PETA is pure evil

[rogue06]

so I wonder if they are for euthanizing children in orphanages?

Various environmentalist groups and activists have long been calling for a culling if not outright elimination of the human race seeing it as a disease that blights the planet.

[mossrose]

Various environmentalist groups and activists have long been calling for a culling if not outright elimination of the human race seeing it as a disease that blights the planet.

Yup. Even the Queen's consort has expressed a desire to be reincarnated as a terrible virus to wipe out all but a million or so people.

[Cow Poke]

Various environmentalist groups and activists have long been calling for a culling if not outright elimination of the human race seeing it as a disease that blights the planet.

Have any of them volunteered to be first?

[Christianbookworm]

Have any of them volunteered to be first?

Right. So, they think we're an invasive species???

[rogue06]

Yup. Even the Queen's consort has expressed a desire to be reincarnated as a terrible virus to wipe out all but a million or so people.

Britain’s Prince Philip, who has headed the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) since 1981^[1], said in the Foreword to Fleur Cowles' If I Were an Animal that "I must confess that I am tempted to ask for reincarnation as a particularly deadly virus."

Now Philip has for decades been a one man gaff machine that would make U.S. Vice President Joe Biden look like the soul of discretion but this was written so it wasn't something that he blurted out off the top of his head. What's more, a year later (1988) he was quoted as saying that "In the event that I am reincarnated, I would like to return as a deadly virus, in order to contribute something to solve over-population."

But he is hardly alone in this sentiment.

CNN founder Ted Turner told "Audubon" magazine that, "Right now, there are just way too many people on the planet,” and that there should be no more than “250 million to 350 million” people on the Earth. Likewise in an address he delivered at Mikhail Gorbachev’s 1995 State of the World Forum (a top non-governmental organization at the UN), environmentalist philosopher and author Sam Keen urged that if we "cut the [world’s] population by 90% and there aren't enough people left to do a great deal of ecological damage."

James E. Lovelock, best known for his advocacy of the Gaia hypothesis, 2006 book, "The Revenge of Gaia: Why the Earth is Fighting Back – and How we Can Still Save Humanity"^[2] calls for nine-tenths of humanity to vanish to "save" the planet from global warming which he claims will kill billions of humans by the end of the century with the survivors forced to move to the Arctic regions to survive.^[3]

According to "Earthbound: New Introductory Essays in Environmental Ethics": "Massive human die-backs would be good. It is our duty to cause them. It is our species’ duty, relative to the whole, to eliminate 90 percent of our numbers." "Environmental Ethics" you say.

While AFAICT they didn't offer any suggestions on how they would like to see our numbers slashed others have and generally go along with Prince Philip.

Retired National Park Service research biologist, who served as the Chief Scientist for the Pacific West Region David Graber remarked in his review of Bill McKibben’s "The End of Nature" for the Los Angeles Times: "We have become a plague upon ourselves and upon the Earth. Until such a time as Homo sapiens should decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along." He would later concede that "death is by far the crudest and cruelest solution to a problem of crowding" but stood by his earlier comments.

Graber has also stated that, "We are not interested in the utility of a particular species, or free-flowing river, or ecosystem, to mankind. They have ... more value to me than another human body, or a billion of them."

A 1989 Earth First! newsletter asserted that "If radical environmentalists were to invent a disease to bring human populations back to sanity, it would probably be something like AIDS." Since AIDS didn't turn out to be the disease that they had hoped for I imagine that today they would be rooting for Ebola.

Paul Watson, a founder of Greenpeace, said we are the "AIDS of the earth" and "We, the human species, have become a viral epidemic to the earth." This sentiment was echoed by tropical biologist Thomas Lovejoy who is a Senior Fellow at the United Nations Foundation and University Professor in the Environmental Science and Policy department at George Mason University, who wrote that "The planet is about to break out with fever, indeed it may already have, and we [human beings] are the disease. We should be at war with ourselves and our lifestyles."

