The radical green movement is rapidly trying to distance itself from Discovery Channel gunman James J. Lee. That will be difficult to do.
Wednesday afternoon, an armed Lee walked into the offices of the Discovery Channel, took hostages and demanded that the TV network alter its programming to suit his demands as laid out in an 11-point manifesto. The incident ended when police shot him dead.
Lee called for saving the Earth by getting rid of people, whom he referred to as “filth,” and stopping global warming. He called for TV programs encouraging human sterilization and infertility, and exposing civilization’s “disgusting religious-cultural roots and greed.” “All human procreation and farming must cease,” he raved, because “the planet does not need humans.”
Curious to see how the greens would react to the incident, I visited the Grist.org web site, perhaps the most popular green website, where I found an article by Grist senior editor Lisa Hymas entitled, “Discovery hostage taker is a population-obsessed eco-wacko.” [Suggested link is http://www.grist.org/article/2010-09-01-discovery-hostage-taker-population-obsessed-kid-hating-eco-wacko]. I read on as I had never seen one green refer to another as an “eco-wacko.”
Although Hymas wrote that, “Lee is giving us sane and humane enviros and childfree people a bad name,” her effort to distance her cause from Lee was soon challenged. The first comment following her post stated, “So, what is wrong with [Lee’s] logic that he deserved to be shot? He wasn’t wrong.” Two comments later, a commenter stated, “I pretty much agree with what he said… In reality, at this point, the human race is like a growing fungus covering and consuming a grapefruit…”
Like Dr., Frankenstein tying to escape the reputational stain of his eponymous monster, the radical green movement cannot runaway so easily from Lee.
While Lee clearly popped his cork, the comments to Hymas’ article indicate there are apparently others out there whose corks are under similar pressure — thanks to green publications like Grist and green personalities like Al Gore, whose movie, “An Inconvenient Truth,” Lee reportedly credited for “awakening” him to global warming.
Gore, Grist.org and others have urged their followers to civil disobedience. Grist staff write Jonathan Hiskes says he’s all for the easy stuff first (like weatherization and energy efficiency), but if that doesn’t work, Hiskes calls for civil disobedience and ensuing prison, if need be. Ironically, Lee tried civil disobedience with the Discovery Channel in 2008 and wound up in prison. His probation from that incident ended just two weeks ago.
Greens have tried using civil disobedience (even if it involves criminal trespass) to shut down coal mining, coal-fired power plants and gas stations. None of these efforts have succeeded. So what’s next when civil disobedience fails? More James Lees?
Some greens have already leap-frogged over civil disobedience and moved straight into terrorism. In the wake of fire bombings at new housing developments, car dealerships and a ski lodge, the FBI has labeled the Earth Liberation front as a domestic terrorist group. Then there’s sawmill worker George Alexander who was almost decapitated in 1987 when his saw blade hit a tree spike embedded by the California chapter of Earth First!
The greens would also like to harness the power of the state to do violence to their opponents. About so-called global warming “deniers,” Grist writer Dave Roberts wrote in 2006, “we should have war crimes trials for these bastards — some sort of climate Nuremberg.”
It’s true that James Lee was a psycho, but he was just taking radical environmentalism to its logical conclusion. People threaten planet and, if they won’t stop voluntarily, then they must be made to stop. Lee believed that because he steeped himself in today’s radical environmental movement.
To comment on the deniers and believers in AGW.From comments of radical whacko believers who have bought into the religion of global warming you have all the money on your side which has corrupted a relative few climate scientists into using over $30 billion in research grants in trying to prove AGW without success. Also using obfuscation and lies to sustain their claims of an overheating planet which began in around 1850, which they blame the industrial revolution for the increase that climaxed around 1940, then decreased unitl 1970 creating panic about another ice age, then increasing moderately until late 1990’s. Dr. Jones of CRU (climate gate), admitted in public in late 2009 the world hadn’t warmed in 15 years. From 1850 to the present warming total is less than 1 deg C. The egregious lie AGW adherents foisted on an unsuspecting public was “never has there been such an unprecedented warming.” And adding that it could well be unstoppable. I submit that an examination of a climate graph of the Holocene will show the magnitude of the egregious claims here of the global warmers.
Ten years ago I read an article with the ominous title, “The End of History” that claimed it would require 4 planets identical to Earth, to sustain the then 6 billion population to live on the scale enjoyed by people living in northern Europe and the United States. As an Economic Geologist, I knew this estimate to be “in the ballpark.” Our advanced countries were making progress then maintaining our populations. Today we are being overrun by hordes from the third world in search of a life. Sixty years ago I spent 15 months in tropical Africa to assist in the development of their natural resources under the Marshall Plan. I saw up close and personal the modus operandi of the third world family. The more children a couple had, the more prosperous they became,
adding up to 4 wives to augment the flow of children! Now Africa is engaged in inter-tribal genocide to survive. Population wise,
we are literally between a rock and a hard place. If we can’t find a humanitarian solution soon, the next world war with nukes could leave the only self-sufficient people, the South African bushmen and the Aborigines of Australia to carry on.