Watermelons: How Environmentalists Are Killing the Planet, Destroying the Economy and Stealing Your Children's Future

by James Delingpole

  Surely Gore had a point, for once? Well, it’s true that Silent Spring was the scare story that put green issues on the map. The book inspired thousands of young men and women to join the green movement. It led to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970, and the furore generated by the book certainly was a catalyst in the banning of the pesticide DDT in 1972.

  Yet Gore and his ilk seem blissfully ignorant of the Environmental Protection Agency’s seven-month hearing (and more than nine thousand pages of testimony) prior to the ban being enacted, in which EPA Judge Edmund Sweeney concluded:

  DDT is not a carcinogenic hazard to man… DDT is not a mutagenic or teratogenic hazard to man… The use of DDT under the regulations involved here do not have a deleterious effect on freshwater fish, estuarine organisms, wild birds or other wildlife.

  Or might it be, perhaps, that for committed watermelons like Gore, it doesn’t much matter whether the likes of Carson get their facts wrong or right – that as long as the ‘correct’ environmental message is put across, any convenient untruth will do?

  Bizarrely, despite Sweeney’s recommendation, two months later the head of the EPA, William Ruckelshaus, still proceeded to ban DDT in the US. Many other countries succumbed to activist pressure and followed in America’s wake – thus depriving the world of its most effective pesticide against malarial mosquitoes. Since malarial mosquitoes were then and continue to be one of the world’s biggest killers – responsible for over one million deaths a year and countless human suffering besides – it has not unreasonably been argued that Carson’s book, by inspiring the ban, has been responsible for more deaths than Adolf Hitler.

  Yet none of this awkwardness has deterred greens from using Carson as their poster child. On Earth Day in 2007, thirteen prominent environmentalists (among them Al Gore) paid tribute to her legacy in an essay collection called Courage to the Earth. Several wildlife reserves and conservation areas have been named after her, as have at least one school, a bridge, a hiking trail and three environmental prizes, while her birthplace in Springdale, Pennsylvania, is on the National Register of Historic Places. Every year, a feast (a ‘sustainable’ one, naturally) is held there in her honour by the Rachel Carson Homestead Association.

  Perhaps when Paul Ehrlich is finally clutched to Mother Gaia’s bosom, he too will be similarly feted. After all, he did at least as much fine work towards the cause of environmental catastrophism as Carson. And in his predictions of doom, he was at least as spectacularly wrong.

  Ehrlich is best known for The Population Bomb, the 1968 bestseller that terrified hippies – their parents, children and dealers too – with such claims as this:

  The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate.

  In another – fictional – account of the world in the future published in Ramparts magazine, Ehrlich envisioned that the ‘sea would be virtually emptied’ of fish. In that world, by 1980, thanks to toxic pesticides, the average age of death in the US would be just forty-two. There would also be ‘disastrous’ climate change – though, cannily Ehrlich hedged his bets as to which direction it would take. ‘With a few degrees of cooling a new ice age might be upon us,’ he argued in The Population Bomb. But ‘with a few degrees of heating, the polar ice caps would melt, perhaps raising ocean levels 250 feet’.

  Colder or warmer? Fish or no fish? Birdsong or no birdsong? Ah, what the hell, it didn’t matter any more for now the floodgates of EnviroHysteriaTM were wide open. Then a Democrat senator called Gaylord Nelson got in on the act. In 1970, horrified by a massive oil spill he witnessed a year earlier off the coast of Santa Barbara, California, he founded Earth Day to raise awareness of environmental issues through a series of ’Nam-War-protest-style ‘teach-ins’ across the US.

