I mentioned to an acquaintance this morning, someone who is a signed up devotee of the Green religion, that if the Greens were really serious about saving the planet and looming environmental catastrophe they would immediately push hard for the banning of all immigration, legal, illegal, the lot. His head practically exploded and he flailed around trying to find a flaw in this argument which is based on the undeniable fact that people in the 1st world cause more damage to the environment, consume more, have a greater carbon footprint etc, etc, than those in the 3rd. His face got redder and redder (there's a clue there, isn't there, true colours revealed?) and he spluttered and mumbled but could only come up with the feeble irrelevancy that some rich people in the 3rd world have a greater environmental impact than poor people in the 1st. But when I replied this meant we should only allow rich immigrants into the 1st world and ban all poor ones it was all too much and he left the room.
I mention this just to show that a substantial percentage of modern environmentalists do not really love Nature, still less God who created Nature, at all. Far too many of them are motivated by those good old fashioned values of hatred and resentment. They want to destroy not create. But you knew that, didn't you? By the way, I write this as someone who doesn't drive, rarely flies and was a vegetarian for 25 years. I consume as little as possible and I would gladly see a vast reduction in our desecration of the natural world, use of plastic, pollution of air, earth and water and so on and so on. But I want to see this driven by love of God and creation not hatred of humanity.
5 comments:
@William - Very good instance. In our era of inversion, activist environmentalists have a massively adverse and disproportionate impact on (what you rightly called) *nature* - or the natural world. They combine self-conceit, stupidity and dishonesty with a leavening of motivated destructive evil.
In other words, they are now the opposite of the pro-nature values they pretend to espouse - and which - until the last 1970s - most environmentalists Did support.
As such, environmentalists are an extreme, but representative, example of a very general trajectory over the past half century.
I believe the problem comes from people using environmentalism as a means to express the negativity within themselves and disguise it as a positive thing.
I see environmentalism (as it is today) as just another form of virtue-signalling. The people most invested in this type of thing, see “saving the planet” as a marker of their own goodness and self-worth, and to abandon it would be to give up their identity as a “good person.” So, yes, it’s “a means to express the negativity within and disguise it as a positive thing.” This is somewhat akin to “spiritual bypassing” in which individuals use spiritual ideas and practices to sidestep or avoid facing unresolved emotional issues, psychological wounds, and unfinished developmental tasks. In the case of the kind of person you have written about here it’s a similar process only writ large onto the “environment.”
When a person who welcomes mass immigration says, they are only coming here for a better life, you are right to respond, "you mean to increase their resource consumption and carbon footprint." This will increase, but not enough to prevent development of violent resentment against the host population. So the the resentful immigrant then further increases his consumption and carbon footprint by burning things that belong to other people.
Ha! Yes, you mean as in the other side of the Channel at the moment. Or else as on your side of the Atlantic a couple of years ago. And maybe elsewhere soon.
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