October 2006
Environmental Evolution
From Darwin to "Gaia" and Beyond Genocide
MICHAEL McGRADE
| "Evolution is the greatest engine of atheism ever invented." |
William Provine |
| “We are parasites. Nature would be much better off without us.” |
Rosemary Radford Ruether |
| “The damage people cause to the planet is a function of demographics ... we must eliminate 350,000 people per day.” |
Jacques Cousteau |
I saw the other day that another truckload of scientists (610 to be precise, all holding doctorates) have ganged together to publicly challenge Darwin’s evolution fantasy. They have signed the "Scientific Dissent From Darwinism" statement, which reads: "We are skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life. Careful examination of the evidence for Darwinian theory should be encouraged."
According to World Net Daily (22/6/06), the statement includes endorsement by members of the prestigious U.S. National Academy of Sciences and Russian Academy of Sciences, along with many professors and researchers at major universities and international research institutions. It was originally published by the Seattle-based Discovery Institute to challenge statements about Darwinian evolution made in promoting an "Evolution" series by the Public Broadcasting Service.
The PBS promotion claimed that "virtually every scientist in the world believes the theory to be true." But the Discovery Institute - a leading proponent of Intelligent Design, which argues from the latest discoveries in physics, biochemistry and related disciplines for an intelligent cause rather than an undirected process such as natural selection - countered: "Dissent from Darwinism has gone global. Darwinists used to claim that virtually every scientist in the world held that Darwinian evolution was true, but we quickly started finding U.S. scientists that disproved that statement. Now we’re finding that there are hundreds, and probably thousands, of scientists all over the world that don’t subscribe to Darwin’s theory."
Stated Raul Leguizamon, M.D., pathologist and professor of medicine at the Autonomous University of Guadalajara, Mexico: "I signed the Scientific Dissent From Darwinism statement because I am absolutely convinced of the lack of true scientific evidence in favour of Darwinian dogma."
Fraudulent Foundations
Quite so. Citing evidence from fossils, embryology, taxonomy, and molecular biology, Michael Denton has shown that Darwin’s "grand claim" - that all life forms are interrelated and evolved from a single cell - has not been supported by one empirical discovery since 1859, when Darwin published On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection.
In fact, the history of the evolution hypothesis is one long trail of wishful thinking and outrageous frauds and fabrications from beginning to end. The infamous ‘missing link’ absurdities embody this evolutionist impulse to reject reason and compromise scientific integrity for the sake of rationalising the godless theory.
Finally exposed as a hoax in 1953 after fooling the acquiescent scientific establishment for over 40 years, so-called Piltdown Man - actually the jaw of an orangutan fitted into a human skull - was still being presented to the present writer and other defenceless schoolboys as a scientific and historical fact 20 years later. For all I know he’s still being taught to this day, along with all the other ape-men we were fed as gospel truth ‘missing links’: like Java Man (whose ‘discoverer’ Dr. Dubois confessed his 30 year fraud on his deathbed and admitted it was probably a giant ape or gorilla); Nebraska Man (concocted from one tooth of an extinct pig); Australopithecines (exposed as the fossil skull of an extinct ape); and Peking Man (the bone fragments of the fossil skulls of dozens of creatures).
Then there was Neanderthal Man whose features were contrived by Marcellin Boule in 1915 and displayed in Chicago for 44 years where his ‘mistakes’ were finally discovered. Yet Boule’s fake ape-like model is still presented as the real thing despite a world authority on "fossil man", evolutionist Donald Johanson, stating that "Neanderthal is not prehistoric man, not at all an ancient evolutionary ancestor, but nothing other than modern man" i.e. a Homosapien, just like Cro-Magnon Man and Heidelberg Man who were also falsely presented to us as the stooped, knuckle-dragging, moronic-looking ancestors still portrayed in every hackneyed educational text or media graphic (in fact they had brains as big or bigger than ours!).
Frauds one and all, as I eventually discovered. And they just keep coming. Remember the Archaeoraptor fossil fraud presented by National Geographic in 1999? It had a few months of glory as the latest ‘missing link’ between dinosaurs and birds before it was exposed as the head and body of a primitive bird and the tail and hind limbs of a dinosaur glued together by a Chinese farmer. Oh dear.
The very Chinese scientist who uncovered this fraud then came up with Microraptor gui, a feathered, tree-dwelling "Dinobird" trumpeted by Nature magazine in 2003. But the fossil specimens pertaining to this concoction - which allegedly glided from tree to tree - were brought from dealers in the same Liaoning Province of China that gave us Archeoraptor and which, according to noted evolutionist Alan Fedduccia, churns out "scores" of these specimens in "a fake-fossil factory." "The Chinese fossil trade has become a big business," he said in an interview with evolutionist Discover magazine [Feb. 2003]. "These fossil forgeries have been sold on the black market for years now, for huge sums of money. Anyone who can produce a good fake stands to profit."
All of which makes Microraptor gui about as convincing as Ernst Haeckel.
After reading Darwin’s Origin of Species in the 1860s, Haeckel notoriously perpetrated fraud upon fraud to promote evolution-as-fact among the German intelligentsia and working classes. To fill inconvenient evolutionary gaps he simply invented protoplasmic organisms and even a ‘missing link’ called Pithecanthropus alalus (speechless ape-man), in support of which complete fictions he manufactured detailed descriptions and elaborate drawings. Most readers will recall being taught in biology class (as fact) his theory that the human embryo is initially identical with that of other mammals and then goes through a series of stages where it has gills like a fish, a tail like a monkey, etc.. What we weren’t told in class was that Haeckel couldn’t find any evidence to support this theory and so doctored drawings of dog and human embryos by two other scientists and presented them as proof.
One hundred and thirty years after this hoax was exposed by Professor Wilhelm His, and despite the idea that human beings retrace their evolutionary past in the womb having been long discredited scientifically, it continues to be taught as evidence for evolution in many popular science books. Moreover, it is still used by some abortionists to convince girls that killing ‘the foetus in its fish stage’ is OK. At a conscious or subconscious level, it has surely also influenced the socio-political and legal rationalisations favouring destructive research on human embryos.
Jane Oppenheimer, Professor of Biology and History of Science, considers reprehensible the "uncritical acceptance by the professional embryologists who swallowed [Haeckel’s frauds]", since they "remained utterly unperturbed by the fact that Haeckel himself was never in any sense a professional embryologist."
Yet rather than rethink their position and the credibility of their hypothesis (about which even Darwin himself entertained a recurring "horrid doubt"), the evolutionist community prefers to glory in its ‘scientific integrity’ for having exposed such frauds! Never mind the incredible length of time it usually takes them to do so; or their culpable silence before the continued presentation to a gullible public of hoax-as-hard science; or the endless stream of scandals emanating from their ranks.
They appear to have adopted the unscrupulous creed of Erasmus Darwin, who found his brother’s fanciful new theory so emotionally appealing that he wrote: "In fact the a priori reasoning is so entirely satisfactory to me that if the facts won’t fit in, why so much the worse for the facts is my feeling." [Letter to Charles,
23 November, 1859]
Elastic Goalposts
We haven’t even mentioned the complete absence of bona fide transitional fossils - which according to Darwin should be "inconceivably great" and are surely the sine qua non for convincing bone-headed ‘fundamentalists’ of the change from one basically different type of organism to another. "[T]here is not one such fossil for which one could make a watertight argument", admitted Dr Colin Patterson, senior palaeontologist at the pro-evolution British Museum of Natural History. [Darwin’s Enigma, 1988]
Nor have we touched on the arbitrary dating. Just a few newspaper articles or TV documentaries, for instance, will yield an evolutionary age for planet earth ranging from hundreds of thousands to millions to hundreds of millions to billions to hundreds of billions of years! Such comedic discrepancies in all evolutionary datings are incessant. So much for scientific precision.
Clearly, like Haeckel and the rest, evolutionary true-believers continue to cut-and-paste as they go along, moving the goalposts whenever they meet a dead-end. If something can’t be explained by hard evidence, they simply vault the inconvenient hurdles of proof and invent still more incredible hypotheses.
Twenty-five years ago the accumulation of evidence against evolutionary theory was already so great that they began repudiating Darwin’s principle doctrine - that small changes from generation to generation within a species eventually produce a new species. In desperation, as Newsweek reported in November 1980, the majority of leading scientists began promoting the Alice-in-Wonderland "punctuated equilibria" (hopeful monster) theory – whereby sudden massive mutations brought about all our modern species. This farcical leap of blind faith to keep the sinking theory afloat also ignores the pivotal fact that mutations are invariably damaging to organisms and thus can play "no part whatever in evolution", as the fervent evolutionist Julian Huxley freely confessed.
Meanwhile, the once untouchable Big Bang theory is encountering all kinds of credibility problems necessitating similar ‘creative solutions’. American physicist Alan Guth claims that "The Big Bang leaves out the bang. It tells us nothing about what banged, why it banged, how it banged or, frankly, whether it ever really banged at all." Thus, confronted with immovable obstacles and contradictions - like a young, ageless universe as well as many stars apparently older than the universe itself - cosmologists have now invented a "Pre-Bangian" era! In addition, mysterious invisible stuff referred to as "dark matter" and "dark energy" have been dreamt up to explain inexplicable ways galaxies move and the unorthodox rate of speed at which they are moving apart.