  Twenty million Americans took part in the first Earth Day event, a million of them (including celebrity guests Ali McGraw and Paul Newman) at a rally in New York City, whose mayor agreed to shut down Fifth Avenue and offer the use of Central Park for the occasion. The inevitably massive media coverage it garnered, including a one-hour prime-time CBS news special presented by voice-of-the-nation Walter Cronkite, placed eco-issues very firmly on the political agenda. That same year in December, President Nixon created the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

  The EPA’s guiding philosophy was – and remains – very much the product of the culture from which it sprung. That culture, hippie-dom embodied, was inspired by the teachings of radical academic and anti-nuke protester Barry Commoner, who helped pioneer the notion that progress is the enemy of the environment.

  Commoner propounded his theory in his 1971 book The Closing Circle, in which he proposed four laws of ecology. They are:

  Everything is Connected to Everything Else. There is one ecosphere for all living organisms and what affects one, affects all.

  Everything Must Go Somewhere. There is no ‘waste’ in nature and there is no ‘away’ to which things can be thrown.

  Nature Knows Best. Humankind has fashioned technology to improve upon nature, but such change in a natural system is, says Commoner, ‘likely to be detrimental to that system’.

  There is No Such Thing as a Free Lunch. Everything comes from something. There’s no such thing as spontaneous existence.

  Around the same time, the British research scientist James Lovelock was formulating his ‘Earth feedback hypothesis’, later renamed the ‘Gaia Hypothesis’. The entire planet, he argued, is one giant living organism whose various constituents – biosphere, atmosphere, oceans and soil – constitute a ‘feedback or cybernetic system which seeks an optimal physical and chemical environment for life’.

  See if you can guess which of the myriad elements in Lovelock’s self-sustaining biosphere is about as welcome as a tramp who’s climbed out of a dustbin smelling of rotten fish and staggered into your beautiful daughter’s wedding ceremony just as she’s about to say ‘I do’? Well, I’ll give you a clue. You’re one of them. I’m one of them. And for those of you at the back who are a bit slow, Lovelock spells it out in a recent book, The Revenge of Gaia. In an interview about the book, he crows: ‘It would be hubris to think humans as they are now are God’s chosen race.’ Because we’re not. We’re doomed, he tells us. We’re all doomed. And it’s no more than we deserve, either, for being such a filthy blight on Mother Gaia’s otherwise perfectly balanced ecosystem.

  And The Ecologist was with him all the way. Founded in 1970 by Lovelock’s good friend, ‘deep ecologist’ Teddy Goldsmith – brother of billionaire financier Sir James, uncle of eco-friendly billionaire Conservative MP Zac Goldsmith – the magazine made clear from its first editorial exactly how it viewed man’s role in the great scheme of things. We are, Goldsmith argued, just a ‘parasite’ – or a ‘disease which is still spreading exponentially’. We have ‘long since ceased to play any useful ecological role’. We are, in fact, ‘waste’.

  In the next chapter I shall examine the most influential of all eco-alarmism handbooks – The Limits to Growth – and the most influential of all eco-alarmist organisations, the Club of Rome. But before that, I should like (with your permission) to bludgeon you over the head with just a few more examples of how bizarre, destructive, misanthropic and unashamedly extremist the green mindset really is. And where better a place to do that than by visiting the paradigm of green values in excelsis – Nazi Germany?

  It would be unfair to blame the Nazis for every last facet of environmental ideology. Edward I of England beat them by seven centuries to create the world’s first Clean Air Act with his 1272 interdiction on the burning of sea coal. King James I beat Hitler to the claim of the world’s first celebrity anti-smoking campaigner. John Muir, and before him the Romantic poets, were ahead of the game on deifying Nature.

  Still, give them their due, the Nazis pushed the cause
of environmentalism with a commitment which makes even modern Eurocrats or Californian eco-nuts look like rank amateurs.

