By Andrew
Follett
Wednesday, June
30, 2021
Afew days ago, in North Arlington,
one of the most affluent neighborhoods in the D.C. suburbs out in northern
Virginia, people awoke to an unexpected scene of destruction. The tires of
several SUVs had been slashed, and in the window of each affected vehicle was
plastered an identical note. The manifesto read, in part:
We have deflated
one or several tyres of your SUV. Don’t take it personally. […]
Scientists
are entirely sure that we are very close to pushing climate change over a
threshold, into a phase where it will be totally out of control and cause
irreversible damage. […]
This does
not have to happen if we impose a radical cut on carbon emissions. Now. Not
tomorrow. That’s why we have disarmed your SUV by deflating the tires. Since
you live in a city with a functioning and accessible public transportation
system you will have no problem going where you want without your SUV.
—Climate
Liberation Front
@FrontClimate
on Twitter
The Twitter account that the wannabe ecoterrorist group created has as its tagline:
“We must rise up to fight the impending climate disaster that capitalism has
brought upon us.” So far, the account has just a single tweet, which warns,
“This is only the beginning.” The tweet was sent by an iPhone.
The irony of iPhone-wielding
anti-capitalists LARPing a green revolution is palpable, but their actions are
representative of a broader trend. Many environmentalists have abandoned
promoting meaningful environmental stewardship in favor of a willingness to
destroy property, to punish “climate sinners,” and to control the lives of
others, rather than promoting meaningful environmental stewardship. But the
only real effect of the Climate Liberation Front will be the slight increase in
CO2 emissions of buying replacement tires.
Legally, any “acts dangerous to human life that are a violation of the criminal
laws of the United States or of any State” that attempt to change government
policy can be considered terrorism. So slashing the tires of an SUV could
certainly qualify.
But outright ecoterrorism isn’t just
limited to iPhone activists slashing tires.
An especially topical example of
crime-in-the-name-of-saving-the-planet comes from Tracy Stone-Manning,
President Biden’s nominee to lead the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), who
participated in ecoterrorism. If confirmed as Biden’s BLM director,
Stone-Manning would oversee 12 percent of the U.S. landmass, or 245 million acres of public
lands.
Stone-Manning admitted to a local news
outlet in 1993 that she would have faced conspiracy charges had she not struck
an immunity deal with a federal prosecutor in return for her testimony,
according to an investigation by The Daily
Caller News Foundation.
Stone-Manning testified in federal court
in 1993 that she sent a threatening letter to the Forest Service warning that a
local forest had been sabotaged with potentially deadly tree spikes to prevent
logging. In other words, Stone-Manning aided ecoterrorists hiding metal spikes
in trees intended to shatter loggers’ chain saws on impact.
Tree-spiking causes serious injuries for
loggers, with one 23-year-old mill worker in California having his jaw cut in
half when his saw exploded upon striking a concealed tree spike, according
to the Washington
Post.
Perhaps the farthest-reaching example of
violence perpetrated in the name of the environment is the Chinese Communist
Party’s failed experiment in coercive population control. For decades, China
limited couples to one child in the name of resource conservation, later
raising the cap to two and then three children. (The CCP is now considering removing
all limits by 2025.) Those limits have led to incalculable suffering, including over 100 million sterilizations
and over 300 million abortions, many of them forced.
Stone-Manning is guilty of embracing the
exact same anti-human strain of environmentalism, advocating for
population control in her 1992 graduate thesis that
called babies an “environmental hazard.”
Stone-Manning is hardly alone in that
view. Former president Barack Obama’s science czar John Holdren once stated
that he wants to see a “decline in fertility to well below replacement” in the United
States, because “280 million [Americans] in 2040 is likely to be much too
many.” As of 2021, there are more than 331 million Americans; census
projections estimate there will be 373.5 million
Americans by 2040. Naturally, Holdren doesn’t mention what he thinks should
happen to the 93 million “excess” Americans.
Biden himself even expressed acceptance of
China’s regime of coerced sterilizations and forced abortions. He told a Chinese audience during his tenure as vice president, when the
one-child policy was still in full swing, “Your policy has been one which I
fully understand — I’m not second-guessing — of one child per family.” (He
later claimed to believe the policy was repugnant — but not enough, apparently,
to want to condemn it in the presence of the people who were responsible for
it.)
The human-rights abuses that have resulted
from China’s family-size limits could be classified as state-sponsored
ecoterrorism. Most ecoterrorism occurs on a much smaller scale than that
totalitarian nightmare, of course, and is limited to property damage.
Protesters affiliated with Greenpeace previously destroyed
trials of genetically modified wheat operated by Australia’s national science agency.
“For an organization that claims to be
dedicated to the protection of the environment, this is an unconscionable act,”
Suzanne Cory, president of the Australian Academy of Sciences, told the
science magazine Nature at the time. The wheat had been engineered to increase its
nutritional value and to improve the health of those consuming it.
In 2013, Greenpeace protesters destroyed a
genetically modified crop of Golden Rice in the Philippines because of alleged health concerns. The rice is
modified to prevent Vitamin A deficiency, which causes blindness and
malnutrition, and was to be given to impoverished children. Vitamin A
deficiency kills 1.15 million children each year, according to the United Nations
International Children’s Emergency Fund. A study by
Cambridge University estimates that Greenpeace’s delaying
of Golden Rice has cost 1,424,000 life-years since 2002 in India alone.
Other Greenpeace activists irreparably
damaged the Nazca Lines, a
1,500-year-old World Heritage Site in Peru, for a publicity stunt in 2014. The
Peruvian government filed criminal
charges against the
activists.
“It’s a true slap in the face at
everything Peruvians consider sacred,” said Peru’s deputy culture minister Luis Jaime Castillo.
Environmental stewardship may be a
laudable goal. But when extremists try to use it to justify terrorism,
destruction, and a blatant disregard for human welfare, a line has been
crossed. And the people crossing that line are sadly not just attention-seeking
petty criminals like the tire-slashing Climate Liberation Front. Such radical
views have found a home in prominent environmental organizations — and they may
even find one in the Biden White House.
No comments:
Post a Comment