At a recent cosmological conference in Portugal, cosmologist Ricardo Scarpa told New Scientist that "The basic Big Bang model failed to predict what we see in the universe." And he added: "Every time the basic Big Bang model has failed to predict what we see, the solution has been to bolt on something new – dark matter, dark energy." ["So where DID we come from?", Daily Mail, 22/9/05]
Elsewhere, recognising the problems of chemical evolution, others have adopted a theory called "directed panspermia" - that life on earth originated from "life sperms," or spores, which arrived from outer space. No less an intellect than Francis Crick, who discovered the DNA molecule, promoted this ‘explanation’ for human life. He argued that spontaneously generated, highly intelligent aliens sent our bacterial ancestors (perhaps blue-green algae) to earth in unmanned rockets, even describing the design of these craft. Similarly, having found that "there is not a shred of objective evidence to support the hypothesis that life began in an organic soup here on Earth," noted English astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle has concluded that the creator from space is not God, but some super-intelligent extraterrestrial life.
You couldn’t make it all up. Yet this is daily media fare!
Reporting the discovery of Colwellia 34H, a marine bug which thrives at nearly 200 degrees below freezing, the Daily Mail of 10 August 2006 raised the possibility of life on Mars and its evolutionary implications. "As the sun continues to expand and warm the outer planets," it solemnly concluded, "scientists are now considering the possibility that Colwellia’s icebound alien cousins could one day turn into us"!
More Than A Hypothesis
And so, behind the endless Ascent of Man propaganda all we find is the Descent of Evolution: from blind faith through criminal fabrications to a lunatic parody of itself, finally reducing science to science fiction!
No wonder critical scientists continue to jump ship, abandoning Crick’s UFOs and all the anti-Christian bigotry for commonsense notions of an Intelligence behind DNA and the beginnings of life. Scientists like Francis Collins, one of the world’s leading geneticists who led the international Human Genome Project that mapped the 3.1 billion chemical base pairs in humanity’s DNA.
In his new book The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief, Collins, now director of the U.S. National Human Genome Research Institute, attributes his rejection of the Darwinian atheistic position to the writings of C.S. Lewis. "For a scientist, it’s uncomfortable to admit there are questions that your scientific method isn’t going to be able to address," he said at a C.S. Lewis Foundation conference. While an article in the Washington Post quotes him saying scientists are "not supposed to decide something is true until [they’ve] looked at the data. And yet I had become an atheist without ever looking at the evidence whether God exists or not." [LifeSiteNews, 28/7/06]
In sum, as the Statement of Dissent signatory Dr. Leguizamon put it: "Nobody in the biological sciences, medicine included, needs Darwinism at all." Yet since evolution is far more than just a (failed) hypothesis, the good doctor was quick to add:
"Darwinism is certainly needed, however, in order to pose as a philosopher, since it is primarily a worldview."
Indeed, from the outset, Darwin’s hatred of Christianity and its "damnable" supernatural doctrines fuelled this primary intention - to construct an alternative naturalistic worldview behind a scientific façade - all the while concealing "direct attacks on Christianity" in favour of "slow and silent side attacks." [Letter to George Darwin, October 1873]
This alone explains the continuing attraction of supposedly objective, dispassionate scientists to such a discredited hypothesis. Even noted chemical evolutionist Dean Kenyon of San Francisco State University says that many of his dogmatically naturalistic peers ignore the theory’s problems precisely because they would otherwise "open the door to the possibility (or the necessity) of a supernatural origin of life."
This religious dimension is raised whenever evolutionists break the intimidating ranks of the evolution Establishment to speak their mind. The aforementioned Dr. Patterson of the British Museum of Natural History says modern science assumes that "a rationalist view of nature [evolution] has replaced an irrational one [creation]." He made that same assumption until 1980. "Then I woke up and realized that all my life I had been duped into taking evolutionism as revealed truth in some way." He said he had experienced "a shift from evolution as knowledge to evolution as faith."
"Speaking in an entirely secular manner, I do not believe that people come to evolution by chance," says the refreshingly candid evolutionist Michael Ruse of Florida State University. "From Herbert Spencer (1892) to Edward O. Wilson (1978), it has functioned as a kind of Weltanschauung, a world picture which gives meaning to life." [Zygon, March 1994, p.26] He stresses, therefore, that the struggle between creationists and intelligent designers on the one side and evolutionists on the other "is not just a fight about dinosaurs or gaps in the fossil record, this is a fight about different worldviews." [Boston Globe, 1 May 2005]
A leading authority on the philosophy of science, Ruse also confirms the religious motivation of pivotal evolutionary figure Charles Lyell (1797-1875).
A lawyer who dabbled in geology, "Lyell found his approach to geology attractive," states Ruse, "because it alone satisfied his deistic concept of theology." [The Darwinian Revolution, 1999, p.272]
Lyell’s dilettantish, anti-Christian "approach" involved his manufacturing the geological time-scale which dovetailed with Darwin’s subsequent need for "incomprehensibly vast… past periods of time" [Origin of Species] to validate his own anti-Christian theory.
Always a subjective, subversive construct and now scientifically discredited by Guy Berthault’s peer reviewed laboratory tests ["Biblical Chronology and the Big Bang," CO, Jan. 2006], Lyell’s Geological Column remains a primary vehicle for deconstructing the Bible and Christian faith, ‘slowly and silently’ as per Darwin. "… [T]his idea came to me five or six years ago," Lyell freely admitted to George Scrope in 1830, "that if the Mosaic geology can be dismissed without upsetting anyone, it would be a historic blow … Let them feel it and draw their own conclusions."
The influential biologist Sir Julian Huxley (1887-1975) later inculcated the evolutionary gospel and its inherent notions of "progress" and "transition" into mainstream culture and fields such as engineering and psychology. "Searching desperately as a young man for a faith to substitute for Christianity," writes Dr Ruse, "Huxley found it in progress - and for him, progress was best manifested in and made most probable and plausible by the evolutionary process." [Mystery of Mysteries, 2001, p. 94] He continues elsewhere:
"Hence, Huxley saw the need to found his own church, and evolution was the ideal cornerstone. It offered a story of origins, one that (thanks to progress) puts humans at the center and top and that could even provide moral messages. The philosopher Herbert Spencer was a great help here. He was ever ready to urge his fellow Victorians that the way to true virtue lies through progress, which comes from promoting a struggle in society as well as in biology - a laissez-faire socioeconomic philosophy. Thus, evolution had its commandments no less than did Christianity. And so Huxley preached evolution-as-world-view at working men’s clubs, from the podia during presidential addresses, and in debates with clerics - notably Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford. He even aided the founding of new cathedrals of evolution, stuffed with displays of dinosaurs newly discovered in the American West. Except, of course, these halls of worship were better known as natural history museums." [Science, 7 March 2003, p.1524]
Atheistic Inculturation
According to Ruse, Huxley concluded that in the future it would be cultural rather than biological factors which would determine the direction for evolution. Yet the extent to which his prophecy has come to pass might have shocked even him.
Readers need only refer to Nancy Pearcey’s "Why Darwinism Matters" [CO, April 2001] for a brilliant summary of how the Darwinian belief system now informs every aspect of modern life - moral, legal, educational, familial, corporate and political.
She explains, for instance, the remorseless logic and implications of "evolutionary psychology" (or sociobiology), the theory that if natural selection produced the human body, then it must also have produced human behaviour - ergo, any behaviour that survived today must have conferred some evolutionary advantage. On this basis, such advantage must be found in jealousy, depression, rape and so on.
In respect of infanticide, one academic rationalises that "The emotional circuitry of mothers has evolved" by natural selection to leave their babies to die in certain circumstances.
Such Darwinian definitions of human nature and morality are embodied in the utilitarian ethics of Princeton University’s Peter Singer. Among much else, Singer equates babies with pigs, cows and dogs and believes that humans in a permanently comatose state, rather than chimpanzees, should have been used in the research that led to the hepatitis B vaccine.
Everywhere, similar evolutionary voices inform the Culture of Death. David Boonin has taught a course at Cambridge since 1995 in which he claims the fact that the human species survived evolution confers no moral status on it that is not conferred "equally on all species." The implication, as expounded in his book A Defence of Abortion [Cambridge University Press, 2002], is that the human fetus, even if admitted to be sacred, has no more right to life than a rat or tree.
"Putting the unborn child on a par with much lower creatures is a pattern in this book," notes Professor Anne Gardiner in Touchstone magazine. "In one place, Boonin remarks that ‘it is difficult to see why we should not also call the spider crawling up my window a person,’ supposing it had ‘a big enough brain’."
On the basis that some geneticists have postulated that their distant evolutionary ancestors may have interbred with those of chimps, a Professor of Psychology at the University of Washington, David Barash, also argues that there is no moral difference between a human being and a chimpanzee, or indeed, between a human being and a sea sponge. He looks forward to the day when IVF clinics produce human/animal hybrids which will quash the "fallacy" that "the human species, unlike all others, possesses a spark of the divine and that we therefore stand outside nature." [LA Times, 28 July 2006]
Of course, quashing this "spark of the divine" - the human soul - is the raison d’être of evolution-as-religion and its atheistic creed. Whether preached overtly by academics through this surreal dehumanising of life or by the perpetual diet of ape-to-man propaganda drip-fed to the masses, the evolutionary seeds of Darwinian naturalism now embedded in societal structures sustain and promote the practical atheism of our day.
True, scientists themselves increasingly demur and the hoi polloi begin to smell a rat (a recent BBC opinion poll of 2000 people showed only 48% of respondents favoured evolution as opposed to a surprising 39% who held to either creationism or intelligent design - War on Science, Horizon, 26/1/06).
Nonetheless, evolution has fulfilled Darwin’s primary purpose as the ‘change agent’ par excellence for achieving his heart’s desire - to bring down the Christianity he disavowed:
"Thus disbelief crept over me at a very slow rate, but was at last complete. The rate was so slow that I felt no distress, and have never since doubted even for a second that my conclusion was correct. I can indeed hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true…." [Autobiography of Charles Darwin, 1958, p.87]
The guiding light of his Christian faith extinguished, replaced by his desperate hope that there was no God to Whom he was accountable, Darwin finally doubted "whether the convictions of man’s mind … are of any value or at all trustworthy." [Letter to W. Graham, 3 July, 1881]
Thus, conceived by an apostate - who questioned his own intellectual credibility - evolution spawned mass apostasy.
