The Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology believes it has discovered in the annals of history a champion — though inadvertent — of environmentalism. They proclaim: Genghis Khan’s Mongol invasion in the 13th and 14th centuries was so vast that it may have been the first instance in history of a single culture causing man-made climate change, according to new research out of the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology. Unlike modern day climate change, however, the Mongol invasion actually cooled the planet, effectively scrubbing around 700 million tons of carbon from the atmosphere.
Julia Pongratz, who was in charge of the institute’s research project, claims that Khan — by his mass murder of up to 40 million people, inadvertently caused a beneficial effect on other life on the planet:
We found that during the short events such as the Black Death and the Ming Dynasty collapse, the forest re-growth wasn’t enough to overcome the emissions from decaying material in the soil. But during the longer-lasting ones like the Mongol invasion there was enough time for the forests to re-grow and absorb significant amounts of carbon.… We cannot ignore knowledge we have gained.
Pongratz explains that this research will be utilized to “make land-use decisions that will diminish our impact on climate and the carbon cycle.” She is part of a growing body of environmentalists in the research community who suggest that what has traditionally been considered good for mankind may not be good for nature.
James Lovelock, creator of the Mother Earth/Gaia theory of life, believes that most humans may not have the intelligence to deal with climate change anyway. He told the Telegraph last March: “I don’t think we’ve yet evolved to the point where we’re clever enough to handle as complex a situation as climate change…The inertia of humans is so huge that you can’t really do anything meaningful.” He observed that government may need stricter controls on the populace: “I have a feeling that climate change may be an issue as severe as a war. It may be necessary to put democracy on hold for awhile.”
Pentti Linkola, a Finnish global-warming believer, summarizes the views of many environmentalists: “The difference between a terrorist and a freedom fighter is a matter of perspective: it all depends on the observer and the verdict of history.” Linkola also reserves special venom for America: “The U.S. is the most wretchedly villainous state of all times. Anyone aware of global issues can easily imagine how vast the hatred for the United States — a corrupted, swollen, paralyzing and suffocating political entity — must be across the Third World.” Linkola quite frankly sees human life as sometimes worthless: “… many people, as a matter of fact, simply have no value.”
Keith Farnish is another scientist who seems to stray from hard science into misanthropy with statements such as this: “The only way to prevent global ecological collapse and thus ensure the survival of humanity is to rid the world of Industrial Civilization.” He supported Greenpeace activists who tried to damage a coal-fired power station in Kent, England, on the grounds that the harm which the power generation would do to the planet exceeded any damage caused by the activists. Farnish has predicted that “people will die in huge numbers when civilization collapses,” something that he believes is imminent in the next few decades.
Dr Eric Pianka, in a March 3, 2006 speech to the Texas Academy of Science, is okay with that: “I actually think the world will be much better when there’s only 10% or 20% of us left.” He dreams of an airborne strain of virus that can “control the scourge of humanity.”
Dr. William Burger, another radical ecologist, has stated: “Surely, the Black Death was one of the best things that ever happened to Europe: elevating the worth of human labor, reducing environmental degradation, and, rather promptly, producing the Renaissance. From where I sit, Planet Earth could use another major human pandemic, and pronto!”
The horrific image of a planet with too much life is in direct contrast to the Jewish and Christian faiths, which believe that God enjoins man to “be fruitful and multiply.” This low view of human life also sounds remarkably like the racial consciousness of the Nazis (and American proponents of eugenics before the Nazis). And there is yet another problem with this “scientific” attitude toward human population on the earth: It is bad science.
The population of the world is, in fact, slowing down. Without any supra-governmental authority, projections of population growth show the earth’s human population leveling out at 9 billion people in a few decades and then slowly beginning to decline. More important for these radical ecologists to understand, the population of the most industrialized parts of the world — where people produce carbon emissions, eat more than a subsistence diet, live in nice homes, etc. — is already declining in many places today even though life expectancy is increasing. In Europe, for instance, there are almost no countries in which the rate of reproduction is high enough to sustain current population (and that includes France, whose higher rates of reproduction are among the large numbers of relatively low-carbon-emission Muslims). Add to declining birth rates the exodus of population from Europe (except for the influx of Muslims into western Europe), and there is no population growth crisis at all — we will actually need more people than are being born now.
The peculiar notion that the human race will grow much more quickly than it can be sustained by food supplies is at least as old as Thomas Malthus, whose grim Malthusian Theory of more than two centuries ago predicted just such a scenario. Indeed, the slow growth rate of population in Europe during the 1920s was a source of comment and concern. Paul Ehrlich, in his 1968 bestseller The Population Bomb, was another who warned that the human race was past the point of no return, even if extreme measures were taken. No matter what people did, he said, “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s the world will undergo famines — hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite any crash programs embarked upon now.” Erlich’s gloomy predictions of 43 years ago have proven inaccurate, even though his radical measures were ignored.
The crisis that mankind faces today, as actuarial financial researchers are quick to note, is a declining birth rate, and the average age of a European, Japanese, or American is getting older each year. The contributions of younger citizens — the prop which sustains pensions and social security systems throughout the industrialized world — will have to increase or the payments made to retired workers will have to decrease (which has proven to be an “Entitlement Bomb” with much more substance than Ehrlich’s “Population Bomb”). This crisis is aggravated by these retirees who are living longer and thus receiving more benefits, and so the shrinking population of young workers is facing a growing population of retired citizens to support.
A dispassionate view of eugenics, ecology, and environmentalism over the last century reveals less serious science and more angry religion full of pagan deities.
Illustration: Genghis Khan
