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Our mountain neighborhood is blessed with a unique layout. The lower-neighborhood stretch faces green embankments, angled at approximately 60 degrees. Abutted each side by the road, this lovely midsection divides the lower and upper homes of a boulevard-like neighborhood. Neighbors must maintain their embankments.
I prefer my incline to be natural, which means that right about now, the embankment is supposed to be blanketed with wild flowers.
But not if the local, progressive, statist tyrant has his way. And he always does.
It has been decreed that a close shave of the neighborhood’s green stretches be the rule, for fear of “fa-fa-fa-fire,” as Basil Fawlty of the eponymous “Fawlty Towers” would have screeched. Patently ridiculous, of course, because the grass is predominantly green in the Emerald State. And, you know, … asphalt: It acts as a firebreak.
Progressive statists are not good at loving thy neighbor as thyself, as commanded in Leviticus (19:18). Practicing the live-and-let-live motto is constitutionally alien to Mr. Wokester. Neither is the progressive an environmentalist. When it comes down to brass tacks, progressive don’t much like the natural world.
But I do.
So, mow we do, but with a difference. To drive Mr. Batty battier, I leave our lovely embankment dotted with alien-like little crop-circles of wild flowers and grasses. And, I had a signpost (pictured) made so as to place alongside my wild flower crop-circles. It reads:
“Help The Bees Pollinate
Black-And-Yellow Lives Matter”
Two things have been achieved with laughter and levity:
In one fell-swoop, this local progressive vigilante is being taunted for his lack of brotherly bee love. With the same degree of mirth, his Black Lives Matter catechism has been mocked into perspective. Flouting BLM is a heresy that drives this leftist more loco than he already is.
For the Left, love of the environment amounts to an anti-intellectual, atavistic ritual, the kind performed by Homo species, say, when lightning struck. Primitive man would have looked to the heavens, and promised a sacrifice, to appease the particular god in control. In our times, the pagan pantheon has been replaced with the Almighty God of Climate Change.
What about conservatives? Conservation is conservative. At least it ought to be. But are conservatives better custodians of nature than progressives?
Everywhere you look conservatives are rejoicing that the world population count broke 8 billion this month. Population explosion is to be celebrated! You can never have too many people, for people, in conservative thinking, are only ever a positive sum; never zero sum. Resources are endless—or, so conservatives seem to assume.
Animal life and habitat? Who cares? Kill the good-for-nothing critters. Deforestation? Bring it on. Forests are overrated. Ditto oxygen. Besides, we are on our way to being an anaerobic species. Ask Mr. AI (Artificial Intelligence). He was on “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” so he knows. (By the way, it’s beyond silly to believe in the autonomy of artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence is nothing more than meta-programing by mega-programmers.)
And, of course, the most populated places on earth are also heaven on earth. Oh, for the glories of Calcutta, Cairo and Gaza, already upon your little American hamlet.
The conservative overpopulation enthusiast could easily borrow the utilitarian arguments advanced by the open-border crowd, when touting the advantages of high-population density.
According to both errant sides—made from the serenity of their stately homes—Mumbai and Manila must be models for the specialization and division of labor that come with population-dense living conditions.
However, if American history (circa 1894) is anything to go by, the scarcity and high cost of labor helped propel this country into its position as the world’s leading industrial power. These factors, historian Paul Johnson has observed, “[G]ave the strongest possible motive not only to invent but to buy and install labor-saving machinery, the essence of high productivity, and so mass production.”
This conservative celebration of the 8 billion and growing is obscene. It conjures one of the more profound—but contradictory—monologues by Tucker Carlson, in extolling the concept of “community.” Millions-upon-millions of people can never form community, mused the host, wisely. Too much. Too big.
All the more so, I would contend, when the millions do not cohere and do not instantiate those Burkean little platoons. For gigantism is the opposite of community.
Small is beautiful. Only small makes for community. And here, Mr. Carlson contradicted himself and his achingly beautiful sentiment: For he loves population growth. Every baby born Tucker considers a gift and a gem.
By the numbers, and so you know: In celebrating overpopulation—conservatives are calling for the Third World, whence the numbers come, to be fruitful and to multiply. Own it!
Moreover, if you are celebrating population explosion, please spare us the pretense at spirituality, transcendence and love of nature. For your actions are phony. Rudderless. They amount to a performative contradiction.
