Environment

What do you think about nature? To some, plants and animals deserve to be treated like members of our family, while to others, nature is just fuel to supply human needs. Many people feel somewhere between these opposite points of view.

Environmentalism

The environment is essential to human life and we must take care of how we use it to protect our health.

Nature is the essential ultimate provider of everything all living things like us need to survive. People’s actions have consequences and if we don’t take care not to spoil and destroy the natural order of life on earth, not only do we drive other species extinct but also we threaten our own species with ultimate extinction. Damage to our environment affects our health when the poisons we dump into the water, air and food filter back into our bodies to make us sicken and die.

Anti-Pollution, Anti-Ozone Depletion, Anti-Global Warming, Anti-Acid Rain, Anti-Species Extinction, Regulation, Safety, Anti-Deregulation, Anti-Greed, Planning, Community, Democracy, Human Rights, Dissent, Litigation, Activism

“We didn’t inherit this land from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children”

—Lakota Sioux Proverb

“I was probably pre-disposed toward conservatism since I was raised in a military family and grew up in Texas, a state that has a low tolerance for unionism and a high tolerance for guns and the death penalty. Nonetheless, in my 20s I had a small streak of liberalism that manifested itself in Sierra Club-like activities. This was due to an extensive amount of back country hiking and wilderness backpacking.”

—M. Mosher (ask)

“Thank god they cannot cut down the clouds!”

—Henry David Thoreau

Environmental Activism

Development of health problems because of industrial waste. Chemicals. Asthma, epilepsy, depressed immune system, leukemia, blood problems... Disadvantage. Pollution/toxin system.

“It’s my fault, I made a decision that I would wait for someone else to do something about this, what kind of a responsible mother would I be to sit back and wait for my kids to be poisoned... I knocked on my neighbor’s doors and found 56% with birth defects like serious mutations... There are many people out there who are not doing this because of professional growth but because children are dying. If somebody somewhere gave a permit which is a license to kill as far as I’m concerned, they have to be stopped.”

—Louise Gibbs, Tragedy at Love Canal 2. 10:30

If you remove people from exposure they can become well. Diseases recover. They said its chronic – it’s not, the situation was chronic.

Fighting companies for money to move away.

Connect industrial waste into environmental effects on characters.

Anti-Extinction

quote from suzuki E O Wilson The idea that extinction is natural, and so has it ever been,... denial”

Overpopulation Control

“Present birth rates are bringing too many people into the world. The planet is filling to carrying capacity. If people do not reduce the number of children they have, we will face serious environmental consequences. By choosing to limit the number of offspring we have, we reduce the burden on our resources to more sustainable levels, ensuring a better future for the children we do have.”

—http://www.populationconnection.org/

“Beyond a critical point within a finite space, freedom diminishes as numbers increase.
This is as true of humans in the finite space of a planetary ecosystem as it is of gas molecules in a sealed flask. The human question is not how many can possibly survive within the system, but what kind of existence is possible for those who do survive.”

—Frank Herbert, Dune

Linked Ideas

Adoption, Birth Control, Sexual Education, Child Limitation

Depopulation

Depopulation is the extreme version of overpopulation control. Depopulationists believe surplus populations should be exterminated.

“In the event that I am reincarnated, I would like to return as a deadly virus, in order to contribute something to solve overpopulation.”

—Prince Philip

“I just wonder what it would be like to be reincarnated as an animal whose species had been so reduced in numbers that it was in danger of extinction. What would be its feelings toward the human species whose population explosion had denied it somewhere to exist...? I must confess I am tempted to ask for reincarnation as a particularly deadly virus.’’

—{From Prince Philip’s foreword to Fleur Cowles’s } People As Animals,{ Robin Clark Ltd., United Kingdom, 1986

“...WE SHOULD FACILITATE...THE OPERATIONS OF NATURE IN PRODUCING THIS [WIDESPREAD] MORTALITY...INSTEAD OF RECOMMENDING CLEANLINESS TO THE POOR [AND THUS PROMOTING LIFE], WE SHOULD ENCOURAGE CONTRARY HABITS. IN OUR TOWNS WE SHOULD MAKE THE STREETS NARROWER, CROWD MORE PEOPLE INTO THE HOUSES, AND COURT THE RETURN OF THE PLAGUE. IN THE COUNTRY, WE SHOULD BUILD OUR VILLAGES NEAR STAGNANT POOLS, AND PARTICULARLY ENCOURAGE SETTLEMENTS IN ALL MARSHY AND UNWHOLESOME SITUATIONS. BUT ABOVE ALL, WE SHOULD [DISAPPROVE OF] SPECIFIC REMEDIES FOR [CURING] DISEASES; AND [DISAPPROVE OF] THOSE BENEVOLENT, BUT MUCH MISTAKEN MEN, WHO HAVE THOUGHT THEY WERE DOING A SERVICE TO MANKIND BY PROJECTING SCHEMES FOR THE TOTAL EXTIRPATION [ELIMINATION] OF PARTICULAR DISORDERS [DISEASES].”

—Thomas Malthus, 1798, “An Essay on the Principle of Population as it Affects the Future Improvement of Society”

Anti-Depopulation

http://www.nomorefakenews.com/archives/archiveview.php?key=2033

2 Child Limitation

People shouldn't be allowed to have more than the number of children that government deems to be sustainable.

“I don’t agree with it. But at the same time, they’ve got 1.2 billion people [in China], and they don’t know what to do. If every family over there was allowed to have three or four children, the population would be completely unsustainable ... I think that right now they’re doing what they have to do. I don’t agree with the forced abortion, but I don’t think the United States needs to interfere with what they’re doing internally in this regard.”

—Pat Roberston on CNN

Linked Ideas: Anti-Liberty, Totalitarianism, Adoption, Abortion, Anti-Femenism, Anti-Overpopulation, Conservationism

Anti-Child Limitation

Bearing children is a human right.

“The blind conviction that we have to do something about other people’s reproductive behaviour, and that we may have to do it whether they like it or not, derives from the assumption that the world belongs to us, who have so expertly depleted its resources, rather than to them, who have not.”

—Germaine Greer

Adoption

Adopting a child is so rewarding and changes a young life forever.

Linked Ideas: Anti-Overpopulation, Conservationism, Philanthropy, Generosity, Anti-Orphanage, Reproductive Science

Opposed Ideas: Procreation, Prejudice

David Suzuki, The Nature of Things

“Today the economy is held up as a triumph of human ingenuity but it is an illustion that leaves reality out of the equation.”
“Fish and air are not free, they’re valuable. The economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment.”