Save The Planet…Kill Yourself

Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth – Alan Weisman – (Little Brown Books)

I have to be brutally honest; I would HATE to be Alan Weisman and to have such a bleak outlook on life that you end up loathing not only yourself, but every other human on the planet so much that you advocate the elimination of the human species in a misguided effort to “save” the planet.

Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth is Weisman’s follow up to the book A World Without Us a pleasant little tale that would have the world heal and replenish itself, once relieved of the burden of human existence. Like I said, pleasant stuff. Apparently uncomprehending exactly how human biology works; Weisman thinks that human’s could be re-introduced to the newly healed and revived planet.

Weisman’s anti-human screed is certainly not new, he merely picks up where the cult of Paul Erlich left off with his late 1960s doomsday predictions of population out of control and the Earth sucked dry. Weisman is lauded for his “journalistic” approach by asking a series of questions on the subject of a sustainable future. He visits 21 countries around the globe to try to get a handle on the question of what is an acceptable way to find and attain a sustainable population.

Like so much of the biased media, Weisman funnels everything through a jaundiced prism of his assumptions about the planet. He takes a statistic like the claim of a billion people going hungry and blames it on the assumption that it is caused by overpopulation and a lack of capacity to grow food to sustain the population. He never bothers to look at the question from the perspective of not a lack of capacity, but one of delivery. Is it a lack of food or the lack of a viable/reliable delivery mechanism?

I remember vividly stories of Bob Geldof and Live Aid rockers buying tens of thousands of pounds of food to aid the hungry; that ended up rotting on docks due to the lack of a system to deliver the food to those in need. Again is the question capacity or delivery?

The problem for Weisman, Erlich and their ilk is that they put themselves on the record, predicting calamitous outcomes and the always end up being wrong. Yes. ALWAYS WRONG! In the end the arguments these people make in favor of their position spiral downward into a cascade of ridiculous, disgusting or down right despicable conclusions. Weisman writes about a “distinguished” Japanese economist who claimed that a post WWII  baby boom was halted by legalizing abortion to avoid starvation and – “can actually grow happier as it’s now shrinking numbers approach a more sustainable size” Hey, get happy, kill a baby! Absolutely despicable, at least to normal people.

Weisman also seems obsessed with being able to control the population; not just the overall head count, but the ability to maintain order and control people. Which is really what is at the root of twisted liberalism; enacting controls on the masses. It is striking that rather than seeking solutions to the problems, real or perceived, Weisman seek to eliminate the “problem” rather than find the solution.