  Theirs was the first nation to ban smoking on public transport (Hitler thought it a filthy habit: tobacco, he believed, was ‘the wrath of the Red Man against the White Man, vengeance for having been given hard liquor’). It was also the first to take the concept of ‘animal rights’ seriously (in 1933 Göring – ah, the big cuddly softie – said that anyone found guilty of animal cruelty or experimentation would be sent to the concentration camps). It passed the first national environmental laws – the Reich Nature Protection Law of 1935 – and was the first to champion organic food (a special obsession of Heinrich Himmler) and vegetarianism (another of Hitler’s on–off fads). Above all, it was the first to address, with rigorous planning and mechanised efficiency, the issue that tends to concern eco-minded catastrophists more than any other: what to do about the world’s population ‘problem’.

  The Nazi expression for this problem was ‘Lebensraum’ – living space – a phrase which, not uncoincidentally, was borrowed from ecological theory. There being not enough Lebensraum available in Germany, it was only logical that the Reich should expand its frontiers, drive out – or exterminate – the native Untermenschen and replace them with hearty, healthy, racially pure Nordic types. In his December 1942 decree ‘On the Treatment of the Land in the Eastern Territories’, Himmler expressed it thus:

  The peasant of our racial stock has always carefully endeavoured to increase the natural powers of the soil, plants and animals, and to preserve the balance of the whole of nature. For him, respect for divine creation is the measure of all culture. If, therefore, the new Lebensräume [living spaces] are to become a homeland for our settlers, the planned arrangement of the landscape to keep it close to nature is a decisive prerequisite. It is one of the bases for fortifying the German Volk.

  Note how the concepts of nature, folk tradition, racism and national unity were intimately bound in the Nazi ideology. The Germans – inevitably – had a phrase for this: Blut und Boden (Blood and Soil). It was invented by one of the party’s leading green ideologues, Richard Walther Darre (Hitler’s first Minister of Agriculture) who, like many eco-minded folk, was a great campaigner against urban decadence and a champion of rugged self-sufficiency.

  For understandable reasons, modern greens have sought to distance themselves from the Nazis. But as the authors of the essay collection How Green Were The Nazis? argue, this won’t quite wash:

  The green policies of the Nazis were more than a mere episode or aberration in environmental history at large. They point to larger meanings and demonstrate with brutal clarity that conservationism and environmentalism are not and have never been value-free or inherently benign enterprises.

  Precisely. Nazi Germany did not represent some grotesque perversion of green values; rather, it represented their purest, most honest form of practical expression. If – as the modern green movement does and the Nazis did – you want to create a depopulated, almost ‘Garden of Eden’ world where small numbers of chosen people live in a state of rustic, de-industrialised, organic bliss, then clearly the two key questions you must ask are ‘Which people?’ and ‘How?’ The Nazis simply took the most direct and honest route: they decided who the Untermenschen were, exterminated them on an industrial scale, then attempted to repopulate their territory with the sturdy Nordic types they believed were most fit to inherit their New Jerusalem.

  In the post-World War II years, the green movement was a bit more circumspect about its desires and intentions. But its instincts remained little changed – just look at books like Harrison Brown’s The Challenge of Man’s Future (1954), which looked forward to solving the world’s population problems with a New World Order run on remarkably similar lines to the experiment which had ended in a Berlin bunker just nine years earlier:

  In the first place, it is amply clear that population stabilization and a world composed of completely independent sovereign states are incompatible… Given a world authority with jurisdiction over population problems, the task of assessing maximum permissible population levels on a regional basis need not be prohibitively difficult.

  And according to what kind of criteria might this ‘world authority’ make its judgements? Harrison proposes that it might ‘prevent breeding in persons who present glaring deficiencies clearly dangerous to society and which are known to be of a hereditary nature’:

  Thus we could sterilise or in other ways discourage the mating of the feeble-minded. We could go further and systematically attempt to prune from society, by prohibiting them from breeding, persons suffering from serious inheritable forms of physical defects, such as congenital deafness, dumbness, blindness, or absence of limbs.

