have direct hits, collateral damage, and friendly fire. Professor Uekoetter’s The Green and the Brown: a History of Conservation in Nazi Germany (Cambridge University Press, 2006) is an example of friendly fire. The book was written to contain damage caused by growing awareness that Nazism is the forbearer of German environmentalism but it is yet another trove of facts affirming the Nazi-environmentalist connection. German conservationism, and its attendant tendencies and sentiments, was not a distinct social movement separable from German fascism. Parallel to the Gestapo’s nightmarish dragnet ran a green reign of terror of intrusive eco-activism. German conservationism survived World War II. What follows is a critical condensation of Green and Brown.
Environmentalism 400 BC
By William Walter Kay
Decent word-pictures of environmentalism won’t be had from those embroiled in the coil over the latest eco-imbroglio. Viewed macroscopically, environmentalism is usurping state power. Entirely for self-aggrandizement, an oligarchic party is imposing a policy platform. Environmentalism isn’t about mutant tadpoles or melting icebergs. It’s about economic containment. It’s an oligarchy bringing uppity capitalists to heel. This is a repeat performance. The classic rendition was given at Athens, 400 BC.
Environmentalism's Appropriation of Christianity
By William Walter Kay
"The ecological reformation of Christianity," according to one scholar, "may be one of the most significant, though least noted events of this age." (1) The environmental movement has conducted a 50 year campaign to appropriate the world's Christian Churches. This is a top-down affair involving the recruitment of key clerics, theologians, Archbishops, Patriarchs and Popes. The stakes are huge. Churches claim 2 billion followers and assets worth trillions (US$). The reformation is partly complete. While Churches now promote Ecology they have yet to convert most Christians into green consumers, activists and voters.
Nazi Oaks Book Review
By Bruce Walker
It is odd, really more like eerie, how similar many of the fetishes of dead totalitarian systems of the last century are to the curiosities of modern leftism. The Nazi war on tobacco, for example, mirrors modern jihads against smoking, which invariably portray tobacco companies as evil. Mussolini, the leader of Fascism, prided himself on not smoking or drinking, just as Hitler, the leader of Nazism did, who was also a vegetarian. (Winston Churchill, by contrast, drank, smoked, and ate copiously.)
Nazis bragged early about putting into the horrors of concentration camps those who committed cruelty to animals. Fascists in Italy also pointed out to the world that their system of totalitarianism was solicitous of the welfare of animals. There was, in Italy, a “Fascist Society for the Protection of Animals” and the Fascists took early steps to preserve endangered animal species.
One overlooked area in which Nazism and modern leftism converge is the worship of nature, the expansion of a gentle and loving appreciation of divinely created beauty into an obsession bordering on religious fanaticism. Mark Musser, in his new book, Nazi Oaks, Advantage Inspirational, not only explores the historical development of radical environmentalism within the Nazi movement but he explains how this totalitarianism is grounded in a violent rejection of the historical Judeo-Christian worldview, which views nature as a blessing created for man by God. The Old Testament, as Musser explains, has an historical and a metaphysical prelude to problems which we associate with modern and thoughtful secularism.
Why gov't, media, corporations, celebs embrace 'green' scam
By Christopher Grey
The science behind global warming and other apocalyptic visions already has been debunked or at least seriously called into question. Of course hundreds of millions people still believe it with a religious fervor that can range from being amusing to really scary.
Sometimes it even seems environmentalism is hostile to the concept of humans on Earth – even while it promotes itself as the only way to sustain this planet for human inhabitants. This raises an interesting question. Why are so many people so devoted to a set of beliefs not based on facts and not based on any higher power such as a more traditional concept of God?
Jacoby's Hidden History of American Conservation (2010)
By William Walter Kay
American environmentalism existed in a clearly recognizable form in the 1860s. The movement, then known as conservationism, became a dominant political force in the 1885 to 1915 era. Some salient features from that era:
• The overwhelming, and explicit, consensus of conservationists was that wilderness could be protected only by imposing martial law.………..Every environmental history has its obligatory fascist wink. Jacoby’s parting words are: “Americans have often pursued environmental quality at the expense of social justice. One would like to imagine that the two goals are complimentary and that the only way to achieve a healthy environment is through a truly democratic society. But for now, these two objectives remain separate guiding stars in a dark night sky, and we can only wonder if they lead us to the same hoped-for destination.”
