I thought he was dead, or at least put away where he can no longer be a danger to himself or society. Alas, no. There he was filling the public radio spectrum early on a Sunday morning unrepentant and on the move again, like a sleeper serial killer awakened from a long hiatus, determined to kill again. The hairs on the back of my neck bristled. My God, I thought, he’s back. Hide the children and call the authorities, the awful Paul Ehrlich has returned.
Of all the hysterical rants that later coalesced into the “deep” environmental movement of the late 1960s—that continues to plague the earth and its inhabitants today—Ehrlich’s 1968 book, The Population Bomb, has to be ranked the most important, becoming the Bible of fundamentalist environmentalists. But unlike the Judeo-Christian version, that holds many truths even for the agnostic, The Population Bomb, as time has proven, is vacant of veracity. Not one prediction in the book came to pass. Yet the green evangelicals cling to its fallacious tenets even more tightly as each of its pronouncements crumbles under the reality of history.
The chapter and verse of the book revolve around the Malthusian theory that population growth is murdering Mother Earth. As our tribe increases, goes the story line, the planet’s resources will diminish accordingly and arithmetically. And not only will villainous homo sapiens use up nature’s real estate, they will poison the air, eat all the crops, blow a hole in the stratosphere, exterminate all other living flora and fauna, reproduce like rabbits and blow each other up with nuclear weapons in a desperate search for food.
Verily then, says the avenging angel Ehrlich, we must abandon the fossil-fuel eating automobile, terminate capitalist systems that engender consumerism, join hands in a one-world global socialist system dedicated to protecting nature, mandate by law birth control, become vegetarians and well, actually, take on the identity of today’s radical environmentalists who still believe in killing off mankind to save the earth.
Ehrlich did get one thing right. The earth’s population did indeed grow from around two billion to six billion in the past 35 years. But not one of the results he predicted occurred. There is more food than we can possibly eat, the air is now cleaner, capitalism has defeated socialism worldwide, animal species are protected by their human cousins and life is better, not worse, for most of the earth’s inhabitants. It is clear to governments today that zero population growth results in economic disaster.
Only in America and its academic fortresses could a person be so wrong and still retain status. Ehrlich is safely ensconced with tenure at Stanford where he is allowed to pollute young minds, influence curricula and, more dangerously, have his meretricious rants published in books and disseminated to the public via the zeitgeist of national journals and broadcast media (like NPR). In ancient times he would have been banished for his errors, if not executed for the deleterious effect he has had on the commonweal.
But au contraire. He has written a new book of fabricated eschatology, the name of which I purposefully refuse to remember, stating, as he told NPR, that the US not only must stop population growth, but must reduce its current head count from 300 million to 140 million, a number he picked out of the air, I assume. In effect, he recommends we imitate Red China and limit each family to one child, a mandate enforced by the state. Like everything else he says, this theorem has no basis in objective fact or simple observation. But it does smack of socialist totalitarianism, the refuge of the tyrant.
Ehrlich maintains that our culture focuses too much on “economy” and not enough on “ecology,” creating a situation he finds abhorrent. In what is basically hate-speech against humans, he feels that: “too many people means too much consumption”; that the automobile is a “plague” (you only need a car for big loads or to go on vacation); that patriotism is for idiots; that the US (get this) is not giving enough foreign aid to under-achieving countries; food production is eroding the “capital” of the earth; growth is using up our aquifers and causing climate change. You get the picture, the same snapshot we saw in 1968, the one that was totally inaccurate.
Ehrlich has to dance around the immigration issue in his zeal to extinguish the human species in America. He wants to be sure the politically-correct multicultural-diversity zealots don’t give him a bad review, so he explains that newcomers from other nations should come to add color (not a pun) and good ethnic restaurants (I kid you not), but like the rest of us, only be allowed one child per family. NPR asked him if curtailing birth could prevent the creation of a genius that would make great contributions to the human condition. In a typical convolution, he answered that a genius could immigrate to the US in the place of the unborn variety.
Ehrlich is a charlatan masquerading as the saint of the natural world. His discredited genocidal directives from the pulpit of the church of the environment make him a very dangerous man indeed. He calls those that disagree or diverge from his scripture “morons” and their views “nonsense.” It is this hatred of the human species that seeps into the radical environmental movement and stains even the good things it undertakes. Thanks to Ehrlich, students are taught that mankind is bad and nature good. No wonder kids are at sea emotionally today, their self-esteem and pride in their culture eradicated from their legacy.
