Hypocrite's dilemma

It may be hard to believe now, but some 25 years ago, the "en-vironmentalist" organizations promoted a better environment. The Sierra Club pushed for environmentally benign nuclear energy to replace polluting coal, the Audubon Society promoted bird watching rather than horror fiction, and an abomination like the Natural Resources Defense Council, dedicated to the deindustrialization of the US by legalistic sabotage, did not exist.

The old type of environmentalism lives on in most members of the "environmental" organization, as indeed, it lives on in most other people. No one wants polluted air just as no one wants nuclear war. But just as the universal desire for peace can be exploited by left-wing fascists to promote a political agenda, so can the universal desire for a clean environment be exploited by the coercive radicals of the "environmentalist" leadership for the condemnation of private property, especially that of natural resources, and for the condemnation of science and technology, especially when used for the defense of freedom. The two twin streams have merged into a single "Green" Party in Germany and elsewhere; and the advent of a greenish-red party in the US cannot be far behind.

It is clear to all whose heads survive the media brainwash that in pressing their agenda, the "environmentalist" leaders use the environment as a bait, but care no more about it than a fisher-man cares about the worm on his hook. That is why this newsletter has always put their "environmentalism" in derisive quotes and called them sham-environmentalists.

But the Browers and Naders are not just indifferent to the en-vironment: they are quite willing to pollute it to a degree that has no parallel in industrial pollution. The classic case of this is nuclear power, whose obstruction by the sham-environmenta-lists annually causes tens of thousands of premature deaths by pollution from less healthful energy sources. But there are other cases, such as the amendments to the Clean Air Act lobbied through Congress by an unholy alliance of the Sierra Club and Eastern coal companies. It requires reduction of sulfur by a percentage, regardless of how much sulfur it originally contained. Thus Western coal goes into the scrubbers cleaner than Eastern coal comes out of them, damaging the utilities as desired by the Sierra Club, raising profits by congressional legislation as desired by the Eastern coal companies, and practicing waste disposal in human lungs as needed by "environmentalist" politics.

Pesticides are another example. Rachel Carson's emotional and media-extolled, but scientifically worthless Silent Spring was the trigger for a worldwide anti-pesticide campaign. It led to the utterly unjustified ban of DDT, one of the great discoveries of this century; and that ban resulted in the loss of millions of acres of forest to the gypsy moth in the US Northwest and New England, and in the loss of millions of lives to malaria in the Third World.

In the foreseeable future the envipocrats will get what they allegedly always wanted: no more chemical pesticides. Genetic engineering is approaching the point where (among many other miracles) it can engineer crop plants that are naturally toxic to insects, for they will incorporate the gene that makes the Marigold flower produce its own insect repellent.

And that is what they will do with pesticides. They will not mention the engineering of deer into cattle and birds into poultry, in which thousands of genes were changed by human intervention; they will depict two-headed monsters causing the earth to fly out of orbit when a single gene is spliced into the DNA chain.

And supported by the Great Media Brainwash, flanked by the AIDS virus and the cholera germ, Jeremy Rifkin and Ralph Nader will march on toward the coercive society where the riff-raff produces so that the better people can regulate.