• Conservationist zealot Army Captain George Anderson incarcerated suspected wilderness wrongdoers in solitary confinement cages; keeping them on bread and water diets for over month at a time. He freely admitted there was no legal basis for such punishment.
• New York conservationists pulled off an exquisite climate change hoax in their successful campaign to enclose the massive Adirondack Forest Preserve.
• Senior conservationist William Hornaday, declared the town of Gardiner, Montana should be “wiped off the map.” He claimed there were 1,000 towns in the West in a similar “degenerate state, bordering on barbarism” because their inhabitants were “afflicted with a desire to do as they please with the natural resources of that region.”
• William Rockefeller bought most of the land in and around the Adirondack town of Brandon, New York. He razed the houses, planted trees in their stead and for this was hailed as the “Maker of Wilderness” by Collier’s magazine.
• Arizona’s Havasupai tribe were given a tiny reservation completely surrounded by a federal forest reserve and later were banned from the forest reserve.
Can Global Warming Alarmists Stand the Test of Time?
By James Marusek
Over the centuries, mankind has experienced tremendous rainfalls and massive floods, monster hurricanes and typhoons, destructive tornadoes, parched-earth droughts, strong gales, flash floods, great snowfalls and killer blizzards, lightning storms sent down from the heavens, blind dense fogs, freezing rain, sleet, great hail, and bone-chilling cold and even an occasional mud storm or two and in-between, periods of warm sunshine and tranquility. And WE ARE STILL HERE. We are perhaps a little battered and bruised from the wear. But there is nothing new in the weather to fear because we have been there before. We have learned to cope. We have developed knowledge, skills and tools to reduce the effects of weather extremes.
Today, every time a heat wave or a great flood occurs (such as those in Russia and Pakistan this year), voices arise claiming this is more proof of man-made global warming. I wonder to myself if these voices are intentionally ignorant of historical weather extremes or just dishonest.
Early meteorologist and historians have documented weather for many centuries. Recently, I have compiled several of these accounts into “A Chronological Listing of Early Weather Events” and published this document on his Impact website. This chronology covers the years 0 to 1900 A.D. (When downloading the file, please be a little patient. This is a master resource and the 6.5 MB file may take a few minutes to access.)
Why is a chronological listing of weather events of value? If one wishes to peer into the future, then a firm grasp of the past events is a key to that gateway. This is intrinsically true for the scientific underpinnings of weather and climate.
We often think about environmentalism as a left-wing ideology. However, the mass-organized environmentalism can only be invariantly identified as a totalitarian ideology; whether it is left-wing or right-wing is somewhat flexible.
In the article The Roots of Environmentalism, I have discussed some aspects of the environmentalist obsession of the German Nazis. An hour ago, Ron de Haan just posted a link to a fascinating article by Mark Musser written for the American Thinker, The Nazi Origins of Apocalyptic Global Warming Theory. The first book that defended the idea of a catastrophe caused by carbon dioxide was written by Gunther Schwab, an Austrian Nazi and environmentalist.
By Mark Musser
One of the primary pioneering theorists on apocalyptic global warming is Guenther Schwab (1902-2006), an Austrian Nazi. In 1958, Schwab wrote a fictional novel built off of Goethe’s (1749-1832) Faustian religious play entitled “Dance with the Devil”. While a few scientists since the late 1800’s had contemplated the possibility of minor global warming coming from industrial pollution, Schwab used Goethe's dramatic approach to convert the theory into an apocalyptic crisis. The book outlines many looming environmental emergencies, including anthropogenic global warming. Guenther Schwab's very popular novel was an apocalyptic game changer. By the early 1970's, it had been translated into several languages and had sold over a million copies.
