After the disaster that was the disaster movie “The Day After Tomorrow”, you might have thought that preachy, anti-human, pro-gaia, people-are-a-blight-on-the-planet feature films would have gone the way of the dodo bird.
But it is not to be so. Witness the pending release of the remake of “The Day the Earth Stood Still”.
My favorite line from the Trailer (and therefore, probably the best line in the movie), is (as I recall) “If the Earth dies, you die. If you die, the Earth lives”.
So, Klatu, the alien sent to warn mankind about playing with Nuclear Weapons in the original movie, is now some kind of green Terminator (or exterminator), sent to save mother Earth from the nasty, despoiling humans, blah blah blah.
Imagine an Al Gore speech, with $millions of Special Effects CGI.
Of course, this kind of thinking isn’t limited to the big screen, in this new age of Hope & Change in America…
Foxnews has a piece on a group called Rising Tide, that Klatu would certainly support.
Rising Tide isn’t protesting the causes of global warming as much as the solutions.
It is against clean coal, nuclear power and capping carbon pollution while letting polluters buy and sell rights to pollute under the cap — the very fixes under discussion in Washington.
It disdains the compromise and collaboration between the Big 10 environmental groups and elite corporations, as well as the view that technology can save the environment.
Rising Tide originated in the Netherlands in 2000. It came to the U.S. in 2006.
That’s when a group of activists involved in Earth First!, one of the earliest groups to use in-your-face tactics such as tree-sitting and blocking roads with human chains, decided that more attention needed to be paid to global warming.
“There was a huge need for a climate-focused group that wasn’t going to compromise … not do what is conducive to business,
but what we actually need for ecosystems on this planet to survive,” said Abigail Singer, who was in those early discussions and is one of roughly 20 people who lead Rising Tide nationally.
Rising Tide’s targets include other environmentalists.
A quick trip to the groups website gives us more insight on their ideals:
Rising Tide North America’s strategy is based on a no-compromise approach of stopping the extraction of more fossil fuels and preventing the construction of new fossil fuel infrastructure. Equally important, we must phase out our current fossil fuel use and make a just transition to sustainable ways of living. What this means in terms of local organizing depends on the specific conditions unique to each town and bioregion. Rising Tide’s tactics are diverse and creative, taking a
bottom-up approach to connecting the dots between oil, war, capitalism, coal, and the destabilization of the global climate.
Practical solutions exist; it’s time we start using them and making them more widely accessible. We must dismantle the systems of oppression that permeate our culture and ourselves, and work toward real solidarity across lines of race, class, gender and sexual
orientation. When we begin to build a culture of mutual aid and community autonomy, we demonstrate that we don’t need the government, and certainly not giant corporations, to survive. We just need a
livable planet.
I have a new favorite phrase from their statement: Environmental Racism.
We also reject nuclear energy and dams; these unsustainable mega-projects often result in the devastation of local bioregions and the displacement of both their natural and human communities. Rather, we advocate a drastic increase in energy conservation and support a transition to clean energy sources such as wind, solar, and micro-hydro power.
Ecosystem preservation, recovery and restoration is essential to sequestering carbon and curbing the exponential rate of species extinction. Our agricultural systems also must be made to work more in
harmony with the Earth’s systems; it’s time to abandon industrial agriculture in favor of small-scale, local food sources.
Of course, if these folks spent any time researching the things they talk about, they would know that solar and wind power, on a scale that can provide the energy needed to support the worlds population, would affect the environment at least as much as fossil fuels do today. And the idea that 6 billion people can be fed by “small scale local food sources” is completely unworkable.
What I am afraid of is that they DO understand the limitations on population of the goals the espouse. That the human population would be necessarily reduced to the point that micro-hydro, windmills, and solar cells could provide enough energy to support a greatly reduced population that could be supported by the agricultural model the champion.
Who suffers the most from this? Why, the “brown” peoples of the world. The very people they claim are oppressed by our current society, will, to fit their world view, need to be culled in huge numbers, to achieve a sustainable population that can live in “harmony” with mother Earth.
Who is the environmental racist now?
I will give Rising Tide this cudo: Their politcal structure is what they preach. From all evidence, they are a collective group of “cells” with no clear overall governance. This, itself, seperates them from other far Left organizations, that tend to be personal aggrandizement vehicles for a few personalities at the top of the pyramid.
The question I am left with, when considering script writers (and thereby actors and movie studios) that consider Man to be a blight on the face of the Earth; and groups like Rising Tide, who posit that Man must be forced to live in harmony with nature (though they don’t seems to admit anywhere that I can see that this will require population reduction on a truly massive scale), is just why the Left hates Mankind to such a deep abiding level.
Are people perfect? No, of course not. If people were perfect, Anarchism would be the rule, as we would not need a government to protect citizens rights from those that do not honor them. We would spend every evening joining hands around a fire, singing cumbaya…
For anyone living in the real world, we need realistic solutions to the worlds needs; Energy, Food, and Water. Solutions that do not require mass reductions in population, or actually create more problems than they solve.
Industrial Agriculture is more than capable of feeding the world’s population, on far less land, using far less resources, than small scale agriculture. Nuclear energy is, relatively, cheap and plentiful. Hyrdo Electric power can be done in an environmentally safe manner. Solar and Wind can be effectively utilized on a local scale, without causing more problems than they solve.
We can feed and provide energy to Earth population, without throwing ourselves back to the stone age, or embarking on a massive reduction in population. And we can do it while preserving, and even expanding, the “natural” and set aside regions of our planet.
I guess there is a difference between what I believe, and what the human loathers on the left believe.
I see Man as the ultimate expression of the Earth, and a vehicle by which our planet can spread life beyond the confines of this one planet. Man can be the ultimate triumph of life, moving beyond the home of our birth, and spreading life to all the places will travel to.
The radical/environmental left see us as a virus, and a threat to the “body” as a whole, which must be controlled, or extinguished, to save the Earth.
Of course, I have not yet heard a coherent thought from any of them as what the purpose of life on Earth is, beyond sheer existance.
