Nature Wept

We all know that hardcore environmentalism is just religion for the godless, with a bit of insanity added in for good measure. Well, get a load of this bit of envirolunacy:

Talk about projection! This reminds Keyser of the way that on sports shows they describe attempts to overcome natural obstacles as a confrontation. The mountain or river is the “enemy” that gets “beaten/defeated” by the mountaineer or rafter. Even as a child, Keyser used to think such language absurd. The mountain or river couldn’t care less about the human activity. After all, it has no personality or consciousness at all, and would keep on sticking up into the air or gushing downstream whether or not solipsistic people were “struggling” with them or not.

But animals are a bit different in that they do have personalities and a consciousness after a fashion, so it’s easy to foist human emotions onto them. For the enviromaniacs, thoughts of “global warming” drive them to despair, so they image that apes, polar bears and wallabies feel the same way.

What a lot of hooey! When has a chimpanzee ever committed suicide, much less with a noose, much less because of his despondency about humans’ attitudes towards nature? And note the blurb at the end: if we give up, they give up. It’s as if the natural world couldn’t exist without people, and if people think the wrong thoughts, in a sort of updated version of the ancient concept of “sympathy” in nature (the idea that the natural world is thrown out of kilter by unnatural activities in the human world, such as the overthrow of a divinely anointed king), nature is forced to do itself in by “bad think” on the part of humans.

In the old philosophical question, one wondered whether a tree falling in the forest without anyone to hear it made any sound. Now it’s become whether a forest can exist without “good think” from people. And in the febrile imaginations of the enviro-loons, the answer would seem to be no.