At one point in his novel, Schwab opines on the fragile relationship between oxygen and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Assuming the planet has only about 100 years remaining, Schwab frets over the continuing rise of carbon dioxide that "will absorb and hold fast the warmth given out by the earth. This will cause the climate to become milder and the Polar ice will begin to thaw. As a result, there will be a rise in the level of the ocean and whole continents will be flooded."......
Human Sacrifice on the Altar of Gaia
June 2008
By Anne Barbeau Gardiner
In the past thirty years, scientist James Lovelock, Fellow of the Royal Society in England and originator of the Gaia Theory, has published several books on Gaia. It was around 1970 that Lovelock first came up with the name "Gaia" for the Earth (he usually puts a capital E on Earth). In his latest outing, The Revenge of Gaia: Why the Earth is Fighting Back -- and How We Can Still Save Humanity, he assures us several times that he uses the name as a metaphor. But it turns out that for him a metaphor is not just a rhetorical device: He finds Gaia a "useful metaphor" because the present ecological crisis "requires us to know the true nature of the Earth and imagine it as the largest living thing in the solar system." Here the metaphor Gaia turns out to be the way to know the true nature of the planet. Then Lovelock invites us to a change of "heart and mind" so that we may "instinctively sense" Gaia as a living planet. How can we instinctively sense a metaphor? Evidently, Gaia is for him far more than a trope. While he admits that the name offends the "scientifically correct," he declares that he is "unrepentant" about using it because this metaphor is a "path to the primitive feelings of the unconscious part of our minds." That's the part he thinks we can use to contact Gaia.
Is Green Another Word For Pagan?
Wednesday, June 11, 2008
Wendell Krossa
Anne Gardiner presents a good summary of some of the pagan mythology behind modern environmental thought. Alston Chase similarly traces something of the mythological roots of this movement in his book In A Dark Wood.
Gardiner also expresses the great battle for human minds and freedom that this environmental movement is shaping up to be. It is becoming the defining issue of our time- the environmentalist assault on human freedom. Some have suggested that it could become a totalitarianism that would outdo totalitarianisms of the past because it wants to legislate human behavior in constraining detail that other movements did not engage. And it demands a reversal of the human enterprise (and humanity itself) on a scale that few other movements envisioned.
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Human Sacrifice on the Altar of Gaia
June 2008
By Anne Barbeau Gardiner
In the past thirty years, scientist James Lovelock, Fellow of the Royal Society in England and originator of the Gaia Theory, has published several books on Gaia. It was around 1970 that Lovelock first came up with the name "Gaia" for the Earth (he usually puts a capital E on Earth). In his latest outing, The Revenge of Gaia: Why the Earth is Fighting Back -- and How We Can Still Save Humanity, he assures us several times that he uses the name as a metaphor. But it turns out that for him a metaphor is not just a rhetorical device: He finds Gaia a "useful metaphor" because the present ecological crisis "requires us to know the true nature of the Earth and imagine it as the largest living thing in the solar system." Here the metaphor Gaia turns out to be the way to know the true nature of the planet. Then Lovelock invites us to a change of "heart and mind" so that we may "instinctively sense" Gaia as a living planet. How can we instinctively sense a metaphor? Evidently, Gaia is for him far more than a trope. While he admits that the name offends the "scientifically correct," he declares that he is "unrepentant" about using it because this metaphor is a "path to the primitive feelings of the unconscious part of our minds." That's the part he thinks we can use to contact Gaia.
Is Green Another Word For Pagan?
Wednesday, June 11, 2008
Wendell Krossa
Anne Gardiner presents a good summary of some of the pagan mythology behind modern environmental thought. Alston Chase similarly traces something of the mythological roots of this movement in his book In A Dark Wood.
Gardiner also expresses the great battle for human minds and freedom that this environmental movement is shaping up to be. It is becoming the defining issue of our time- the environmentalist assault on human freedom. Some have suggested that it could become a totalitarianism that would outdo totalitarianisms of the past because it wants to legislate human behavior in constraining detail that other movements did not engage. And it demands a reversal of the human enterprise (and humanity itself) on a scale that few other movements envisioned.
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