Karl Marx, for his part, saw its godless implications and possibilities in a flash. He seized on Darwin’s work to underpin his own satanic ideology and eradicate all idea of the supernatural.
"Darwin’s book is very important and will help me to found class struggle in history on the natural sciences," he famously wrote to Lassalle on 16 January 1861. "Darwin’s theory of evolution being what it was," explained Malachi Martin, "Marx reasoned that the social classes, like all matter, must always be in struggle with each other for survival and dominance."
The same notion of Darwinian force and endless, bloody purification underpins fascism and all materialistic ideologies, which share just one common enemy: Christianity. Pope Pius XII explained in Humani Generis that "Such (evolutionary) speculations are eagerly welcomed by the Communists, who find in them a powerful weapon for defending and popularising their system of dialectical materialism; the whole idea of God is thus to be eradicated from men’s minds."
Quite simply, as admitted by evolutionist William Provine, Professor of Biology at Cornell University: "Evolution is the greatest engine of atheism ever invented. Naturalistic evolution has clear consequences that Charles Darwin understood perfectly. 1) No gods worth having exist; 2) no life after death exists; 3) no ultimate foundation for ethics exists; 4) no ultimate meaning in life exists; and 5) human free will is non-existent." ["Evolution: Free will and punishment and meaning in life", 1998,
Darwin Day Keynote Address]
These veritable Five Commandments of Atheism represent Charles Robert Darwin’s nihilistic bequest to humanity. Today, consciously or not, to greater or lesser degrees, they dictate how the great mass of Westerners, especially the leaders and opinion-makers, live and think and go about their daily lives.
Evolution-substitutes for the Commandments of God, they have engendered a level of systemic materialism that has paved the way for the next attack on Christianity, as atheistic evolutionism morphs into pantheistic environmentalism: a seamless transition for Green true-believers and their mass audience alike, since pantheism is atheism.
The "Green Piltdown"
The history of environmentalism mirrors that of evolution not only in its atheistic worldview but in its predication on wild speculations, frauds, cover-ups and "junk science". As with evolution, these are disseminated with the same religious zeal as fait accompli-facts by a compromised scientific establishment, an acquiescent media and a political class for whom Green naturalism serves to underpin their materialistic Culture of Death.
Just as evolution-as-fact is preached: instead of micro-evolution (change within species) as fact and macro-evolution (change into new species) as baseless theory, so climate change-as-fact is endlessly propagated: in lieu of ‘natural periodic shifts in temperature’ as fact, and ‘cataclysmic global warming due to man-made carbon dioxide’ as politically motivated invention.
In effect, so-called "global warming" is the Piltdown of environmental frauds; a massive con which is destined for the same ignominious end as the bogus ape-man. Commentator Melanie Phillips even suggests that "The misuse of facts by the global warming lobby may destroy the credibility of both scientists and the green movement."
Given how science has survived complicity in so many scams with its own reputation and the credibility of evolution still in check, this is doubtful. Nonetheless, as with evolution, ever increasing numbers of scientists are breaking ranks with their compromised peers (whose careers and grant money are tied to supporting politically correct theories) to challenge the "misuse of facts" and the notion that the earth is warming at an unprecedented rate because of man-made CO2.
According to Phillips: "Now even James Hansen, the Nasa scientist whose predictions of a huge rise in global warming helped light the bonfire 14 years ago, has stood on his head. He now agrees with the sceptics that the world will most likely heat up during this century by no more than 0.7C, virtually identical to the rise in the past 100 years."
She also points to a report published on 25 February 2002 by the European Science And Environment Forum [ESEF], "in which a group of eminent scientists from Britain and America shred the theory and, with it, the credibility of the Inter-Governmental Panel On Climate Change [IPCC] that predicted a rise in temperature of between 1.4C and 5.8C by 2100. This led to the Kyoto Protocol, which required swingeing cuts in carbon dioxide emissions by the industrialised nations." She goes on:
[The IPCC] got it wrong, these scientists say, because it used wholly inadequate computer models. These omitted numerous factors contributing to climate change, such as clouds, water vapour, atmospheric and ocean currents and the effects of the sun. In addition, they failed to deal with the complex reactions involved in climate change. One study alone by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the National Aeronautics And Space Administration revealed the effects on heat levels of high-level clouds, which knocked the climate models for six.
Computer modelling is, in general, a dubious scientific tool. When it comes to climate change, it uses partial data to transform flawed hypotheses into prophecy. It is of little more use than a ouija board.
["The great global warming con-trick", Daily Mail, 25/2/02]
Quashing Dissent
As we shall see, this notion of computer modelling as ‘ouija board science’ is a most apt spiritual analogy, if we understand the dark forces behind radical environmentalism and where they’re leading us through the agency of influential fellow-travellers - like David Attenborough, for instance.
Throughout a recent BBC documentary, Attenborough sat with a climate modeller staring at a screen while mouthing discredited Green clichés about an impending global warming apocalypse. And yet he insists: "When I make these films, I prefer to show what I know to be the facts, what I know to be true, and then people can decide what they will from that." [60 Minutes, CBS, 10/11/02]
Clearly, however, as with evolution which he also pushes relentlessly, facts rarely enter into it. Attenborough and his media ilk merely relay the party line of bien pensant academics, who brook no factual critiquing of pet theories which conveniently gel with those of the money men. Consequently, scientists who dare to dissent and thereby threaten the £/$multi-billion research gravy train are hounded from the inner-circle - as with another celebrated TV presenter, plant biologist David Bellamy.
Unlike the pliant Attenborough, Professor Bellamy has "long incensed his fellow academics for expressing doubts that mankind is largely to blame for global warming." In June 2005, however, he announced his withdrawal from the global warming debate after being set upon and publicly humiliated by his peers over an incorrect scientific claim he had made on another matter which had no bearing on his global warming scepticism and which mistake he had rapidly corrected. Seizing on the opportunity to vilify Bellamy, the scientific establishment labelled him a global warming denier and dumped him from the presidency of two national conservation groups.
Sunday Telegraph science writer Robert Matthews related this shocking incident in the course of a larger piece about the reluctance of science journals to publish research from respected experts that "fails to support the standard view of climate change." He cites the case of Dr Chris Landsea of the US National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, a member of the IPCC until January 2005 when he "resigned over what he saw as the existence of a ‘party line’ on the issue of hurricane violence and global warming."
"Dr Landsea singled out Dr Kevin Trenberth, the head of the IPCC hurricane panel, for pushing his own belief that hurricanes will become ever more devastating." According to a paper published in the respected Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society [June 2005] by Dr Landsea and his colleagues, "there is no convincing evidence to support that view." As a more technical journal, however, BAMS does not command the mainstream media attention of journals like Nature, Britain’s leading science journal, which "summarily rejected" the Landsea paper "without even sending it for proper review." At the same time, while also ignoring the Landsea paper, Science published a paper from Dr Trenberth foisting his doomsday predictions on hurricanes and global warming on a much wider audience. ["Dissenting views on climate change are being frozen out," The Sunday Telegraph, 19/6/05]
The celebrated Danish enviro-sceptic Bjorn Lomborg has endured similar treatment. A decidedly Left-wing vegetarian homosexual and former Greenie activist who now claims that our Western environment is getting better, not worse (see book review this issue), Lomborg was hammered by the likes of Nature, Science, Scientific American and Time Magazine when, in January 2003, Denmark’s Committee on Scientific Dishonesty declared him "objectively dishonest."
Yet in December of the same year, the Danish Ministry of Science rejected the allegation and accused the Committee itself of dishonesty, error, "sloppy" and "emotive" language and declared its ruling to be "completely void of argumentation"! It further charged that the Committee had not even permitted Lomborg an opportunity to respond. Predictably, this reversal received little publicity compared to the widespread coverage of the Committee’s initial false ‘finding.’
Despite attempts to silence and smear them, however, the dissidents continue to speak out. Like exasperated Australian Bob Carter, a respected marine geologist involved in climate research. He plainly states that today "The overwhelming emphasis [of our official scientific bodies] is not science for the sake of understanding. It’s science for the sake of making money." [Herald Sun, 27/2/03]
He argues that the acknowledged temperature rise between 1970 and 1988 is not proof that we are ruining the environment since a similar warming occurred between 1918 and 1940, before the biggest phase of industrialisation, while cooling occurred between 1948 and 1965, "when human emissions were increasing at their greatest rate." Writing in the Sunday Telegraph, he confirmed that the British government is being "scientifically brainwashed" and that politically incorrect science advice is not welcome in Whitehall.
Carter was doubtless referring to the fact that the government acts on advice from its Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research in Exeter, a costly IPCC spin-off funded by the taxpayer which churns out studies and brochures parading all the usual speculations as facts. Opened in May 1990 by Margaret Thatcher, who defined its grandiose task as "no less than to help us safeguard the future of our planet," the Centre conjures up catastrophic predictions from its computer modelled ouija board.
These are the boffins alluded to by clueless politicians as they confidently mouth the latest environmentally-correct findings. "Globally, emissions may have to be reduced, the scientists are telling us, by as much as 60% or 70%. The Kyoto Protocol is only the first rather modest step," Environment Minister Michael Meacher opined with gravitas in November 2000.
The Facts
Just as the evolutionist Establishment (including the Pontifical Academy of Sciences) shuts out the creationists and intelligent designers, so the vast international network of climate research centres is a closed shop with no room for dissidents like Bob Carter, Bjorn Lomborg, Chris Landsea, David Bellamy et. al. Nor would any of the international group of scientists who met in Washington several years ago to question the value of the IPCC’s climate projections be admitted. One of these dissidents, German geo-physicist Hartwig Volz, noted that the IPCC called its climate models "projections" or "story lines" rather than "predictions." "They might be more aptly termed ‘fairy tales’," he said. [Alive!, June 2002]
This shocking politicisation and exclusion was mentioned by a powerful House of Lords economic affairs committee in a withering report about the IPCC.
Released on 6 July 2005, the Lords report claimed that the IPCC is allowing science to be determined "by political requirements rather than by the evidence." And it adds: "We are concerned that there may be political interference in the nomination of scientists to the IPCC." The peers warned that the Kyoto Protocol "will make little difference to rates of warming" and suggest that instead of wasting money on futile attempts to limit emissions it would be better spent adapting to inevitable changes in the weather – with flood defences and water conservation – and developing carbon-free sources of fuel.
The fact is that of the 186 billion tons of CO2 that rise into the atmosphere every year, only 6 billion are directly attributable to man. The rest are from natural causes, biological activity in the oceans, volcanic activity and decaying vegetation. Which is why global warming advocates like Jerry Mahlman of the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) freely admit that even "If Kyoto were successful, it would produce a small decrease in the rate of increase of CO2 in the atmosphere. It would take 40 Kyotos to actually stop the increase." ["The Emperor’s New Climate: Is Global Warming Real?", Crisis.]
In late 2004, for example, the worst polluter in the environmentally-correct American state of Washington was not Boeing or a paper mill or any of those dreadful job-creating industries, but Mount Saint Helens. According to Express, a free paper distributed by the Washington Post, the local volcano was "pumping out 50 to 250 tons of sulfur dioxide gas a day since it began erupting in October. At peak, that’s more than double the amount from all of the state’s industries combined."
Even Professor James Lovelock, a Green icon and the man who first put forward the "Gaia hypothesis" of the Earth’s balanced ecosystems (the carbon dioxide-oxygen cycle, the ocean sinks and forest dumps which recycle the air we breathe) has disowned Kyoto. In a May 2004 interview with The Independent, in which he concluded that the faith placed in renewable energy by the Greens was misplaced, he said signing on to Kyoto was "like the Left’s attachment to disarmament in 1938 … well-intentioned but misguided."
And so the $150 billion targets of the Kyoto Protocol would solve nothing, other than making politicians appear to be doing something and robbing the Third World of precious funds for clean water, sanitation, health care and education.
Put simply, and as the 2002 European Science And Environment Forum report pointed out, the earth has always shown cycles of cooling and heating, with dramatic swings. The earth’s climate changes naturally, and this is the backdrop against which the influence of human beings must be judged.
According to Dr Sallie Baliunas, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics, after reviewing more than 240 scientific articles containing data obtained by teams of researchers who "mined ecological reservoirs that hold information on past climate change" (such as glaciers, coral growth, pollen, stalagmites, documentary records etc.), a team from Harvard University has confirmed that "the climate in most locations was not extreme or unusual during the 20th century. The warmest, or most extreme, climate occurred in the Medieval Warm Period, between the 9th and 14th centuries." She continues with this crucial summary:
HH Lamb, the founder of the climatic research unit at East Anglia University, studied how climate influenced human affairs. He found that during the 12th and 13th centuries, England’s climate was warm enough to support more than 50 vineyards, signifying that May frosts were rare. More than ten vineyards flourished for more than 100 years. About 1150 AD, William of Malmesbury noted in De Pontificibus: "No county in England has so many or so good vineyards as this Gloucester."
But this was short-lived. A cooling period known as the Little Ice Age began by 1300, and it persisted in some regions until 1900. Western Europe experienced more frequent acute winters, early frosts and more climate variability from year to year. The Little Ice Age intensified from about 1550 to 1700. All seasons experienced low temperatures on average, accompanied by high variability from year to year. Extreme storms occurred in the North Sea and central Europe, with the 1690s being perhaps the most severe decade. During 1693-1700, Scotland suffered its worst famine when crops failed for seven out of eight years.
By the 19th century, the Little Ice Age had largely abated. To some extent, early 20th century warmth can be seen as a natural recovery from the harsh cold of previous centuries, and the 20th century is neither extreme nor unusual compared to the last 1,000 years. Little firm knowledge exists to explain the broad climate extremes of the last millennium, making forecasts of future climate highly uncertain.
The scientific data from the past millennium suggest a context for the debate about climate change - namely, that a trend of human-induced warming does not exist. Politicians and interest groups are keen to scare the public into believing that they are the cause of a warming climate, and that costly policies are necessary to mitigate the risks. The debate needs scientific facts - not psychological instincts - to inform its course of action. [The Scotsman, 12/5/03]
Eco-hysteria
Yet it is precisely psycho-social manipulation and intimidation of the public that drives environmentalism today. Waving away inconvenient facts and undaunted by repeatedly getting it wrong - in the tradition of infamous Green Paul Ehrlich who once declared on American television: "I would bet even money that England will not exist in the year 2000" - global warming ideology has pushed the risible scaremongering of past years to new levels.
Hyperbolic media headlines like these would be hysterically funny if they weren’t so tedious and disconcerting for fragile and impressionable souls: "Humans hold knife to planet’s throat"; "Shrinking Britain: How global warming could leave many of our big cities submerged"; "Studies hint at irreversible rising seas"; "Polar bears turning to cannibalism due to global warming"; "Global warning flood danger to 1.8m homes"; "Global warming will kill millions"; "Why the world is slowing down: scientists blame global warming for new phenomenon" … . And my personal favourite: "We must live on other planets or be wiped out says Hawking"! (Yes, at a news conference in Hong Kong last June, the celebrated Cambridge astrophysicist Stephen Hawking solemnly announced that "Life on Earth is at the ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by a disaster such as sudden global warming… It is important for the human race to spread out into space for the survival of the species." Atheist Hawking, please note, is a member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.)
Under these headlines we find the unchallenged party line writ large. "Global warming is real and it will deliver a wave of extinctions to rival the dinosaur’s exit," wrote the Environment Editor of Sydney’s Daily Telegraph. Detailing catastrophic computer-based forecasts of "at least 25 per cent (at worst almost half) of all animal and plant species vanishing within this generation’s lifetime," he duly informed his vast readership that "the problem’s core is human-induced climate change, the greenhouse effect." On cue, he then castigated the US and Australia for not signing the Kyoto Protocol. For all intents and purposes, it was the Greenpeace Annual Report!
Hollywood, of course, stirs the pot with blockbusters like The Day After Tomorrow [2004], a film backed by environmental hysteric Al Gore, which hypes human-caused global warming. According to climatologist Patrick Michaels, long a critic of the global warming theory, liberal politicians and Left-wing groups saw The Day After Tomorrow as the movie that would make John Kerry President of the United States! Although Gore has admitted some of the scenarios in the film are implausible, it nonetheless serves what he sees as the noble purpose of indoctrinating the public with a Kyoto-like polemic. [NewsMax, 24/5/04]
Shamefully, some of the worst histrionics emanate from British Establishment figures like the former head of the Meteorological Office, Sir John Houghton, and the government’s chief government scientific adviser, Sir David King. Houghton describes global warming as "a weapon of mass destruction" while King, a news headlining panic merchant who charges around the globe airily dismissing his critics and demanding immediate action before the sky falls, has stated that terrorism is not "even comparable to the threat to our civilization that global warming represents." Computer modelling, you see, has shown King that millions of lives worldwide will be under threat as sea levels rise dramatically, causing eco-systems to collapse and 400 million to go hungry.
Never mind that Dr Tim Lenton, director of Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, is adamant that sea levels do not pose such a threat and that "We don’t have to literally, globally start reducing emissions tomorrow." He pointed his finger accusingly at the Environment Agency which exaggerated the threat from global warming on the basis of a report he wrote early this year. The Agency claimed that sea levels could rise by 11 metres over the next 1,000 years, leaving low-lying areas of Britain under water, and demanded urgent action. But Dr Lenton said his research actually showed it would be possible to avoid the worst case scenario – even if nothing was done for the next 100 years!
Such rebukes fall on deaf ears. The great and good go on voicing their definitive prophecies regardless of the genuine scientific data. And lack of expertise is no obstacle. Even Britain’s Chief Medical Officer, Sir Liam Donaldson, feels qualified to warn the populace that increased global warming will cause catastrophic heatwaves to strike annually by 2080. (He must have seen The Day After Tomorrow ... or heard it from Attenborough ... who got it from the ‘ouija board boys’ ...)
On and on, claim after spurious, cataclysmic claim it goes. At least The Financial Times, commenting on the 2003 Lomborg ‘acquittal’ in Denmark, has urged politicians and the media to be wary of stories hyping global warming. It said the temptation to feed us a "diet of distortion" is too great. While Professor Richard Stott of the University of London, who wrote the preface to the 2002 ESEF report that demolished the IPCC findings, has warned that current policies based on this kind of global warming hysteria are more likely to harm the environment. "In the name of global warming, we are about to cover the glorious landscapes of Wales, Scotland and East Anglia with great whirring wind farms," he said. "I hope the local populations will protest, and do so vigorously. They would be right."
"Hopeful Monstrosities"
Wind farms are a prime case study of costly environmental damage being effected by the numerous hoaxes spinning off from the central global warming con.
Although a poll conducted by Country Life magazine found them the most loathed structures in Britain, over and above motorways, power stations and city centre eyesores, preening politicians who prefer sound bites to sound science insist they will provide "renewable energy" that is "strategic" to the country’s future.