David Foreman, who has worked for The Wilderness Society as Southwest Regional Representative, was a board member for the New Mexico chapter of The Nature Conservancy and served on the Sierra Club’s board of directors before helping to co-found Earth First!, is infamous for his comments about the famines in Ethiopia a few decades back: "The best thing would be just to let nature seek its own balance, to let the people there starve." Nature didn't need to "seek its own balance" there considering that the famine was largely man-made.

Stewart Brand, founding editor and publisher of the Whole Earth Catalog has said that "We have wished, we eco-freaks, for a disaster or for a social change to come and bomb us into the Stone Age, where we might live like Indians in our valley, with our localism; our appropriate technology, our homemade religion – guilt free at last!" "Appropriate technology"? According to Brand that means the Stone Age.

But the aforementioned Earth First’s! David Foreman doesn't even want gardens! "We can see that life in a hunter-gather society was on the whole healthier, happier, and more secure than our lives today.” Strange, I thought our life expectancy is nearly three times as long now than it was in the Stone Age. If you’re dead how can you be "healthier, happier, and more secure"?

In his influential "Respect for Nature: A Theory of Environmental Ethics" Paul W. Taylor wrote that "The ending of the human epoch on Earth would most likely be greeted with a hearty ‘Good riddance!’" There is that "Environmental Ethics" again.

And this has been going on for quite some time. Back when the use of DDT was being banned Charles Wurster, a leading environmentalist with the Environmental Defense Fund, captured this thinking succinctly in 1972. When it was mentioned to him that the banning of DDT would cost millions of lives in poor countries, Wurster responded: "So what? People are the cause of all the problems. We have too many of them. We need to get rid of some of them and this is as good a way as any." (“Them” includes "all those little brown people in poor countries," as fellow de-populationist Dr. Van den Bosch of the University of California so indelicately put it).

His views were far from atypical. In the 1960s World Health Organization (WHO) authorities believed there was no alternative to the overpopulation problem but to assure that up to 40% of the children in poor nations would die of malaria. As an official of the Agency for International Development stated: "Rather dead than alive and riotously reproducing."

Finally, there was the late South African botanist, zoologist, biologist, anthropologist, Lyall Watson who in a 1995 editorial in The Fiscal Times wrote that cannibalism is a "radical but realistic solution to the problem of overpopulation." One can only hope it was similar to Jonathan Swift's satirical economic essay "A Modest Proposal" where he suggested that poverty, hunger and overpopulation could be eliminated in Ireland if the Irish would only eat their children. But given the above it really is hard to tell.

Strange that you never see any of these advocates for massively reducing the human population ever taking the lead and practicing what they preach. Much like PETA and pet ownership, that is obviously something meant for everyone else.

















1. International President from 1981, and President Emeritus from 1996

2. Some editions of the book have a different, less optimistic subtitle: "Earth's Climate Crisis and the Fate of Humanity."

3. "By 2040, parts of the Sahara desert will have moved into middle Europe. We are talking about Paris – as far north as Berlin."

[Cerebrum123]

Hey rogue06, maybe you should share some of this stuff with The Pixie on AP's thread about "Genesis and Anti's".

[Christianbookworm]

Rougue's post quote sounds like something a certain Batman villain would say...

Ra's ah ghul

[Jedidiah]

James E. Lovelock, best known for his advocacy of the Gaia hypothesis, 2006 book, "The Revenge of Gaia: Why the Earth is Fighting Back – and How we Can Still Save Humanity"^[2] calls for nine-tenths of humanity to vanish to "save" the planet from global warming which he claims will kill billions of humans by the end of the century with the survivors forced to move to the Arctic regions to survive.^[3]

These folks should support global warming. It won't hurt the earth but, as they imagine it, it will serve to cut the human population drastically.

[Cow Poke]

These folks should support global warming. It won't hurt the earth but, as they imagine it, it will serve to cut the human population drastically.

Let NATURE do the dirty work!

[Christianbookworm]

As long as they don't try to put an evil plan to reduce the human population into effect! Because... I don't know who's job it would be to stop it!