Maybe, Just Maybe, Environmentalism is Hostile to Women
August 29, 2009
Death (and Sterilization) By Government « LewRockwell.com Blog.
Karen De Coster writes:
John P. Holdren, Obama’s Science Czar, has, surprisingly, received little mainstream press on his crazed worldviews. Thus, every so often I like to post a reminder for people that may spur them to do some additional research on their own. Here’s a short editorial from the Washington Times to remind us of Holdren’s book, Ecoscience: Population, Resources, Environment, that he co-wrote with Paul and Anne Ehrlich (the Times article commits a spelling error on the last name). From the Times editorial:
In case compulsory abortion wasn’t enough to diffuse his imaginary population bomb, Mr. Holdren and the Erlichs considered other extremist measures. “A program of sterilizing women after their second or third child, despite the relatively greater difficulty of the operation than vasectomy, might be easier to implement than trying to sterilize men,” they wrote. “The development of a long-term sterilizing capsule that could be implanted under the skin and removed when pregnancy is desired opens additional possibilities for coercive fertility control.”
It gets worse. The Holdren-Erlich book also promotes “Adding a sterilant to drinking water or staple foods.” After noting that, well, yes, there were “very difficult political, legal and social questions, to say nothing of the technical problems,” Mr. Holdren and his co-authors express hope that their idea may still be viable. “To be acceptable, such a substance would have to meet some rather stiff requirements,” they wrote. “It must be uniformly effective, despite widely varying doses received by individuals, and despite varying degrees of fertility and sensitivity among individuals; it must be free of dangerous or unpleasant side effects; and it must have no effect on members of the opposite sex, children, old people, pets or livestock.”
Wow. So much for the idea that environmentalism is about getting back to Mother Earth or revering womankind, as some eco-feminists might claim. This passage makes it sound like just about everyone and everything–”members of the opposite sex,” “children,” and “livestock”–have a greater claim to existence than women’s fertility.
At least the Erlichs and Holdren have made it plain. All the claims of environmentalism–that we emit too much carbon, use too many resources, or hurt too many animals–will ultimately be made on women’s bodies. There will be the show of attacking traditionally male-oriented industrialization and production, but ultimately the blame will fall on women, for having babies either when the region is too poor (say, in the dark continent) or too rich (America.) Women are the wretched culprits and should be punished accordingly by coercive sterilization or worse. Was someone telling me that Western Christianity oppressed women and that green socialism would set me free? Eve may have been kicked out of the garden, but at least she got to keep her kids.
New website: Climate Debate Daily
March 12, 2008
Arts & Letters Daily has started a new website (as of January 2008) devoted to the global warming debate: Climate Debate Daily. That’s right, it’s not called “The Global Warming Consensus.” Sorry folks, that’s another website!
I am very pleased to see a website devoted to give-and-take on the issue. My own position is that of a skeptic, but I’m also in the “So what?” camp. As in: so what if global warming were caused by human activity? Because if there is global warming, and if it is caused by human activity, and if the only solution is to de-industrialize the Western nations and prevent the undeveloped nations from industrializing, the cure is worse than the disease.
To put this in a feminist libertarian perspective, women, while still disadvantaged in many respects, generally enjoy the highest status in developed nations such as the United States. In lesser-developed nations, women do the dirty work like hauling water and inhaling wood smoke fumes, and–oh yeah!–they’re treated like chattel or worse! In other words, comfortable First Worlders with their shiny Priuses and Macbooks who denounce global warming are effectively telling the rest of the world to stop developing, thereby condemning literally billions of women to second-class (or last-class) status.
I am not categorically stating that West Is Best, but when I peruse statistics* on female genital mutilation, mass child prostitution and dowry killings, a case for the more developed nations becomes apparent, at least to me.
*On a daily basis, usually over breakfast.
In “Hot Air, Cold Cash: Who are the Merchants of Fear?” no less a liberal than Alexander Cockburn, former writer for the Village Voice and The Nation, deflates the global warming fearmongers, identifies their corporatist special interest roots, and fingers Gore for exactly what he is: not a selfless public servant, but a greedy, mendacious politician (is there any other kind?)
The world’s best known hysteric and self promoter on the topic of man’s physical and moral responsibility for global warming is Al Gore, a shill for the nuclear industry and the coal barons from the first day he stepped into Congress entrusted with the sacred duty to protect the budgetary and regulatory interests of the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Oakridge National Lab. White House “task forces” on climate change in the Clinton-Gore years were always well freighted by Gore and his adviser John Holdren with nukers like John Papay of Bechtel.
As a denizen of Washington since his diaper years Gore has always understood that threat inflation is the surest tool to plump up budgets and rabblerouse the voters. By the mid Nineties he positioned himself at the head of a strategic and tactical alliance formed around “the challenge of climate change”, which had now stepped forward to take Communism’s place in the threatosphere essential to all political life. Indeed, it was in the New Republic, a tireless publicist of the Soviet menace in the late 70s and Reagan 80s, that Gore announced in 1989 that the war on warming couldn’t be won without a renewal in spiritual values.
God, I love it. Personally, I think this photo from Time says it all:
