The latest anti-Israel antics of Greta Thunberg reminded me of the popular adage that modern environmentalists are like watermelons—green on the outside, red on the inside. They care little about human prosperity in a healthy environment, which was the goal of the original conservationists.
The ecological movements that became prominent in the 1960s and thereafter seek instead to undermine Western societies and economies by rejecting any industrial development. Ayn Rand aptly described the misanthropic and Malthusian nature of the leftist environmentalist movement:
Ecology as a social principle… condemns cities, culture, industry, technology, the intellect, and advocates man’s return to “nature,” to the state of grunting subanimals digging the soil with their bare hands.
Rand further argued:
Now observe that in all the propaganda of the ecologists—amidst all their appeals to nature and pleas for “harmony with nature”—there is no discussion of man’s needs and the requirements of his survival. Man is treated as if he were an unnatural phenomenon. Man cannot survive in the kind of state of nature that the ecologists envision—i.e., on the level of sea urchins or polar bears ….In order to survive, man has to discover and produce everything he needs, which means that he has to alter his background and adapt it to his needs. Nature has not equipped him for adapting himself to his background in the manner of animals. From the most primitive cultures to the most advanced civilizations, man has had to manufacture things; his well-being depends on his success at production. The lowest human tribe cannot survive without that alleged source of pollution: fire. It is not merely symbolic that fire was the property of the gods which Prometheus brought to man. The ecologists are the new vultures swarming to extinguish that fire.
Greta Thunberg quickly became the darling of the globalist left and gained world fame for vituperating, rather insolently and inappropriately, major governments and other prominent institutions. Unfortunately, she attracted millions of misguided followers.
The young entrepreneur Boyan Slat, on the other hand, who made a genuine contribution to reducing plastic waste in the oceans, remains almost unknown. Instead of being celebrated as a successful environmentalist, he is of no interest to the “watermelon” eco-socialists, since he advocates for technological advancements and does not engage in rabid anti-Western activism.
The environmental aspect of the current anti-Western, anti-American, and anti-Israel propaganda is especially dangerous since it preys on the naïveté, ignorance, and good intentions of young people around the globe. It scares them by manipulating research data and producing climate-change predictive models of apocalyptic proportions, despite strong evidence that the slight temperature changes over the past 150 years are not only innocuous but mostly likely beneficial, as ca. 2,000 eminent scientists have pointed out time and again. The media-induced climate hysteria has caused countless scores of well-intentioned individuals to reject marriage and procreation since they are terrified of imposing new life on this fragile planet. Numerous surveys report increased depression and other psychological disorders resulting from artificially induced climate anxiety.
Major businesses and governments subscribe to this propaganda and commit significant resources to net-zero policies, which are economically damaging and overall unsustainable. Not surprisingly, the UN is navigating this absurd ideology and requiring Western nations to decimate their economies, while major polluters like China continue to develop robust fossil fuel industries.
Fortunately, voices of reason have become more frequent and prominent over the past decade or so. In his superbly argued analysis, titled The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels, Alex Epstein, explains that “fossil fuels are easy to misunderstand and demonize, but they are absolutely good to use. And they absolutely need to be championed…. Mankind’s use of fossil fuels is supremely virtuous—because human life is the standard of value and because using fossil fuels transforms our environment to make it wonderful for human life.”
As Viktor Frankl’s deeply moving book Man’s Search for Meaning reminds us, human beings have a profound need for meaning and motivation. The modern age has largely discredited traditional Western values as a source of existential meaning. Young people today are increasingly tempted to embrace radical ideologies, unquestioningly and passionately, as a source of their moral worth.
As Ben Shapiro noted regarding Thunberg’s latest anti-Israel campaign, “the real question here is … why we can almost always … identify climate change activists with fans of Hamas, one of the least environmentally friendly groups on the planet. And the answer is simple—it’s something called ‘the omni cause.’ … For the left, … what unites the omni cause … is that people hate the system. And by this they just mean capitalism and the West…. [T]his is part of a broader movement that actually is quite dangerous because when the West begins to parrot the absolute lies of terror groups, that has consequences…. And when you raise the temperature this much, people are going to get violent.”
And people did get violent, as the tragic murder of the Israeli Embassy staffers and the recent Colorado attack just proved. That is why the worldview of Greta Thunberg and her followers represents a serious moral, philosophical, and existential threat and must be firmly opposed with education, facts, and reason. We must keep reminding the young people of today that rejecting Western civilization and all the advancements that political and economic freedom have generated can only lead to lawless violence and ubiquitous poverty and misery.
Nora D. Clinton is a Research Scholar at the Legal Insurrection Foundation. She was born and raised in Sofia, Bulgaria. She holds a PhD in Classics and has published extensively on ancient documents on stone. In 2020, she authored the popular memoir Quarantine Reflections Across Two Worlds. Nora is a co-founder of two partner charities dedicated to academic cooperation and American values. She lives in Northern Virginia with her husband and son.
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