True, mine is not the rote conservative position, or that of textbook libertarianism. I wager, however, that new-generation conservatives and libertarians are not necessarily on board with the old school’s kill-everything-that-moves-for-profit, and fill-the-oceans-with-plastics political gangs.
To coincide with ocean currents, every one of our oceans has gyres of garbage as big as Texas, much of it plastic.
“The GOP for growing the Great Pacific Garbage Gyre” is not every young person’s idea of an attractive campaign slogan. Neither is being for growing oceanic plastic gyres a chic magnate.
Much of the plastic is single-use plastic, the stuff for which conservatives, who tinker only at the philosophical margins, reserve the “best” of their straw arguments.
In particular, Canadian conservatives are picking on Il Duce Trudeau not so much for trashing the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, but for not wishing to trash the environment with plastic cutlery.
Still—and despite the fact that conservatism conserves nothing—environmental conservation is conservative. We ought to claim it as our cause.
Ilana Mercer has been writing a weekly, paleolibertarian think piece since 1999. She’s the author of Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America From Post-Apartheid South Africa (2011) & The Trump Revolution: The Donald’s Creative Destruction Deconstructed” (June, 2016). She’s on Twitter, Gab, Gettr YouTube & LinkedIn; banned by Facebook, and has a new video-podcast.
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Ilana is a libertarian; as far as I know, most libertarians don’t believe animals have rights (which I disagree with).
Why do you have “most” in italics? How about a statistical breakdown. I, personally, don’t know most libertarians, so it would be illuminating to know how many thought what about this subject. Thanks in advance.
The Emerald State surely isn’t very emerald in the dry summers. Dandelions always took over my yard, by mid summer. It was the only plant that could thrive there during the summers. When I mowed in the summer, I mowed dandelions. The browned grass would crunch below my feet, as I walked behind the mower.
I’m a conservative, yet a staunch environmentalist. Everyone should be. We’re in a very serious 6th extinction event. It’s beyond dire. The National Academy of Sciences found Humans and their pets/livestock now account for 96% of the Earth’s biomass. We’ve destroyed 83% of the wild-mammal biomass and 50% of the wild-plant biomass across the globe. This genocide is far more serious than any human genocide. It threatens all of life itself.
The Emerald State surely isn’t very emerald in the dry summers.
Nor in the east, at any time of year.
The Left doesn’t really care about the environment or nature. They pretend to in order to support their universalistic, globalist and Leftist agenda. This was a campaign by the Green party in Germany.
https://www.dailyadvent.com/news/3662d4b58f9340d1fc94d9bffe486a3c-German-Green-Party-releases-advertisement-featuring-Antifa-propaganda
This is the kind of world they want; their utopia is our dystopia.
The Left would have no problem, cutting down trees to house in more migrants and refugees.
I am a true environmentalist and a European nationalist. I see our bio spirit in the works of Europeans, including arts, literature, sciences, Musics and yes Nature Preservation. The Least polluted nations on Earth are all in Europe. The most polluted are in South Asia and Sub-Sarhan Africa. When Europeans are concerned with low White birth rates, the left shouts “Well, the world is already overpopulated” or “There are too many people anyway.” Of Course, this is all aimed at Europeans with a declining and aging population, not Africans, whose population is booming out of control largely due to foreign aid.
It seems that the overpopulation problem is being taken care of by mRNA shots, which lower sperm counts and make women infertile. Bill Gates, like his father before him, is a known eugenicist, just as are the Globalists who run the WEF. One problem is that they can’t get Africans to take them, while whites willingly stand in line for boosters and cancel those who refuse to be lemmings.
BTW, Ilana, your problem with a too nosy neighbor makes me wonder if you’re in an HOA. I rue the day my wife and I bought into one. You have to get approval before making changes to your home’s exterior or landscaping. Cutting down a tree without approval brings on a $300 fine. We are captive to the whims of the board who runs it.
By “most libertarians”, I meant, naturally, libertarians who are theorists that I’ve seen expressing themselves regarding this subject.
Examples:
Prof Dr Walter Block:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Block#Animal_rights
Prof Dr Tibor Machan:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/40435778
Dr Murray Rothbard:
https://mises.org/library/rights-animals
Let’s run the numbers
It would take ~5 plastic water bottles to fill one square foot.
There are 27,878,400 square feet in a square mile.
Texas is 268,820 square miles.
If there is “one gyre of plastic in each ocean”, let’s say it’s one plastic bottle thick. That means there are over 112 TRILLION plastic bottles floating in the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian oceans.
Sorry Ilana, I ain’t buyin’ it. If it’s true, who is throwing all that stuff in the oceans?
I’m not.
Are you?
Near as I can figure—with few exceptions—the fewer the people, the better the place.
Some people take umbrage at this observation, taking it personally for some reason. Perhaps they should.
BTW, I think that biomass stat neglects insects.
A lot of them did, I think, until those concerns (as you note) ran headlong into Steve Sailer’s World’s Most Important Graph.
Nothing but nothing must stand in the way of our Glorious Progress towards a Black Planet. Yes, it’ll be a burnt-out cinder as well, but ya gotta break some eggs, right?
Leviticus also says you have to murder gay men and not eat lobsters. Where do you draw the line deciding which parts are just bullshit and which are not?
Allegedly those beautiful Monarch butterflies are dying off. Striking creatures. I used to see a great deal of Tiger Swallowtail butterflies in my neck of the woods as well, now, not so much.
Be better to lose pedphiles, rapists, thugs, swindlers, crooks, etc., than beautiful animals like the tiger, majestic creatures like the African elephant, or immensely powerful mountain gorillas. Also be a pleasure to rid the world of rats, snakes, and roaches from the animal kingdom and the humanoid variety.
I just wonder if the mystery of disappearing bees and surging plastic waste and immigration isn’t all related to the rise of corporate dominance of the global economy.
I was born in 1951 and the USA had a little over 150 million people in the 1950 census. In 1960 the population grew to 182 million with very little foreign immigration. In fact, TV PSA reminded all ”aliens” they had to register annually. Big Pharma, having vaccinated the baby boom generation to the limits of science was looking for the next big profit center and in 1962 they found it. The birth control pill. This wasn’t a once and done innoculation but a steady income stream millions of American women would have to buy every month for years. The baby boom petered out after 1964.
Drug stores and 5 and 10 stores had lunch counters. People could sit down and have a cup of coffee or a bite to eat and it was served in a porcelain cup or plate that got washed and used over and over. Free coffee refills too. There was no need for a McDonalds or Starbucks whose profit margins were created by not having to seat their customers or wash dishes. They simply handed the customer a disposable cup with a plastic lid and a paper bag with their food in it. The customer had to dispose of the waste if they even bothered. Great for Ray Kroc , Howard Shultz, seagulls and rats but maybe not so great for the environment.
Growing up even a non gardening boy like me, could kind of tell the time of year by what flowers were blooming. Cherry blossoms and azealas blooming let you know spring had sprung. People still planted flowers not low maintenance shrubs the HOA or lawn maintenance company could trim every so often. You wanted a gorgeous lawn you kind of had to do that yourself or, like my and many other fathers, as a precursor to driving the family car, teach your boy to start and operate the lawnmower and other yard maintenance equipment. As a bonus you could even go mow the elderly neighbors yard for a couple of bucks, with no charge for tool rental or gasoline.
I kind of think the bees died out with the loss of flowers, weed killers and focus solely on the lawn. That, and some Brazilian Dr. Frankenstein tinkering with the DNA of honeybees.
Recycling plants in East Asia.
Most plastic isn’t really recyclable, and there isn’t a lot of demand for what does get recycled. So most of that junk that clueless Canadian and American municipalities ship over to get “recycled” just gets tossed in the nearest body of water.
Linh Dinh worked in his brother’s recycling plant until he had to shut the business down. (You can’t even turn a profit recycling plastic by hiring family members for a few dollars a day).
It gets tiring having to clean up your mess. But that’s why you hire that squatty Guatemalan so your dainty hands don’t get callouses.
https://sustainabilitymag.com/top10/10-countries-tackling-plastic-pollution
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13762-022-04079-x
https://www.governing.com/now/after-chinas-recyclable-ban-municipalities-shift-gears?_amp=true
It’s not tiring at all. It’s the only thing you’ve got going on.
Burning Looting Murdering catechism
animals have rights
flea and lice are animals, BUT –
…humans are animals too (albeit, as Lichtenberg puts it, “das Tier das Versprechen machen kann / the animal that can make promises”), and thus have the same right as other animals: look at what a chimp does with flea and lice.
They get them elected to public office…