David Attenborough, British broadcaster and environmentalist, is at it again, claiming that humans are a plague. According to today’s UK Telegraph:
He said the only way to save the planet from famine and species extinction is to limit human population growth.
“We are a plague on the Earth. It’s coming home to roost over the next 50 years or so. It’s not just climate change; it’s sheer space, places to grow food for this enormous horde. Either we limit our population growth or the natural world will do it for us, and the natural world is doing it for us right now,” he told the Radio Times.
Of course, this is nothing new. Environmentalists have been saying similar things for decades. Prince Phillip, former president of the World Wildlife Fund, said “If I were reincarnated I would wish to be returned to earth as a killer virus to lower human population levels.”
Let there be no mistake: mainstream environmentalism has become deeply anti-human. Decades after Paul Ehrlich’s dire predictions of famine and mass starvation due to overpopulation were proven completely wrong, environmental textbooks sing his praises. Maurice Strong, the first director of the United Nations Environment Programme, said, “Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrial civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?”
Rich, first-world environmentalists advocate against building coal and natural gas power plants in developing countries, even though thousands of impoverished people will die for lack of electricity and the life-saving things it makes possible, such as hospitals, refrigeration, and heating. They block access to and divert funds from tools that can completely eradicate malaria in favor of bed nets.
John Davis, former editor of Earth First!, said “Human beings, as a species, have no more value than slugs… I suspect that eradicating smallpox was wrong. It played an important part in balancing ecosystems.” At best, the philosophical foundation of environmentalism assumes that humans have no value. As the above quotations show, however, many environmentalists believe humans are inherently bad–that homo sapiens is a plague.
CFACT believes differently. A human life is inherently more valuable than a slug, a cow, or any other animal. As our statement of purpose reads, we believe in Prospering Lives, Promoting Progress, and Protecting the Earth. We stand with Julian Simon, who said that people are the ultimate resource. Free and prosperous people are best equipped to address environmental concerns. Human ingenuity, imagination, and creative intelligence are the fuel of progress.
History has shown that the environment is best protected when humans prosper. Nature suffers when people suffer. Any environmentalist policy that would drive up the cost of energy, food, or other essential needs in the name of protecting nature must be rejected. Instead, we must pursue constructive policies of political and economic freedom and wise ecological stewardship that will enhance the future of the world’s people.
free and prosperous people are best equipped to address environmental concerns
David Attenborough has seen the natural world ravaged and destroyed by human activity for many decades. It’s hardly surprising that he’s upset by it.
Money is for lobbying no human people : opensecrets.org seeing :http://soprweb.senate.gov/index.cfm?event=getFilingDetails&filingID=CAE335F3-D971-424D-B345-C9504F4913D7
Oh no, YOU people like Cfact are the human plagues on Earth! You should just move to communist China and enjoy breathing THEIR air – because after all – regulations are evil! Just GO away with your lies.
Good God! Get a grip of reality will you and maybe read a book once in a while. Of the history variety if possible.
Why do you think China has bad air compared to the Western world? Because they’re working themselves out of abject poverty. Once they have been allowed to do that and prosper they will foster better environmental policies that will protect their environment just like all the other first world countries have and allow them to live at the same comfortable standard YOU do. But let me guess. You wouldn’t like that would you? You’re not comfortable with the idea that the poor may one day enjoy living at the standard you do today. There’s a word for people like you. And that word is ‘hypocrite’.
bingo, when humans prosper so does the enviroment, look at usa many advances in cleaner technology has helped to clean us the usa from previous dirtiness, and made it more pleasant for everyone including the crittors. but china seems to be the exception I guess it is based on the human heart, a polluted mind leads to a polluted earth, by the way anyone who believes humans are a plague or virus of the earth is being not just anti human but anti god as well after all we were created in his image, lets not confuse humans lack of wisdom and mismanagement of the earth with humans being virus, not the same thing, and I don’t see anyone who claims the earth is overpopulating volunteering to die for their cause, they always want others who they don’t have any emotional attachment to die, they want their friends and family to live however since they are not plagues but the saviors, such arrogance is disgusting.
I am afraid that the dubious idea called “democracy” would remain beneficial to people everywhere in the world, regardless of customs and cultures.
As for environmentalism, it, too, has unintended consequences against humanity, the environment, economy, etc. etc. etc.
