Ch. 01 – On Being Green (Part 4)

 This article is an excerpt from Chapter one in my new book The Chicken Little Agenda – Debunking Experts’ Lies. You can find out more about the book here, and can order the book from this link. This is the fourth of eleven parts for Chapter one that will be presented here sequentially. Click here to read Part 3.

Chapter 1

The Green Revolution

On Being Green

“It’s not easy being green,” crooned Kermit the Muppet to an entire generation of tykes. Columnist Alston Chase quoted a German Green politician who had been recently elected to the Bundestag—the German parliament: “Grass-roots democracy sounded wonderful before we were elected to Parliament. But now we are in power, centralized solutions seem far more effective.”

“Green” is an idea whose time has come. It is impos­sible today to find a politician who will disavow “the environment.” From every side of the political spec­trum, long-term members and candidate wannabes alike decry radical actions by fringe Greens, while giv­ing lip service to their so-called underlying principles. Does “Green,” as Time magazine says, merely mean “our stand on the planet is that we support its sur­vival”? Or is there something behind the rhetoric of survival, beyond National Wildlife calendars, beneath Hollywood movie-star environmental protests?

David Brower, who at eighty-eight succumbed to cancer on November 5, 2000, was widely considered to be the “Archdruid” of the American environmental movement. In their 1993 book Trashing the Economy, Ron Arnold and Alan Gottlieb quote Brower: “I found­ed Friends of the Earth to make the Sierra Club look reasonable. Then I founded Earth Island Institute to make Friends of the Earth look reasonable. Earth First! now makes us look reasonable. We’re still wait­ing for someone to come along and make Earth First! look reasonable.” (Earth First! is the group responsible for spiking trees, sabotaging logging equipment, and undertaking other terrorist activities in the name of the environment.)

Brower was arguably the most influential of the environmental activists. He set the tone for the inter­national Green movement: strident and extreme. In her 1990 book Trashing the Planet, the late Dixy Lee Ray quotes Brower: “Childbearing [should be] a pun­ishable crime against society, unless the parents hold a government license. . . . All potential parents [should be] required to use contraceptive chemicals, the gov­ernment issuing antidotes to citizens chosen for child­bearing.” Catherine Foster writing in The Christian Science Monitor on April 8, 1991, quotes Brower: “More is a four letter word. . . . I’d like to declare open sea­son on developers. Not kill them, just tranquilize them.” Dixy Lee Ray quotes his mantra in 1993 in her book Environmental Overkill: “While the death of young men in war is unfortunate, it is no more serious than the touching of mountains and wilderness areas by humankind.”

Wendell Berry, an eloquent agrarian admired by Greens, writes: “In living in the world by his own will and skill, the stupidest peasant or tribesman is more competent than the most intelligent workers or techni­cians or intellectuals in a society of specialists.” Stephanie Mills, the Green journalist, puts it this way: “[Recreation activities of young moderns] may not cul­tivate the endurance necessary for the kind of labor required to dismantle industrial society and restore the Earth’s productivity.” Elsewhere she writes, “The ecofascist in me finds it hard to trust even the out­come of a democratic process.” She goes on to imply that the only way to save the Earth is for an elite group of biology-smart ecologists to rule the rest of us with benevolent firmness. She concludes that a major ele­ment in bringing this about is totally abolishing pri­vate ownership of land.

Is this beginning to sound familiar?

(Part 5 of 11 follows)