Experts on wind power who know better, however, say Britain is not the place for wind energy which, quite apart from aesthetics, is considered "stupendously inefficient and ludicrously expensive." Far better, they say, to look at alternatives like solar, water and geothermal power as well as biomass - using plants and animal waste - as a fuel for power generation.
Of course, none of these alternative energy sources could meet existing energy needs, let alone future demands. Only nuclear energy, so emotively and illogically demonised by the Greens who massively overstate the dangers, can provide the clean and safe energy they seek without adding to the man-made greenhouse gases they blame for creating global warming.
In any event, only a government in thrall to Green ideology and as inept and profligate as New Labour could possibly ignore the overwhelming contrary evidence and announce a £6 billion plan to build thousands of wind turbines, with a view to them powering one in six homes by 2010: a target, according to Tory Shadow Minister Tim Yeo, which "sets a new standard of absurdity."
The fanciful notion that these 260 foot tall monstrosities with 115 foot blades - the biggest turbines in the world - will provide the capacity suggested, is a Green approximation of the "hopeful monster" theory noted earlier: the one scientists desperately conjured from nowhere as facts piled up against their evolution delusion.
As commentator Christopher Booker explained in the Daily Mail of 15 July 2003, eco-enthusiasts talk up the benefits of wind turbines by referring to them in terms of their "installed capacity" (their theoretical capacity if they ran flat out for 24 hours a day). But the reality is quite different. "Britain’s weather pattern is such," he says "that wind turbines generate power for less than a third of the time. So it is necessary to have 100 per cent back-up from other power sources to cover for all those periods when the windmills are lying idle."
Moreover, "a megawatt hour of electricity costs around £16 from a gas-fired power station and around £20 from a nuclear power station. According to official figures, the true cost of the same amount of electricity from the 1,000 on-shore turbines already built in Britain is nearer to £30. This cost is obscured by an elaborate subsidy, whereby electricity supply companies are forced to buy the more expensive wind-generated power. This inflated cost is passed on to the consumer through electricity bills."
"All these problems have already been encountered in Denmark," says Booker, "which Mrs Hewitt [then-Trade and Energy Secretary] holds up as a prime example of a nation turning to wind-power. In fact, Denmark has accepted that producing electricity from wind is so costly and unreliable that last year it sharply scaled back its huge wind-power programme."
Let us put aside political columnist Andrew Alexander’s observation that "Nigel Doughty, chief of Doughty Hanson, which owns a turbine blade manufacturer, turns out to have been a major contributor to Labour Party funds" [Daily Mail, 28/10/05], and simply say that New Labour’s Green obsession is thus diverting billions of pounds to building an infrastructure that has been tried, tested and rejected. At the same time, real energy problems are mounting ominously in a country which it is predicted will have to import 50 per cent of its gas by 2010, rising to 90 per cent by 2020, making it reliant on such icons of stability and propriety as Russia, Iran and Algeria!
This is why the Institute for Civil Engineers has predicted that within less than two decades, Britain could be heading for a repeat of the 1974 energy crisis, when shortage led to government imposed power cuts. As with every facet of life in the UK, the taxpayer ends up paying through the nose for Labour’s chronic ineptitude. In this case, its failure to tackle long-term energy policy instead of tilting at utopian Green windmills has largely contributed to the near doubling of energy bills since 2003 and helped push average household energy bills over the £1,000 a year mark. Meanwhile, as many British families dread the unaffordable cost of a cold winter, European householders enjoy boundless energy at lower prices.
And we haven’t even started on all the eco-contradictions and inconsistencies arising from Green-led policies. Mrs Hewitt, for instance, also wanted to supplement the wind-power by importing energy from France, 80 per cent of whose electricity is generated by nuclear power. Surely this negates Labour’s eco-friendly wind-power strategum in the eyes of its prized Green constituency?
And what about the danger posed to wildlife? Protestors claim that two of Britain’s most endangered species of birds - the white-tailed and golden eagles - are under threat of being slashed to ribbons in the blades of the 180mph turbines planned for Lewis in the Western Isles, one of 15 massive wind farm developments proposed for the Highlands. Other rare and protected species would also be under threat by the turbines to be planted in the middle of one of Britain’s finest peat moors. [Sunday Express, 30/1/05]
Good, Bad and Deadly
Rendered uncertain, anxious and fearful in turns by the same relentless disinformation and eco-histrionics that effect such wrong-headed, damaging, contradictory and outrageously wasteful policies, the public are left prey to the self-serving judgements of their leaders. These generally find environmentalism safe territory, allowing them to grandstand and distract attention from more immediate crises like health, education, housing, immigration and transport. After all, everyone wants a clean, safe and harmonious natural environment in which to dwell; we all recognise the clear benefits of avoiding pollution, utilising resources ever more efficiently, protecting and caring for flora and fauna, etc. etc.
And contrary to evolution, there is such a thing as a ‘moderate’ approach to all this; one which holds a correct understanding of the relationship of human beings with nature. It is embodied as always in the heavenly balance of Catholic teaching. "Seen in the light of the doctrine of God the Father, the maker of heaven and earth," wrote John Paul II, "this relationship is one of ‘stewardship’: human beings are set at the centre of creation as stewards of the Creator." [Apostolic Exhortation Pastores Gregis, 2003]
Countless issues rightly demand such stewardship. Take your pick: the plight of hundreds of millions of British broiler and battery cage chickens pumped with antibiotics to speed growth while crammed into windowless sheds 20,000 at a time; damning research from Denmark on the hazards to human health of feeding growth hormones to cattle; the safe disposal of the million tons of toxic electrical goods and two million toxic TV tubes tossed away in Britain each year; the multiple dangers posed by genetically modified crops promoted by governments in bed with giant American agribusiness conglomerates...
Such legitimate environmental causes abound alongside rampant Green hypocrisy. Abuse of women in fur coats is voiced by those wearing shoes or carrying bags which also require the killing of animals. Gutless criminals who terrorise anyone remotely associated with the use of animals for medical research (without offering any viable alternatives) would be the first to beg for the life-saving drugs developed by such highly regulated research were their own lives on the line. The cheap ‘Foxes Good-Hunting Bad’ polarity of the anti-hunt crowd betrays their ignorance of the more urgent issues of animal welfare and husbandry and holds nonsensical implications for all equestrian sports, fishing, shooting and pest control practices. While world leaders tour the globe preaching apocalyptic messages about alleged global warming and attending "sustainable development" junkets, leaving countless tons of aircraft CO2 emissions in their wake!
Amidst the good and bad of our ecologically-obsessed age, however, it is the preoccupation with animals and the natural environment over and above human life that most attunes a post-Christian society to the deadly Green gospel handed down by Darwin – which, to recap, preaches an evolving human species indistinct from nature and, as a consequence, views the human person as expendable matter.
The tendency assails us every other day: as in reports of the Australian Humane Society’s call for an end to students dissecting frogs and rats in science classes, or the ‘bill of rights’ for pets proposed by the British Environment Ministry in cahoots with the RSPCA, which "five freedoms" defining standards under which animals should be kept invites further nanny state intrusion into our lives and opens up Pandora’s Box in respect of the way we treat farm animals, vermin and fish.
This inversion of the Divine Order - according inalienable rights to animals and natural phenomena even while showing "genuine contempt for man", as John Paul II put it - has dehumanised the mainstream. Thus, consumer and animal welfare groups react with justifiable horror at the proposed sale of meat and milk from cloned animals. "Cloning is about treating animals as commodities," they recently cried. Yet they hail so-called "therapeutic" cloning which treats early human life as an object to be manipulated and destroyed for their advantage.
Grass-roots Engineering and Control
The subversive history of socio-political control behind this mass dehumanisation at the very heart of the Green agenda is unknown to an ‘evolutionised’ electorate. It should be made aware that its apparently caring-sharing eco-leaders are direct descendants of a host of Darwinian socialist admirers, like Marx and Hitler:
In Germany, for instance, … Hitler’s National Socialist German Workers Party (Nazi) emerged from a political culture which associated pollution, big cities, and the destruction of the natural environment with what was called "Jewish cosmopolitanism." Hitler indeed remained a Green in some respects throughout his life, and his notions of how the environment should be protected played a part in his vast schemes of social engineering. The "rights of nature", as we may call them have figured on the agenda of the radical left for at least a century, and have been accompanied by far-reaching plans to reconstruct society in order to protect them.
Indeed, those concerned with upholding Christian principles should be highly suspicious of any philosophy which accords "rights" – on a par with the rights that Christian teaching accords to human beings – to natural objects. ["Is Totalitarianism Dead? Beware of the ‘New Left’", Paul Johnson, The Human Life Review, Spring, 1989]
The only problem with this sober warning is that nobody is listening. Evolution has helped facilitate an epochal reduction in the number of those "concerned with upholding Christian principles" and left Joe Average spiritually receptive, instead, to a pantheistic gospel which accords nature more than its due.
For Joe, this feel-good philosophy has translated into swimming with dolphins, recycling bottles and protesting oil spills in Alaska. But the ‘big picture’ is now unfolding before him as the deeper, darker reality hits his hip-pocket and civil liberties in the form of eco-taxes and punitive eco-laws and regulations.
These touch everything from his rubbish collection rates (to be charged by the kilo with an extra tax for non-recyclable waste) to the expensive Energy Efficiency Reports required to sell his home (especially punishing for older energy inefficient houses) to his rising business insurance premiums and bank credit risk (due to re-assessments based on global warming hysteria) to increased speed camera surveillance of his motorway journeys (enforcing the 70mph limit to curb carbon emissions - even though congestion, not speed, is the problem) right down to the minutiae of a proposed lightbulb tax (for failure to switch to ‘greener’ lightbulbs, costing up to £5 each).
The list grows like Topsy. If elected, the Tories want swingeing taxes on motorists and airline passengers as part of encouraging "tough targets for carbon reduction." While "carbon allowances" or "carbon credits", earned by cutting emissions, are on the not-so-far horizon, to be used as a money-substitute for purchases.
There is simply no escape from the eco-nazis. If the financial and legal costs don’t pummel Mr Average into eco-submission, social ostracism will pull him into line. "People who don’t recycle are costing their neighbours more by pushing up their council tax, and also contributing to climate change," snapped British Environment Minister Ben Bradshaw while announcing tough new eco-penalties and eco-taxes. "It’s no exaggeration to say they are behaving irresponsibly and antisocially. It’s time people realised that." [Daily Mail, 9/8/06]
This is the alarming trend: apocalyptic claims based on ‘ouija board science’ leading to socio-economic coercion grounded in the socialist premise that only government intervention can save the environment, since human beings like Joe Average left to themselves are too stupid or feckless to do so and, well, ‘We Know What’s Best For Joe’.
Hence Bradshaw’s menacing tone, entirely in keeping with the sort of cradle-to-grave control the Blair government has zealously pursued since its election: "a sustained and unprecedented invasion of privacy," as one commentator phrased it, which will soon include the Children’s Index, a central database to store dozens of personal and familial details on every child in England and Wales.
In this Orwellian climate, therefore, one can understand the alarm caused by the recent discovery that microchips had been secretly planted on 500,000 household wheelie bins (with all bins due for fitting within a few years) in order to monitor English households and impose fines on those who exceed limits on the amount of non-recyclable waste. They will also be used to monitor and harass those not pulling their weight. "We can detect recycling participation rates," said a local Crewe and Nantwich Council commissar. "So if a particular street or district is doing particularly badly, we will go and have a chat with them." [The Mail on Sunday, 27/8/06]
This is on top of council-employed inspectors now sifting through rubbish and issuing on-the-spot fines to anyone who for whatever reason puts as much as a teabag in the wrong bin. Ipswich council workers left behind a bin full of recyclable waste because it contained a single supermarket bag. North Lincolnshire Council demands the removal of both the sticky strip from envelopes and the plastic ‘windows’ (because they "contaminate the recycling process"). In Suffolk, plain cardboard can go in the brown bin for composting or the blue bin for dry recyclables, but printed cardboard can go only in the blue bin.
Hefty fines are being meted out for oversights or mistakes. And there’s no opting out. Several councils have introduced "compulsory schemes" threatening to fine people up to £1,000 for putting recyclable waste in their normal bin. An Exeter woman was prosecuted for the reverse reason: putting the wrong rubbish in her recycling bin. She was acquitted after a £6,000 court case found that the council could not show she was responsible. [The Mail on Sunday, 20/8/06]
Mr Average ponders where it’s all heading: Compulsory evening classes to test knowledge of these confusing and draconian regulations? To be run by extravagantly paid Council Recycling Consultants with summary powers to halt rubbish collections on test scores under 90%? And as he awaits the next oppressive diktat, schools are busy indoctrinating his children with Green propaganda.
According to a study by the Canterbury Christ Church University College in Kent which interviewed 50 Geography teachers and examined the national curriculum textbooks used in secondary schools, this will leave them knowing "everything about pollution but nothing about rivers or mountains." Eighty-four per cent of teachers agreed there was a greater emphasis on "values" today and 68 per cent said fewer facts were taught now compared to previous years. Two-thirds thought that teaching about "sustainable lifestyles" was more important than teaching basic skills such as reading maps. But one dissident told researchers: "We already teach as if we were the action wing of Greenpeace. We should develop critical thinking, not blind adherence to green policy."
One A level Geography text, Global Challenge, presents pupils with a series of challenges on cutting consumption and lowering fertility rates. This bias, said the author of the research, Alex Standish, "leaves pupils with the impression that humans can only cause harm to the environment." Unconcerned about such blatant politicisation, a spokesman for the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority blithely confirmed that "Teaching about environmental change and sustainable development is an integral part of the geography curriculum." [Daily Mail, 17/12/02]
More precisely, such teaching is an integral part of dehumanising Green propaganda that directly or indirectly corrupts many other subjects along the way – a situation the Australian government, for one, is finally confronting. Federal Education Minister Julie Bishop recently announced an end to the Marxist-inspired history curriculum that has been standard fare in Australian schools. She believes that the re-routing of history into the more subjective material of courses on "social and environmental studies," has left children without sufficient national identity and at risk of becoming "uninformed citizens." [LifesiteNews.com 9/7/06]
Well, yes and no. It has undermined their national identity, since a supranational duty to help "save the Earth" has been their staple curriculum. But in that respect they are very much informed citizens - global citizens - steeped in environmental Think Globally Act Locally initiatives and anti-Capitalist cant.
Take the robotic response of one of Sydney’s brightest high school students of 2004, who joined the New South Wales Greens Party in his final year. Asked about his future plans, he parroted a quintessential Green mantra: "I am interested in environmental issues and the increasing trend towards profit at any expense." Read: ‘I accept the climate change-Capitalist exploitation nexus because my head is uncritically crammed with Green lies and half-truths’ – which includes the entire Culture of Death worldview predicated on population control, as in the above English Geography challenge to "lower fertility rates."
From their earliest school years, to varying degrees, two generations of every creed and none have been formed in this pagan mould, involving simultaneous exposure to pantheistic New Age practices like yoga, self-hypnosis, meditation and the altered states of consciousness induction techniques of deep breathing and progressive relaxation. Concurrently, as examination of any Western educational curriculum will reveal, humanistic teaching concepts are taught which paralyse individual critical thought and promote "group-think" tailored to a globalist communitarian mindset, such as: outcome-based education; holistic education; transpersonal education; conflict resolution; integrated curriculum; constructivist learning; general systems theory; personal mastery; mental models; child-centred classroom; total quality management; school to work; consensus circles; peer mediation; focus groups; values clarification; situational ethics; sensitivity training.
And the end result of this universal exercise in social engineering on its hapless human guinea pigs? Without the Ten Commandments, their benchmark of morality has been reduced to "environmental awareness" and a "social conscience" based on amorphous "values." These demand little more than purchasing Fair Trade coffee to make the world a better place, and carrying it home in bio-degradable bags that won’t upset the ecosystem. According to a recent American Express survey, 33 per cent of the population now regard themselves as "conscience consumers."
It begs the question: what sort of "conscience" is inflamed by the plight of battery cage chickens yet untroubled by unborn children being dismembered and torn from the womb en masse?
The Real Agenda
We know the answer to that question and it certainly isn’t a mind informed by the teachings of Our Lord Jesus Christ and His Catholic Magisterium – a diabolic state of affairs anti-life politicians and technocrats are keen to reinforce at every opportunity as they both direct and reinforce the amoral "values" dictated by that Green "conscience." Hence, during a recent speech in California about the faltering war on terrorism, Britain’s pro-abortion-up-to-birth Prime Minister said: "… unless we revitalise the broader global agenda on poverty [and] climate change … we will not win … This struggle is one about values. Our values are worth struggling for… ."
The Blairs of the world, of course, are merely conduits for the pagan line dispensed from the Olympian heights of the global pyramid. For as Michel Berger outlined in his critique on "Ecology and Globalism" [Apropos, Lent 2003], the principal goal of the Masonic humanists and occult New Agers orchestrating the eco-globalist gospel via the United Nations, Club of Rome, Trilateral Commission, Green Cross International et. al., is the annihilation of the traditional Christian "paradigm" (i.e. way of understanding and explaining reality) and its replacement with a new "holistic paradigm" leading to pantheism. Boutros Boutros-Ghali, as Secretary General of the United Nations, summarised this vision of the world at the 1992 "Earth Summit" in Rio:
Over and above the moral contract with God, over and above the social contract concluded with the people, it is now necessary to conclude an ethical and political contract with nature, with this earth to which we owe our existence… To the ancients the Earth had a soul. To find it again, to resuscitate it, such is the work of Rio.
After recalling this transcendent sovereign power of nature and the earth - reverenced as holy mother "Gaia" (a Greek earth goddess) by neo-pagans - Boutros-Ghali actually opened the Rio conference with two minutes of silence for the earth!
He was followed on the podium by New Age occultist Maurice Strong, Secretary-General of the UN Conference on Environment and Development, who in true Darwinian spirit turned immediately to the real agenda:
"We are the most successful species ever, but now we’re a species out of control," he decreed. The world’s population has grown by 1.7 billion since the Stockholm Conference in 1972 and 1.5 billion of those live in developing countries that are unable to support them. This growth cannot continue. "If we don’t control it, nature will," he stressed in the menacing tradition of English churchman Thomas Malthus. In his seminal "Essay on the Principle of Population" [1798], Malthus wrote that "All children born, beyond what would be required to keep up the population to a desired level, must necessarily perish.... Therefore ...we should facilitate, instead of foolishly and vainly endeavouring to impede, the operations of nature in producing this mortality..."
Kings, Presidents and Prime Ministers holding supranational environmental ‘portfolios’ followed Strong with similar Malthusian calls for population control to "eradicate poverty and achieve greater equality" between nations through "interdependence" and "sustainable development." All the while they undermined national sovereignty by further empowering unaccountable non-governmental lobby groups (NGOs) and creating still more supranational organisations – vehicles for the one-world government long advocated by the most powerful and wealthy secular humanists on the planet and fostered by their elite umbrella groups.
It was one such, the Club of Rome, whose apocalyptic 1972 report "Limits to Growth" set in train the establishment of national and international environmental agencies and ministries, even though its early computer modelling falsely prophesied the complete "collapse of the world system" unless the population was slashed and "a totally new form of human society" created.