Aren’t the activist ideologues being held responsible for imposing Marxist-Leninist and Robespierrist doctrines upon the peoples of the world?
I had enough of the political correctness dogmas. Why? Because it has got the worst in my life. Too much politics are really depressing.
It is important to make discussions more meaningful – and avoid the depressingly political interference that affects people’s daily lives, appropriate values and customs, economy and other aspects – J.P.K.
Why would the ideological belief in environmentalism continue unabated right now? How disquieting, really. Socialist ideologues never learn from true history of Marxist-Leninist tyranny. – J.P.K.
Might as well chime in here, on behalf of the “anti-human, right on, David Attenborough” set, particularly since CFACT is a tarted-up front for the Climate Science Denial/More Cheap Labor, Faster” crowd (of about 1 percent of the population, which looks forward to the day they can pay the other 99 percent a buck-fifty a day in wages, and charge them a dollar-fifty-nine for their daily ration of food, water, a few dozen square feet of shelter and, perhaps soon, oxygen — and also earn interest on the loan to make up the difference.
The truth may indeed be that this planet can somehow support 10 billion people. The rest of the question is, in what kind of Godforsaken aesthetically-dismal existence will those 10 billion humans endure? Just in my lifetime (61 years, during which the population doubled), the interior of the United States has been raped, scraped, channelized, paved, skyscrapered, acid-rainwashed and saturated in toxins; the sylvan East Texas of my youth is now a weedpatch where scrub is all that’s left after the pulpwood cutters took every stick big enough to feed into the maw of the paper-mills while once-pleasant cities like Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston are essentially just hundreds of square miles of heat-retaining asphalt, stalled traffic and noise. And the oceans are whirling gyres of plastic, toxins and pathological organisms.
Skip, if you like, issues like global warming or the exponential rate of increase in species extinction: We are leaving our children and grandchildren nothing but stress and ugliness and a system of valuation of the “Worth of Things” that is based strictly on crunchable numbers: Tract X (hyperdense apartment complexes, multi-story office buildings) have vast value, whereas Tract Y (woodlands and meadows) is only valuable to the extent that it can be converted to a twin of Tract X.
There is no way to preserve the intangibles because they cannot be monetized. Thus they are doomed.
You know it, I know it. The only person who doesn’t know it seems to be the author of this article, who after invoking the hilarious oxymoron, ‘rich environmentalists,’ goes on to assert
Any
environmentalist policy that would drive up the cost of energy, food,
or other essential needs in the name of protecting nature must be
rejected. – See more at:
http://www.cfact.org/2013/01/22/environmentalist-says-humans-are-plague-on-earth/#sthash.BXiE251z.dpuf: “Any environmentalist policy that would drive up the cost of energy, food, or other essentials in the name of nature must be rejected.”
Obviously, that would interfere with the plutocrat plan to stack us deep and work us cheap. Humanity, once upon a time, was NOT a plague, but something wonderful and perhaps unique in the universe: An organism capable of appreciating our self-awareness on this lovely blue marble.
Now, hothoused in our numbers by the two handmaidens of greed — ignorance and religion — all there is to see is the backside or the bumper of the ‘consumption module’ stuck in traffic ahead of us.
I get the feeling the view of the author of the piece is from the window of the first-class seat, gazing down on the folks down here in flyover country. I would hazard he is either an exploiter of the misery of the human condition, or was paid to write the article by one.
Any
environmentalist policy that would drive up the cost of energy, food,
or other essential needs in the name of protecting nature must be
rejected. – See more at:
http://www.cfact.org/2013/01/22/environmentalist-says-humans-are-plague-on-earth/#sthash.BXiE251z.dpuf
Any
environmentalist policy that would drive up the cost of energy, food,
or other essential needs in the name of protecting nature must be
rejected. Instead, we must pursue constructive policies of political and
economic freedom and wise ecological stewardship that will enhance the
future of the world’s people. – See more at:
http://www.cfact.org/2013/01/22/environmentalist-says-humans-are-plague-on-earth/#sthash.BXiE251z.dpuf
Any
environmentalist policy that would drive up the cost of energy, food,
or other essential needs in the name of protecting nature must be
rejected. Instead, we must pursue constructive policies of political and
economic freedom and wise ecological stewardship that will enhance the
future of the world’s people. – See more at:
http://www.cfact.org/2013/01/22/environmentalist-says-humans-are-plague-on-earth/#sthash.BXiE251z.dpuf