  Elsewhere in his unpleasant book (quite clearly indebted to the Eugenicist philosophy that supposedly died in disgrace with Nazi Germany), Brown speaks of the human species in disgusted tones that, as we’ve seen earlier, would have been most heartily applauded by Teddy Goldsmith, James Lovelock and John Aspinall. Having speculated with horror on a world inhabited by 200 billion people, Brown writes:

  At this point the reader is probably saying to himself that he would have little desire to live in such a world, and he can rest assured that the author is thinking exactly the same thing. But a substantial fraction of humanity today is behaving as if it would like to create such a world. It is behaving as if it were engaged in a contest to test nature’s willingness to support humanity and, if it had its way, it would not rest content until the earth is covered completely and to a considerable depth with a writhing mass of human beings, much as a dead cow is covered with a pulsating mass of maggots.

  Urrgggh! All those people – yellow, black and brown ones especially – breeding. The horror!

  If Harrison Brown were just some crackpot from the outer fringes of the environmental movement, I would not quote him at such length. Unfortunately, just like Rachel Carson and Paul Ehrlich, he is hailed as one of the greens’ great gurus. Among his biggest admirers is John Holdren, the green activist who is now President Obama’s director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, also known as his ‘Science Czar’.

  In 1986, Holdren edited and co-wrote an homage entitled Earth and the Human Future: Essays in Honor of Harrison Brown, in which he claimed:

  Thirty years after Harrison Brown elaborated these positions, it remains difficult to improve on them as a coherent depiction of the perils and challenges we face. Brown’s accomplishment in writing The Challenge of Man’s Future, of course, was not simply the construction of this sweeping schema for understanding the human predicament; more remarkable was (and is) the combination of logic, thoroughness, clarity, and force with which he marshalled data and argumentation on every element of the problem and on their interconnections. It is a book, in short, that should have reshaped permanently the perceptions of all serious analysts…

  You wait with bated breath for the moment in the essay where Holdren blushingly dissociates himself from Harrison Brown’s borderline Nazi Eugenicism. Or at least, from Brown’s sinister advocacy for a new world government in charge of population control. But the moment never comes. And there’s probably a good reason for that: Holdren was arguing for very similar policies in a book he wrote in 1977 (with Paul and Anne Ehrlich) called Ecoscience.

  Besides advocating state-enforced abortions for undesirables and the mass sterilisation of humans through drugs in the water supply, the book argues for the creation of a ‘Planetary Regime’. This Planetary Regime – perhaps run under the auspices of ‘UNEP and the United Nations population agencies’ – would ‘control the development, administration, conservation and distribution of all natural resources, renewable or non-renewable, at least insofar as international implications exist’. (I particularly dig that so-extreme-and-scary-it’s-funny use of the italicised ‘all’, in the original.)

  And there’s more. This Planetary Regime ‘might also be a logical central age
ncy for regulating all international trade … including all food on the international market’. And, of course, it would be given responsibility ‘for determining the optimum population for the world and for each region and for arbitrating various countries’ shares within their regional limits’. Oh, and obviously, in order to ensure the New World Order runs smoothly, there would need to be ‘an armed international organisation, a global analogue of a police force’ – just in case formerly free citizens around the world started getting uppity about the ‘partial surrender of sovereignty to an international organisation’.

  With luck, by this stage, I’ve helped you form a pretty clear picture of what the watermelons stand for. And by this I don’t mean the nice, fluffy associations ‘green’ has developed over the years – nurturing, caring, cherishing, preserving, cleansing, and so on. I mean, rather, the core beliefs on which the green religion is based, as expressed in the writings of its most influential philosophers.

  These core beliefs, though often dressed up as concern for nature and the future of mankind, are rooted in the most bitter misanthropy and direst pessimism. They care little for the human species’ myriad achievements, preferring to see our race as a blot on the landscape, a parasite, a disease which threatens the eco-system’s otherwise perfect balance and which should at best be reduced by natural means – at worst ruthlessly culled.

  Are these really the kind of people you want to control your children’s future?