Beyond Genocide
The call for a new society by systematically sterilising, aborting, euthanising or otherwise killing off billions of people in order to protect the environment and preserve world resources is especially perverse in the middle of a global demographic crisis. China’s one-child policy is already creating serious labour shortages; South Korea is spending $20 billion on familial incentives to combat its chronic people shortage; the EU warns that serious population decline affects one in five European countries and could see economic growth fall to just 1% a year; while the UN Population Division itself reports low fertility rates in Third World countries with 20 already below replacement level.
Near universal under-population, however, will not silence the bloodythirsty refrains of the Darwinian eco-globalists, who regard human life as a pest that must be limited and controlled at all costs.
The First Global Revolution, published by The Council of the Club of Rome, states that: "In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine, and the like would fit the bill. All these dangers are caused by human intervention ...The real enemy, then, is humanity itself." [1991, Pantheon Books, p. 115]
In the opinion of David Graber, a research biologist with the U.S. National Park Service: "Human happiness and certainly human fecundity are not as important as a wild and healthy planet. I know social scientists who remind me that people are part of nature, but it isn’t true ... We have become a plague upon ourselves and upon the Earth ...Until such time as homo sapiens should decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along." [Los Angeles Times, Book Review Section, 22/10/89]
In the UNESCO Courier of November 1991, Jacques Cousteau wrote: "The damage people cause to the planet is a function of demographics - it is equal to the degree of development. One American burdens the earth much more than twenty Bangladeshis ... This is a terrible thing to say. In order to stabilize world population, we must eliminate 350,000 people per day. It is a horrible thing to say, but it’s just as bad not to say it." ["The Population Controllers", New American Magazine, 27/6/94, p. 7.]
World-renowned scientist and evolutionary ecologist Eric Pianka, however, would find Cousteau’s formula timid and his figures miniscule! In a recent speech at the 109th meeting of the Texas Academy of Science at Lamar University in Beaumont (3-5 March 2006), Pianka condemned humans as "no better than bacteria" and told hundreds of his colleagues that 90 percent of us need to be wiped out by exposure to Ebola or some other deadly virus in order to save the planet. After outlining the various alternative solutions in the form of a slide depicting the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, he coldly stated that disease offered the most efficient and fastest way to kill the billions that must die very soon if the population crisis is to be solved.
When he finished this talk urging the slow and agonising death by Ebola virus of 5 billion human beings, his colleagues burst out in sustained applause. "It wasn’t merely a smattering of polite clapping that audiences diplomatically reserve for poor or boring speakers," noted one appalled observer, Forrest Mims III, a member of the Texas Academy and chairman of its environmental section. "It was a loud, vigorous and enthusiastic applause."
In the ensuing question and answer session Pianka praised the police state that enforced China’s one-child policy, saying: "Smarter people have fewer kids." And his audience chuckled when he gleefully proposed that, "We need to sterilize everybody on the Earth." Five hours later, the Academy presented Pianka with a plaque in recognition of his being named 2006 Distinguished Texas Scientist, which bought more sustained applause from 400 people in the banquet hall. Mims said that the 45-minute lecture converted a university biology senior into a Pianka disciple, who then published a blog that seriously supports Pianka’s mass death wish. ["Meeting Doctor Doom", Citizen Scientist, 31/3/06]
For their part, Global Assessment Report of UNEP (a United Nations sponsored study group) also quotes an expert roughly in accord with Pianka’s figures, who suggested that: "A reasonable estimate for an industrialized world society at the present North American material standard of living would be 1 billion. At the more frugal European standard of living, 2 to 3 billion would be possible." [The World Conservative Union, Gland, Switzerland, Phase One Draft, Section 9]
Margaret Thatcher, no friend to pro-lifers, also puts population control at the heart of our ecological mission. Alarmed by the continued rise of the world’s population, she declared at the opening of the Hadley Centre for Climate Research in 1990: "Putting the [environmental] problems right will be all the harder until we succeed in curbing that rate of population growth."
This baying for blood euphemistically referred to as "population control," is of a nature and scale that does not fit the definition of genocide as listed in Article 2 of the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Since 1973 in the U.S. alone, one low estimate of total surgical (including prostaglandin and saline) abortions and abortifacient (the Pill, Mini-Pill, I.U.D., Depo-Provera, Norplant etc.) chemical abortions, totals over 200 million deaths. The high estimate was 4 times that figure. [www.life.org] On a global basis over the same period, multiplying by a suggested figure of 40, the numbers are unimaginable, and rising hourly. We have ‘evolved’, by any measure, beyond genocide. Yet for want of a more specific term referring to extermination of the human species per se, rather than a particular "national, ethnical, racial or religious group," we might call "population control" genocidal. And if we make this concession, then surely, under the terms of Articles 2 and 3 of its own Convention, the UN and all its deadly Planned Parenthood affiliates - overseeing planetary programmes of mass surgical and chemical (abortifacient contraceptive) abortion and sterilisation - stand guilty, at the very least, of: "Conspiracy or attempt or direct and public incitement to commit genocide" by "Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group [species]", "Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group [species]" and "Killing members of the group [species]."
Enlightened Totalitarians
The commonly held sentiments above which underlie this unspeakable reality, epitomised by Cousteau’s plea to "eliminate" hundreds of thousands on a daily basis, recall the deep and unrelenting hostility towards ordinary men and women that fill the eighteenth century writings of the so-called Enlightenment thinkers. They prepared the ground for the French Revolution and all the future vehicles of dehumanisation, like evolution, which fuelled the totalitarian political systems and genocides of our time.
Despite the ‘official’ history presented in school textbooks about the "values" promoted by the Age of Reason and its "constant pre-occupation with the dignity of man", the likes of Diderot, Voltaire, d’Alembert and the rest all despised the vast majority of human beings, especially women, since they claimed to be made in the image of God, his Creator, and they hated the Creator. Also because they were less "enlightened" than these philosophers considered themselves to be. Xavier Martin of the French Academy, who read all the works of all these men, a truly herculean effort, has documented these incontestable facts. [See "A Searchlight on the ‘Enlightenment’," CO, June/July 2002]
Clearly, the same malign spirit behind the super-elitism and godless disregard for humanity exhibited by these celebrated French Humanists is directing all the fine appeals for a new, pristine Green society based on "population control." It is more or less apparent in the Masonic discourse of leaders of the Gaia cult like Mikhail Gorbachev (President of Green Cross International who says "the environmental crisis is the cornerstone for the New World Order"); or the psycho-babble of fellow-travelling New Agers like "Human Potential" guru and UNICEF Advisor Jean Houston (who insists "the ecological crisis is challenging us to a realization of a new humanity"); or the manifest contempt of "useful idiots" like ‘Liberal Catholic theologian’ Rosemary Radford Ruether (who declared:"We are parasites. Nature would be much better off without us.").
But when influential globe-trotting eco-ambassadors and pro-aborts like Al Gore appear on our TV screens pleading for us "to participate in the upheaval" we "must undergo" to create a new civilisation, we should be under no illusions whatsoever that behind Big Al’s democratic smile lies another face, and it is not smiling. "To protect this central objective," announced Gore, "means taking part in an effort so that every decision, every program, every law, every institution, every treaty, every alliance, every tactic and every strategy – in brief all means – are employed to stop the destruction of the environment and to protect and preserve our ecological system."
This clear totalitarian intent is of a piece with Gore’s ruminations in his infamous tome Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit, where he writes disturbingly about what constitutes an "authentic" or "inauthentic" life in modern society. Commenting in National Review, Adam Wolfson wrote:
As Lionel Trilling once noted [about "authenticity"], this "is a word of ominous import." Who is Gore to say, we might inquire, what are authentic purposes and what are not, who is an authentic person and who is not, what is an authentic world and what is not? Where does he get the knowledge to make such fundamental distinctions? Gore associates the inauthentic with "the noisy chatter of our discourse," with the pursuit of comfort through technology, and with a consumerist culture. An inauthentic person is a "false self," or someone who does not live in his own life, as Gore strangely puts it. Gore may well be a good democrat; but it takes little imagination to see where his analysis could lead (as it indeed has in the "dysfunctional" totalitarian states of our century). To the reeducation camps go the inauthentic ones, where they will be forced to become authentic. [8/3/99]
Indeed they will, through forcible sterilisation, according to David Brower, founder of Friends of the Earth and described by USA Today as "the godfather of the environmental movement." In keeping with the aims of his Earth Island Institute which seeks to "develop and support projects that counteract environmental threats," Brower states that: "Childbearing [should be] a punishable crime against society, unless the parents hold a government license ... All potential parents [should be] required to use contraceptive chemicals, the government issuing antidotes to citizens chosen for childbearing." [quoted by Dixie Lee Ray, Trashing the Planet, p.166]
This all translates into deadly practice through globalist movers and shakers like Henry Kissinger - a member of the Club of Rome, one time US National Security Advisor and later Secretary of State - who in 1974 supervised the production of National Security Study Memorandum 200. Now declassified, the document states that population growth in the developing world would lead to a desire for self-determination of their economies and the consequent growth in prosperity would threaten U.S. security and overseas economic interests. Populations must therefore be controlled (through the United Nations using coercive methods, including the withholding of aid money) but this fact must be withheld from national leaders. Among the countries specifically targeted were Ethiopia, Columbia, India, Nigeria, Mexico and Indonesia.
In a 30 August 2006 interview with Zenit newsagency, the Auxiliary Bishop Lara Barbosa of Rio de Janeiro, referred to this "Kissinger Report", as it is known, while emphasising the concerted campaign by international organizations to establish abortion in Latin America. He pointed out that the infamous Memo states that "no country has reduced the increase of its population without taking recourse to abortion," and includes Brazil as one of the "13 key countries" to exercise such population control. Said the Bishop: "[T]hat document is only the tip of the iceberg. Currently there are various population projects in Brazil, a lot of lobbying of the National Congress, and an enormous quantity of money injected in projects by powerful entities, such as the Ford and MacArthur Foundations."