NOTES FROM LA-LA LAND
More Blasts From the Past
As if the resurrection of Paul Ehrlich wasn’t enough to turn stomachs, up pops another poseur from the late ’60s, the traitor masquerading as patriot Daniel Ellsberg, he of the Pentagon Papers, intoning (again on NPR) that public servants are mandated to disclose confidential government documents sooner rather than later, lamenting that if he had committed his act of betrayal earlier, there would be no Vietnam War. Of course Ellsberg has a new book out that will receive grave attention from the usual suspects as they ignore the dozens of books published but rarely reviewed that include actual facts rather than the party line of the far Left.
• • •
Someone else is back from the grave, John le Carre of espionage fiction fame with a new book in the wake of several failures since the Cold War ended and purloined his subject matter. The new offering, Absolute Friends, received raves in New York and London so I thought perhaps he was worth reading again. And he is, sort of. However, from the beginning he makes clear he hates America (George Bush in particular), Tony Blair, the war in Iraq and the British Empire. He, as so many who peddle books today, cannot risk subtlety or ambiguity anymore and I can’t risk finishing the book.
• • •
At least one malevolent character from the Ehrlich/Ellsberg/Le Carre era actually went to his grave for good. Humphrey Osmond was the Brit psychiatrist who developed the use of LSD to treat schizophrenics, leading to a trend in the treatment of the mentally ill taken up by RD Laing and others that pushed the theory that the schizophrenic is actually in touch with proper reality and we in the square world are the ones in need of treatment. Remember One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest written by Ken Kesey, an Osmond/Laing devotee, in which RP McMurphy (Jack Nicholson in the film version of the original play) was the hero and the doctors the villains? Not 10 years later, this perverse and unscientific theory infiltrated the academic psychiatric establishment leading directly to the release of mental patients across the US in the late 1970s creating the “homeless problem.” The phenomenon was billed by the Left and the compliant media as the failure of capitalism when actually it was a purposeful application of nutty ’60s theory. He will not be missed.
The King of Vulgarity
I warned in these pages two years ago that the purchase of CBS by the sinister and vulgar Sumner Redstone, chairman of Viacom and the owner of the USA Channel and MTV, would make his mark. And he sure enough did during the Super Bowl. If the owners of media produce content that holds the audience in contempt, how should we regard them?
Wasteful Waste
I urge area leaders to note the trash controversy in New York City where a study of outside experts confirmed that recycling was a huge waste of time and money. The city’s Independent Budget Office reported that abandoning recycling would save $35 million a year. NC cities need to come clean, so to speak, and cease burdening citizens with expensive recycling schemes.
Campus Jihad
It was somewhat gratifying that UNC-Chapel Hill academic authorities chastised assistant professor Elyse Crystall for sending an email to the 33 students in her Literature and Diversity English class attacking one student by name who dared speak against the party line on homosexuality—in effect libeling him for voicing his own opinion on a college campus, where, allegedly, academic freedoms and the free exchange of ideas are cherished. Sadly, this sort of attack has been going on every day in academe since the radical scholars staged a campus coup d’etat in the early 1980s using the fear of being politically incorrect as a bludgeon to cow their peers and browbeat students. However, predicatably, while acting as if the school was rushing to the aid of free speech by chiding Ms. Crystall, Richard Soloway, interim dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, the breeding ground for PC antics, opined to a local newspaper: “The real question, whatever one’s affiliation might be, is how is it (meaning professors propagandizing and threatening students who don’t agree with their views) reflected in the quality of teaching? I’ve seen no evidence to suggest students aren’t getting a quality education at this institution.” I respectfully disagree.
Spy News
The ad produced for the 2003 Raleigh International Spy Conference, founded by yours truly and sponsored by Metro and the NC Museum of History Associates, won the best of show award in the area ADDY competition sponsored by the Ad Club of the Triangle. Trailblazer Studios of Raleigh produced the :30 second TV spot through their Serious Robots division for our agency, The Republik, who wrote the commercial for the Spy Conference. It's really clever and cutting edge and has been entered in national competitions.
Master of disguise for the CIA, Tony and Jonna Mendez, who will appear at the 2004 Raleigh International Spy Conference, were the stars of the PBS TV documentary Spy Catchers, part of a new series on public television called Innovations, sponsored by the National Science Foundation. In the program, Tony and Jonna, posing as terrorists, challenged the FBI's crack surveillance team (The G's), to follow them and observe them making a clandestine meeting with an ostensible al-Queda "sleeper" in Washington, DC. Go to www.raleighspyconference.com to learn more about the Mendez team and meet them in Raleigh September 1-3 at the spy event.