Why Do They Hate Themselves?

Many of us were heartened recently learning of the utter failure of Al Gore and Company's "Live Earth" extravaganza, a world-wide series of concerts of over-the-hill millionaire rockers who, while using gazillions of watts of electricity, sang their old, all too familiar tunes and scolded those foolish enough to buy tickets to the silliness over their shameful and wasteful ways.

Hardly any news there, Ms. Barbra Streisand has been engaging in such rank hypocrisy on her website for years. Mark Steyn, however, in a typically droll account of the flop concert series, illustrates further the wackadoodle world of environmentalists by quoting UK Prof. John Guillebaud (who enjoys the singular title of Professor Emeritus of Family Planning and Reproductive Health at University College, London) urging Albion, in order to reduce global warming--sorry, it's climate change these days--to cut back on her births by the rate of one kid per family. Britain's fertility rate at present is 1.8 children per couple. To maintain the present population requires a rate of 2.1 per couple so not only is the learned professor urging the suicide of the British nation, he wishes she would look slippy about it.

There is something unnerving about the enviros despising their own species. Since most of them seem also to subscribe to Marxist notions of redistribution of wealth, I wonder if it might be a corollary of the hatred of those who succeed in free markets, i.e. the species that has come out on top in the animal kingdom has done so at the expense of the lower orders and must therefore be punished. On the other hand, environmentalism might also be likened to a crude sort of religion, one where salvation is possible for no one; Calvinists who don't believe in God.