David @ Tokyo

Environmentalists are correct. We do need to protect our country, our planet, our children’s’ future and their children’s’ future, but not with fear.

We must encourage innovation, science and our own good scientists to uncover the solutions to our problems. Locking in yesterday’s answers from yesterday’s science is no solution – it is the road to definite ruin
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I say shame on the people who elevate environmentalism to a religious status, shame on you for your arrogance, shame on all of us for allowing the environmentalists’ war against the human race to begin, and take hold.
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It seems to me the once common practice of Christian public worship and young folk performing Christian missionary work now competes with the new religious status of environmentalism. Some may think that statement as a step too far, so let me explore the logic.

Followers of Christianity throughout the centuries have had a fervent belief in their faith and believed that through the adoption of that faith, that others would become better human beings and the world a better place.

Over centuries young missionaries have left their native lands and travelled to the far flung corners of the world on crusades to convert the population of the world to their ideals.

While I largely follow Christian principles I do have a problem with the idea that humans are basically bad and without a doctrine to guide them, individuals and humanity would fall and fail.

Now I draw the similarities with the Environmental movement of today.

Environmentalism does not speak about the good of man and what mankind has achieved. Like missionaries it talks of man’s work as negatives to the natural environment.

Environmentalists and historic missionaries both look upon mankind and our achievements as a negative that needs to be curbed and defeated.

Environmentalism talks of humans failings and is scathing of its influences and the changes made to the “natural world”, and seeks to wind the clock back.

Young people around the world are enlisted and travel overseas as missionaries for Greenpeace – they stop street-goers and seek to influence and convert them to their cause. Environmentalism, the cause of winding back the clock, capping and reducing are their ethos.

Environmentalism has captured the attention of a great many people. Citizens across the spectrum have bought into the environmental teachings that the world is on the road to ruin, and with it, mankind.

Many are adopting these teachings without proper scrutiny because of the momentum the movement has, supported by experts who too often owe their livelihood to the environmental business. Even in this country, thousands now owe their living and personal prosperity to continued development of environmental controls. Those controls in turn are reducing the development and productivity of the nation and its ability to increase the standard of living of the New Zealand people.

I ask all Kiwis to think more deeply before supporting environmental causes. I believe they often give support to relieve themselves of any guilt about their lifestyle. Kiwis must understand that ill thought out environmental controls based on emotion rather than science will inevitably lead to a reduced standard of living.

There has always been a segment of human society that aspires to subjugate diversity and to impose its own cultural, moral and ethical values upon others. In the nineteenth century we saw the British Empire spread through Asia and Africa cheered on, not as commonly believed, by merchants and soldiers but rather by clergymen and journalists who alike exhorted their national leadership to "bring the wretched heathen to the light" and "take up the white man’s burden" – in other words to bring the benefits of the supposedly superior Anglo-Saxon religion and culture to the inferior black and brown skinned people of the world.
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The new cultural imperialist does not bash a bible; he pushes an ecological manual in your face and demands your adherence. He does not avow adherence to a church of the spiritually enlightened; he professes membership in a Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) of the morally superior. He comes not to save your souls; his flock will be your birds, your elephants, your reptiles and your fish. He alone knows how to care for and tend to them. He shares several salient features with his nineteenth century counterpart. He is utterly and totally convinced both of his own moral probity and of the right that his natural superiority imbues in him to tell you exactly what you are going to do and how you are going to do it. In the past, when you defied a ranting British preacher, he ran to his national government demanding military protection. The new imperialist similarly runs to his national government when he is defied. If you will not adhere to the environmental strictures that he has mapped out for you – without, of course, consulting you – then he will demand that his national government, along with any available international bodies, impose on you a broad range of economic sanctions in return for your impetuosity.
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The NGO’s tell us that they are the guardians of wildlife, but we always need to bear in mind that they are self-appointed guardians. Their only mandate is the one that they have chosen to arrogate to themselves. Ironically, the NGO’s will demand that multilateral meetings of elected officials throw open their doors to their participation in order to "democratize" them – a somewhat hilarious claim when stemming from non-elected bodies.
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In the world that we now inhabit, regulations, once issued, are never rescinded. Species, once identified - rightly or not - as endangered, are never allowed to recover. There is a delicious, if painful, irony in the fact that NGO’s demand that we take radical action to preserve endangered species but, simultaneously, they insist that none of those measures have ever done any good. This is because their fundamental agenda is to terminate all human interaction with the natural world around us.

posted by David  # 11:36 pm