Reuters and CNN have reports on the hostage situation at Discovery Channel headquarters. As Business Insider reports about James Jay Lee, the man who has explosive strapped to himself and taken hostages at DC HQ: “He is an anti-capitalist Malthusian who wants the Discovery Channel to stop any programming that promotes capitalism, human birth, progress…” Lee’s11-point manifesto includes this:
2. All programs on Discovery Health-TLC must stop encouraging the birth of any more parasitic human infants and the false heroics behind those actions. In those programs’ places, programs encouraging human sterilization and infertility must be pushed. All former pro-birth programs must now push in the direction of stopping human birth, not encouraging it…
10. Stop all shows glorifying human birthing on all your channels and on TLC…
11. … All human procreation and farming must cease!
Lee repeatedly refers to human beings and civilization as pollution. The media will likely ignore his political views, so not to taint the entire green movement as anti-human, but in fact it is not all that extreme as it would seem to the untutored eye. As we noted in our January 2010 editorial, “A deadly climate,” the environmentalist position is essentially anti-human, with concerns about our “carbon footprint” really being opposition to there being so many human beings doing human things:
What we call “climate change” is only the most recent outbreak of a perennial phenomenon which affects all human cultures from time to time. In Sophocles’ tragedy, Oedipus Rex, Thebes is suffering from “pollution”; in the Middle Ages, there would be intermittent outbreaks of real and imagined plagues. Oddly enough, the cure for both of these problems was the same: Thebes is cured by the expulsion of Oedipus, and the numerous Medieval texts claim that the “plague” often abated after a pogrom of local Jews. If modern medicine has made these actions seem outrageous and unacceptable, modern climate science has stepped into the breach, convincing us that “carbon” is the poisonous element – everywhere and nowhere – that chokes our air, and stagnates our water.
Distressingly, the diagnosis of climate scientists is not very different from Sophocles’ oracle or the witch doctor of the Dark Ages: all of the causes of climate change are euphemisms for man. The problem is not the carbon footprint, but the person who leaves it; the problem is not carbon consumption, but the carbon consumer; the problem is not even pollution, but the hidden polluter. The real pollution is always the same thing, and it is always a person.
Lee’s manifesto may seem outrageous and extreme, but it is the logical conclusion of where the environmentalist movement will take us.