Also listed for genocidal measures in Memo 200 was the Philippines, which remains a prime target. On 5 March 2005, the Philippino Catholic Bishops’ Conference organised a rally in Manila and protests across the country to galvanise Catholic opposition to proposed Population Control Bill 3773. Reflecting measures advocated in the Club of Rome’s 1972 report and sounding like a fiat from the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, the Bill sought to introduce the "Responsible Parenthood and Population Management Act", mandating a rule that restricts families to two children and introduces sex education for children and the distribution of contraceptives.
Philippino pro-life groups rightly condemned the Bill as "destructive," "deceptive," a violation of privacy and autonomy of couples and families, an "alibi" for government failure to genuinely address poverty and a recipe for reducing productivity and a depressed economy. Yet the servile Philippino government was merely enacting the legislative base for that "new civilisation" demanded by the bloodthirsty Lords of the Earth at Rio and every other UN summit. The abortion holocaust is their ongoing statement of homicidal intent and the rapid descent into involuntary euthanasia the next evolutionary step along the path to the post-human world facilitated by Darwin. (A survey conducted by the Brunel University has estimated that nearly 2,000 people were killed in Britain by doctors performing involuntary euthanasia in 2004. - BBC News, 17/1/06)
This nightmare was described by the Pontifical Council for the Family in Family and Human Procreation. A hard-hitting 57-page document released last June which condemns the attack on the family as the "eclipse of God" and calls abortion a crime which must be punished, it truly states: "[T]oday man has become a great enigma to himself and lives through the most acute crisis of his history in its family dimension: the family is subject to attack as never before; the new models of the family destroy it; procreation techniques jettison human love; the politics of birth control lead to the current ‘demographic winter.’ ... Along these paths ... we deviate towards a ‘post-human’ world. It is necessary to save man."
Quite. To rescue him precisely from the godless society planned for him by ultra-Greens like Alvin Toffler, Bill Clinton’s influential advisor, who wrote: "This new civilisation draws in its wake new models of family structures, it modifies our ways of working, loving and living; it establishes a new economic order; it announces the advent of a new consciousness."
Satanic Source
If this new civilisation is evolving on the back of Darwin’s embedded atheistic worldview, the source of it’s pantheistic "consciousness" is Satan himself. Increasingly brazen in a world denuded of belief by his trusty lieutenants Darwin and Marx, he now operates directly and openly through individual UN occultists like Maurice Strong [see "Dark Green Catechism" this issue] or occult UN Non-Governmental Organisations such as the Lucis Trust, the modern face of the "Lucifer Publishing Company" founded by Alice Bailey early last century.
Bailey was a disciple of Madame Blavatsky, the nominal leader of the Theosophical Society between the early 1900s and the late 1920s. For PR reasons she dropped the name "Lucifer" from the original title. But the nature and beliefs of her organisation are unchanged and The Lucis Trust is powered by the same Satanic force that energised Madame Blavatasky and her many infamous adherents like Adolf Hitler and eugenicist Margaret Sanger.
Publications from The Lucis Trust regularly refer to "The Plan" for humanity that has been established by "The Hierarchy" and dictated by so-called "Ascended Masters" like the mythical Djwhal Khul, the alleged source of Bailey’s works. It centres around an emerging syncretic world religion that Bailey refers to as "the Church Universal." She listed 1945, 1965 and 2025 as key dates in "The Plan" and her predictions thus far have been remarkably (eerily) accurate.
As an NGO (actually headquartered at the United Nations Plaza for many years before moving to Wall Street) the Lucis Trust remains one of the major front groups through which theosophy works to raise global "consciousness" via labyrinthine UN networks. Another is Share International, which publishes a monthly journal "in association with" the UN Department of Public Information and is headed by Benjamin Creme, a British theosophist who claims to speak on behalf of "Lord Maitreya", a member of the "Spiritual Hierarchy of Ascended Masters." Creme insists that Maitreya is "the Christ" and is working with other members of the "Hierarchy" to bring about the consummation of human evolution.
The cult of earth goddess "Gaia" is the heart of this pagan consummation - by which evolution finally gives birth to environmentalism-as-religion.
When the spooky Mikhail Gorbachev, who metamorphosed overnight from ex-Marxist President and KGB chief into New Age eco-crusader, said on the PBS Charlie Rose Show of 23 October 1996: "Cosmos is my God. Nature is my God" - he simply meant: ‘My God is Gaia.’
All traditional beliefs are to be swept away to accommodate this deification of Mother Earth - which pagan spirituality alone, according to Dr. Robert Muller, can totally unify the world.
For 38 years an Assistant UN Secretary-General to three Secretary-Generals - U Thant, Kurt Waldheim and Javier Péres de Cuéllar - Muller wrote so prolifically about the future of the United Nations he was called "Prophet of the UN." He readily admits that his beliefs are based largely on the writings of Alice Bailey. And parents should note that Muller credits her teachings and those of her alleged Tibetan "spirit guide" (i.e. demon), Djwhal Khul, for providing the basis of his World Core Curriculum which he authored to provide children with a global education in an increasingly interdependent world.
This still hugely influential figure positively embodies the UN Gaia cult and its belief that world peace will ultimately depend "on divine and cosmic government" with the UN standing "as the pinnacle of divine enlightenment." In October 1989, Muller stated:
"We are part and parcel of a living planetary organism. Each of us is a cell, a perceptive nervous unit of the Earth. You, as cosmic and earth cells, are part of a vast biological and evolutionary phenomenon ... We have now a world brain which determines what can be dangerous or mortal for the planet: the United Nations and its agencies, and innumberable [sic] groups and networks around the world, are part of the brain."
Cosmic Confrontation
The vast, powerful, costly Green infrastructure we have glimpsed in this essay constitutes a major chunk of those global "groups and networks." Empowered by legislation now churned out at unprecedented rates, these protective technocratic "brains" of Mother Earth become ever more intrusive, coercive and oppressive with time.
In the U.S., more than a third of all the laws and regulations the Federal government has published since 1970 are devoted to the "environment." In Britain, of the unprecedented and staggering 3,000 new criminal offences created under the illiberal Blair regime since 1997 - one new crime for every day Mr Blair has been in power! - 640 offences were created by the Environment department.
This universal political trend allied to the theosophical source of Muller’s disturbing occult vision and the hellish pantheistic ‘spirituality’ of the eco-elite that it reflects, all suggests that we are facing the penultimate stage of Darwin’s "slow and silent war" on Christianity before Antichrist. In March 2000, Cardinal Giacomo Biffi, Archbishop of Bologna, even speculated that the Antichrist might be already among us, looking to undermine the Catholic Church while most likely disguised as a philanthropist supporting creeds like vegetarianism and animal rights, and advocating dialogue with Orthodox or Anglican believers.
If not the actual arrival of Anti-Christ, however, present trends certainly presage that religious alternative to Christianity which evolutionist Julian Huxley so desired but was denied the popular environmental vehicle to achieve. Instead, his equally famous successors have been handed the task of bringing the new pantheistic anti-gospel to the masses. The religious dimension of this seamless hand-over from one atheistic belief system to another was not lost on a newspaper columnist commenting on David Attenborough’s most recent TV offering.
The doyen of mass media evolution propagandists and a self-declared atheist, the 80-year-old Attenborough effectively consecrated the transition from evolutionism to environmentalism during a two-part BBC documentary "Can We Save Planet Earth?" (May/June 2006) during which he predicted doom and disaster - violent hurricanes, terrible droughts, threat to polar bears etc. etc. - while imparting his influential blessing to "climate change."
"[Attenborough] positively reeks of decency, of old-fashioned values," gushed the reverential columnist. "[And now] as he speaks to us … of melting ice caps and disappearing ozone layers … has become an almost spiritual figure. …[A]s our religious belief wanes and even, for some, comes to be associated with warfare and terrorism, so the threat to our planet looms larger. So eco-friendliness becomes the new modern creed, green the new religion. Familiar themes emerge. According to the eco-bible we have all sinned and must pay for polluting the earth with emissions from our second cars, cut-price flights and the endless wrapping up of everything in plastic."
"Now, in Sir David," he coos, "we have found our new prophet. He may have fierce and scary messages but surely – we hope – this is the man who will also lead us to eco-salvation? … No longer content just to describe the wonders of the natural world, now he wants to make us change our ways. Follow the shining path to environmental redemption, he says. [It is Attenborough’s] passionate belief that we need to improve the way we behave to avoid disaster. It’s our new moral dilemma." [The Sunday Express, 4/6/06]
In a critique of this "new secular religion" - with its "new spirituality that supplants all religions, because the latter have been unable to preserve the ecosystem" and its "new God that is the earth itself, named Gaia" - Archbishop Javier Lozano Barragan, president of the Pontifical Council for Health Care Workers, summed up the parallel dilemma facing Holy Mother Church. "Clearly," he said, "we are faced with the total denial of Christianity and the fundamental fact of Christianity, the Incarnation of the Word, the redeeming death of Christ and his glorious resurrection." [L’Osservatore Romano, 11/1/03]
We must, therefore, confront this reality: that what we face is a fight to the death with a satanic global behemoth which would crush us except for the guaranteed spiritual weapons and means of grace at our disposal - prayer, penance and the daily Rosary. In this mounting confrontation - between the Gospel and the anti-gospel; the one true Church and the one world anti-church; Christ and Anti-Christ - the only response, as Archbishop Barragan concluded, is "an authentic universal ethic" to supplant the phony humanistic "values" of the genocidal goddess worshipped by the eco-death dealers: an ethic whose object must be nothing less than God Himself and the historical fact of the Incarnation of God, Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.