London Daily Mail
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/index.html
2 February 2009
So the deepest green of them all turns out to be not so much a friend of the earth as an enemy of the human race.
Jonathon Porritt, the Government’s ‘green’ adviser, has said that couples who have more than two children are being ‘irresponsible’ by creating an unbearable burden on the environment.
Curbing population growth through contraception and abortion must therefore be at the heart of policies to fight man-made global warming. Apparently this is all because people have to accept responsibility ‘for their total environmental footprint’.That’s what having children amounts to, apparently, in his mind. The blessings of a large family and the contribution this makes to prosperity and progress don’t figure at all. Instead, children are to be measured solely by their burdensome impact on the planet.
What kind of sinister and dehumanised mindset is this? It is no coincidence that the country which comes nearest to Porritt’s ideal society is Communist China, which imposed a murderously cruel policy of restricting families to one child apiece. For the desire to reduce the number of children that parents produce is innately totalitarian.
Reproduction is humanity’s strongest instinct. To seek to curb it is to interfere with one of our most fundamental freedoms and desires. To do so on the basis that Jonathon Porritt possesses unique insight into the needs of our world which is denied to the lesser mortals who inhabit it is not just monumental arrogance — it is also the delusion of totalitarian tyrants from Stalin to Hitler to Mao.
But then the green movement is essentially totalitarian in outlook. It sees people as a nuisance which has to be controlled. Accordingly, green interference in our lives now stretches from turning the ordinary lightbulb into an endangered species, telling hospitals to stop serving meat on patients’ menus, and sending round the garbage police if someone commits the crime of putting a tin can or plastic bottle into the receptacle designated for paper.
Now, by pointing out what he says is the population ‘ghost at the table’, Porritt has blown environmentalism’s cover. For he is not some maverick sounding off. These views are mainstream within the green movement, and they are growing.
This month, an international campaign is being launched called ‘Global Population Speak Out’ to publicise the link between ‘the size and growth of the human population and environmental degradation’.
A green GP, Dr Pippa Hayes, says she will actually refuse to offer fertility treatment to women who want to have more than four children, because she believes that this places an ‘insupportable burden’ on the earth’s resources.
It is shocking that a GP should not only have such anti-human views, but seek to impose them upon her patients — refusing to act in their interests, which she subordinates to an ideology.
Doctors have a duty to support life. That’s why some doctors refuse to have anything to do with abortion. For a doctor to regard herself as a ‘conscientious objector’ for wanting to reduce human life is to turn not just medical ethics but also the foundation of our common humanity inside out.
It’s a short step from that to seeing human beings as some kind of disease.
Indeed, another prominent establishment green, the former diplomat Sir Crispin Tickell — who has said we should be pursuing policies that would reduce our population to 20 million, or one-third of its current level — remarked: ‘Someone has said that constantly increasing growth is the doctrine of the cancer cell. You just get out of control.’
From this revolting attitude it is again but a short step to seeing people as mere objects to be disposed of. When coupled with the unspoken but implicit subtext that the populations that need most to be controlled in the world are black and brown, it turns into outright racism.
Accordingly, it results in a blind eye to genocide. When mass slaughter took place in Rwanda in 1994 and the world stood by and did nothing, there was much talk about how this was inevitable because of the high population density that was causing land shortages and poverty. It was no accident that Hitler was a green.
There is in fact a direct line running between the modern environmental movement and the anti-human mindset of population control. Fundamental to green thinking is the belief that human consumption is innately bad.
Human life itself is seen as a pollutant, not merely by producing too much carbon and thus contributing to global warming but by generally consuming and producing
too much and thus eating up the planet like locusts.
The roots of this thinking go back to the 18th century, when it was first thought that population growth would outstrip the earth’s resources and would lead to famine, starvation and death.
Despite the fact that the world’s population massively increased and resources expanded to sustain it, the belief persisted in progressive circles and led to eugenics and thence to fascism.
Of course there are places in the world where people are starving. Yet that isn’t because natural resources have a limit but the result of the tyrannies, ignorance or cultural restrictions which prevent the poor of the world from harnessing the resources of the earth.
What’s more, Porritt’s two-child limit is particularly neuralgic when it comes to Britain, where many people are indeed having no more than one or two children — with the result that the indigenous population is not replicating itself.
The rise in Britain’s population is made up almost entirely of immigrants, at the cost of its identity.
The green movement has provided a respectable camouflage for the population control movement, which went underground after the Nazi era.
That’s why Porritt is a patron of the Optimum Population Trust, which moans that every baby born in Britain will burn carbon equivalent in quantity to an area of woodland the size of Trafalgar Square.
Another of the Trust’s patrons, the environmental guru Paul R. Ehrlich, predicted in his seminal 1968 book The Population Bomb that during the Seventies and Eighties hundreds of millions of people would starve to death — about 65 million of them in the U.S. — and that by the year 2000 ‘England will not exist’.
But then the whole man-made global warming theory has turned out to be just as absurd.
As Britain shivers in its harshest winter for 13 years, atmospheric data shows that the earth is getting colder, not hotter, the ice caps are increasing not disappearing and the rise in sea level has slowed and is nothing out of the ordinary.
Yet despite the patent absurdity of these predictions of environmental doom, this thinking now dominates political life.
The reason is undoubtedly the grip upon politics of those who want to control our lives in order to reshape society.
In all corners of everyday life, from state interference in parenting to telling people what to eat or what not to drink, from council snoopers to idiotic health and safety rules, the aim is to control and change the way we behave.
The green movement camouflages this sinister tendency under cover of the urgent necessity of saving the planet. But with people like Jonathon Porritt apparently believing that the only thing wrong with the planet is the human race, the big question must be just who he will be saving it for.
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