Seeking to claim the environmental movement for its own, Conservatives often trumpet the fact that Teddy Roosevelt, a Republican, created the National Parks System. Despite environmentalism’s modest beginnings, the movement has become a Socialist leviathan, unworthy of claim by anyone purporting to stand for the God-given rights of man.
Desperate to be accepted at any cost, conservatives have jumped onto a liberal train, hoping to arrive at a conservative destination. In a June 26, 2002 column entitled Liberating America (contd.): Environmentalists Decide Nation Worth Preserving, Steve Sailer asserts that since environmentalists have woken up to the fact that immigration contributes to overpopulation in this country, that conservatives should align with them. Not to disappoint the reader by forgetting to include an apt Hitler analogy, would we fall remiss in not supporting old Adolph in enacting slower speed limits in school zones? While conservatives may like school zone speed limits, improper alliances are still improper, even when the ’cause of the moment’ is just.
As Mr. Sailer points out, many conservative property owners support environmental issues thinking they are protecting their property value by reducing pollution and restricting development in their area. Sadly, the ultimate result will be that they live in a tidy prison cell. This type of short-sighted doctrine plagues the entire environmentalist movement: a tree cut down can never regrow; the extinction of an animal through hunting will throw the ecological balance of the planet off forever; and a gallon of water flushed down the toilet never comes back. In rebuttal: trees are a crop and can be replanted [there is no more vigorous planter of trees than lumber companies;] animals go extinct without human intervention, and have for millennia; and we have the same water on this planet we had at creation…it just goes around and around [there are no water ‘shortages,’ just logistical problems in delivery.]
Besides being short-sighted, environmentalism is pure envy, and a violation of the 10th Commandment. The right to property as ‘God-given’ is established in Scripture, and it is an essential function of government to safeguard it. When government becomes the engine of property rights violation, it becomes the ‘enemy of the people’ rather than the protector of their rights, and must be destroyed [or otherwise forcibly altered.] A people cannot long abide with the rape of the fruits of their labour – indeed, our Founding Fathers came to this same conclusion, at a point when they were far less encumbered than us.
Like environmentalists, King George III was mindful of limited resources, which is why he wanted distribution of as many resources as possible limited to him. The leaders of ‘green organisations’ cry for protecting wildlife/water/trees/dirt, but what they really want is power. Environmentalist leaders like to be invited to talk shows and consulted as ‘experts’ for news segments on ” the destruction of the environment” and such like nonsense. While environmentalist movement leaders don’t have direct control over natural resources, influence over the people who do control them translates into access to the halls of power and the fame and money that comes with it. Were there no fame or power or money in supporting ‘the environment,’ most of the movement’s leaders would move on to pastures greener for their picking, so to speak.
In Every Situation, Follow the Money
Just today, I went to lunch with a carload of guys from the office. The conversation quickly turned to the recent corporate accounting scandals. Since this was my first social contact with this particular group, I went easy on them. The conclusion of the conversation went somewhat like ‘all this scandalous mess comes of greed.’ I might have added that even more greed comes not only from the people who fooled the market long enough to make their own fortunes, but from the people who look to government to ‘do something.’ If anything is ‘done,’ it will be paid for with money taken from the pockets of them who want nothing to do with the mess. As usual, government makes everyone equal…equally miserable.
Not to range too far afield, the key concept in understanding anything that happens involving organised groups of people is to figure out what the group members’ interests are: in other words – ‘follow the money.’ Whoever first uttered that phrase was ‘right on’ in more ways than he could have known. Environmentalism has nothing to do with the environment, campaign finance reform has nothing to do with reforming campaign finance laws, Homeland security has little to do with providing security to the homeland [something that could have been done within weeks of 9.11 if it were.]
We enjoy comfort and the quiet security of simply going about our business, just as our colonial forefathers did before the Revolution. They were, however, stirred to action eventually, just as we will be one day. Woe be to us the day so-called conservatives align en masse with so-called environmentalists, for if there is but a small minority willing to vote for candidates who support private property, then we are guaranteed a tyranny never seen in America – Waco and Ruby Ridge notwithstanding.
Just as when one man is not allowed to say what he wishes, none of us really have freedom of speech, so too are we all without property rights if one man has his taken away for any reason other than real debt owed. The law is supposed to be timeless and not subject to fads of the day, but today we have ‘pop justice,’ in which unfashionable activities are prosecuted as crimes, while fashionable yet heinous activities go unnoticed.
The Ten Commandments long served as a solid foundation for Western Law. Let us pray for a return to them as such, before the only recourse left is a repeat of our 1776 and 1861 struggles against tyranny. Those two wars had vastly different outcomes, but they had one terrible thing in common: a lot of people met an early grave.
Are we ready to stand up for our rights?