Category: Odds & Ends

“It ain’t over until…”

You been here FOUR HOUR!
You scare my wife!
You eat my profit!

The secular religion of environmentalism has found a new harbinger of death: the decline of British butterfly populations. Aaaack! Ratify the Kyoto treaty! Recycle your toilet paper! Drive your SUVs off a cliff (after filing the proper environmental impact statement with local, state, and federal authorities)!
Nature emits at least 95% of the carbon dioxide that’s released into the atmosphere. Humans release less than 5%. But it’s that 5% that is going to destroy the butterflies and the rest of the planet. Never mind that major volcanoes have put more debris and carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than man ever has, and in short, violent spurts.
Strangely, although many environmentalists buy into the Gaia hypothesis, which says that the Earth is a single organism with many parts (including humans), they think a small rise in one kind of gas spells disaster for the planet. Is the Earth really that fragile? It’s survived five major rounds of extinction before. You’d think that plant life would increase a little bit to exploit this increased resource. It isn’t like CO2 is a new gas, invented by evil scientists.
Another good question is: so what? Environmentalists would respond that mass extinction would throw off the “equilibrium” of the planet. Again, so what? The planet would eventually find a new stasis after a while. According to paleontologists, something like 99% of all species are already extinct; what does a few more matter? Organisms come, and organisms go, and the planet seems relatively indifferent to their fate.
I referred to environmentalism as a “secular religion.” I didn’t mean that clean air and water are religious concepts, but rather that the ideological “story” of environmentalism is rooted in quasi-religious, quasi-Christian beliefs. There is the innocent Garden of Eden (when man was a hunter and gatherer), the Fall (agriculture, or perhaps industrialization — theologians disagree on this point), the Redemption (Earth Day, 1970), and the Apocalypse (global warming).
Once you’ve decided that man’s actions are dangerous and that we somehow stand outside of nature instead of at its pinnacle, it’s just a question of gathering evidence of man’s destructiveness. You do that through generating studies with the foreordained conclusion that man is going to destroy the Earth. Faith seeking understanding, as it were.
If the Earth is created by God and given to man, then it’s a moral failure to abuse it. But if there’s no God, then what does it matter if a few species disappear? Or a lot of species? Unless butterflies are God’s creatures and thus beautiful and worthy of respect in their own right, it’s hard to feel sorry for them.

For a few hours this morning, I mentioned a rumor at another site. It turned out to be an exaggeration, so I’ve removed the reference to it here.

Wow! What a campaign!
What a great showing! Thank you! Thank you!
First, I’d like to thank every single one of the 64 people who voted for Catholic Light in this great race for the title of Best Catholic Group Blog. Your love has just been a great sustenance to us throughout these weeks, and I am so proud of every one of you for your courage and your fortitude, your prudence and your temperance, and all the other marvelous virtues you showed, day in and day out, throughout this great campaign for the good of the global village. It has truly been an amazing experience.
I want to acknowledge and congratulate our friends at Holy Whapping for their great showing tonight — yes, they deserve a lot of credit for a fine and hard-fought and fair campaign; that is, unless the voting irregularities observed by our investigators turn out to be provable, in which case you’ll be hearing from Pe– oh, never mind.
Anyway, we still have a mission ahead of us. We have work to do for this weblog, for this audience, for this great Internet stretching across the world, bringing together the posts of our wonderful team and your great comments which together show forth with increased splendor that Light which we are all here to celebrate: the light of the Faith and of its truth and the one Light whom we in our limitations can never fully comprehend and yet which the darkness can never overcome. To that Light who enlightens all men by His quiet coming may there be effervescent glory when He is revealed in endless majesty and unto endless ages!
Good night and God bless you!