Environmentalists hate humans.
Today (via Drudge) we get a clear example of what radical environmentalists are about: University of Texas professor Dr. Eric Pianka -- who has just been named a "distinguished scientist" by the Texas Academy of Science -- has called for the elimination of 90 percent of the human population, preferably via disease. Here's just a small taste of his distinguished views:
One of Pianka's earliest points was a condemnation of anthropocentrism, or the idea that humankind occupies a privileged position in the Universe.If they're really serious, I can think of an important first step Dr. Pianka and each of his admirers could take to help mitigate our "overpopulation" problem.. . .
Pianka hammered his point home by exclaiming, “We're no better than bacteria!�
. . .
He spoke glowingly of the police state in China that enforces their one-child policy. He said, "Smarter people have fewer kids." He said those who don't have a conscience about the Earth will inherit the Earth, "...because those who care make fewer babies and those that didn't care made more babies." . . .
With this, the questioning was over. Immediately almost every scientist, professor and college student present stood to their feet and vigorously applauded the man who had enthusiastically endorsed the elimination of 90 percent of the human population. Some even cheered. Dozens then mobbed the professor at the lectern to extend greetings and ask questions.
(UPDATE: Here's another story with more details about the professor.)
Comments (38)
"If they're really serious, I can think of an important first step Dr. Pianka and each of his admirers could take to help mitigate our "overpopulation" problem."
Ha Ha Ha. Were they wearing ties at the time?
Well there you are. Proffesor Reisman proved right. Certainly in the general if not in the case of every individual involved. And ye shall be judged by the company ye keeps (and rightly so). This information coming with superb timing as if to supremely vindicate him.
But when we get through laughing at these people think of the magnitude of the problem we face. Closet fascism capturing all of societies important institutions as if directed by Gramsci's ghost. And these lunatics might be just one crisis away from Joe sixpack taking them seriously.
The good scientists can't beat this lunacy back on their own. Since it is they who risk their livelihoods by taking up the task. They need help from outside the field. All those who have spoken out have been steamrolled and tarred as cranks.
Published: April 2, 2006 1:42 PM
How can one get rid of such people before they get into power, but without committing such evil (ie exterminating them)? After they come into power evil will be the only way to get rid of them. Everytime there is a weather event they scream hysteria just like the president scares people with terrorism.
Published: April 2, 2006 1:51 PM
CMB:
How hard is it to misinterpret someone saying they want to kill 90% of the human population? The article also posts evidence of this crank's views via his website.
Published: April 2, 2006 1:55 PM
"That was one person's account, reported third-hand. Why are you even bothering to post this on this blog?"
The link gives us a first-hand eye-witness report.
Published: April 2, 2006 2:01 PM
Kyoto is a punitive tax on breathing.
Published: April 2, 2006 2:59 PM
Pianka is an idiot - apparently he did not get the word that his spiritual father Paul Ehrlich has been repeatedly discredited vis a vis his population bomb scenarios.
Human population, just as with other species is self-limiting, in the absence of government intervention. The only way 90% of us are going to be wiped out by a disease is if our governments engineer or revive a pandemic-causing virus. Like this one;
http://www.libertyguys.org/articles/detail.asp?ArtID=1022
Biologically he is correct in saying humans, to nature, are little different than bacteria. But that totally underestimates the unique properties of the human brain.
Published: April 2, 2006 3:04 PM
Eye witness accounts are enough to execute people (find guilty in the court of law).
Published: April 2, 2006 4:23 PM
Hey, just because they want to kill 90% of us doesn't mean they hate us. They said we're no better than bacteria, but that doesn't mean we're WORSE than bacteria, which they presumably have favorable opinions about. Err... right?
Ok, defending these evil bastards is impossible. Here's hoping they start by setting themselves as good examples for the rest of us to ignore while we can go on with our lives.
Published: April 2, 2006 6:11 PM
"Smarter people have fewer kids." Makes you just wish the parents of people such as Pianka we a lot "smarter" does it not?
It really is a sad and disturbing reflection of how low society has sunk under the influence of the state that college students just eat up the garbage this horse's ass spews.
There is a related article by Eric Englund that shows the strong connection between this biocentric mentality and the Nazi movement. Such people really have no problem with mass murder if it’s for a good cause. It’s why I know truth is stranger than fiction. People are more twisted and insane than what many of us can really imagine. And these same twisted minds are attracted to political power where they can enact and inflict their twisted programs on the unsuspecting and hapless masses.
http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig/englund4.html
Published: April 2, 2006 7:05 PM
I wrote the members of the board of the Texas Academy of Science the following quickly and poorly written letter, allowing for the possibility that this was all a sick joke (although it didn't appear to be one):
To the officers of the Texas Academy of Science:
According to Dr. Forrest Mims' report (included below), Dr. Eric R. Pianka recently spoke at a meeting of your organization. If his report is an accurate representation of the speech, in which Dr. Pianka stated that humans are "no better than bacteria" and mused about the most efficient ways of killing off most of them, then I am absolutely appalled and frightened that Dr. Pianka was even invited to speak before the Texas Academy of Science, let alone given a positive reception and a standing ovation following his speech. The advocacy of the extermination of 90% of the human population is horrific, and while I do not envy Dr. Pianka the resulting backlash, I do say it will be what he deserves. I will defend to my death his right to say such things, of course, but I condemn him for saying it, and I condemn each and every one of you for giving him a forum in which to say it.
I hope that this is simply a sick joke. The advocacy of genocide is an affront to all that is decent. If you have any honor at all, you will condemn his remarks prior to dissolving the Texas Academy of Science. If this report is factual, your organization, and everyone in it, will be forever tainted by this speech.
Published: April 2, 2006 8:02 PM
The heroic Julian Simon died far too young. He made mincemeat out of Ehrlich and I'm certain he'd have done the same with this Pianka fellow.
Published: April 2, 2006 10:24 PM
How can one get rid of such people before they get into power, but without committing such evil (ie exterminating them)?
Why would it be evil to kill someone who threatens mass murder? Sounds like self-defense to me.
Published: April 3, 2006 12:11 AM
A problem of market failure?
If Pianka is advocating genocide he is clearly to be condemned. If he is simply warning that mankind is vulnerable to a huge epidemic from something nasty, like Ebola or a new avian flu, then of course he's right. The avian flu of 1918 killed millions, and the world's poulation is now multiples of that size with no place to run or hide. The bacteria and viruses evolve too quickly through gene transfer for us to keep ahead if something with contagious with high lethality appears. And then we have governments playing with these things as weapons - which is the reason the final vials of smallpox have not been destroyed. Governments around the world are now seriously worried about the possibility the the very lethal avian flu might combine with a common cold virus.
Millenarial fantasies on the Pianka line of course have been around for years, from Stephen King's The Stand to the movie 12 Monkeys. Pianka seems to be an advocate, sadly - along the lines of Whitley Strieber's mass suicide distopia "Nature's End" : ww.isbnwebservice.com/cheap/044651344x/ Natures%20End/Whitley%20Strieber/1?sid=044651344x.
That Pianka is a misanthrope may perhaps be understandable from his perspective as an ecologist and biologist. He sees mankind as a part of nature, but very destructive one. He is correct on the sense that, as scientists around the world have noted, we are now in the midst of the sixth great mass extinction, this one induced by human activity. http://dir.yahoo.com/Science/Biology/Extinction/Mass_Extinctions/Sixth_Extinction/
Unfortunately, the scientists do not understand that reasons for the human assault on the environment is not that mankind is evil, but simply that we have yet to extend effective proporty rights to common, public good resources, with the effect that these resouces are under-priced and overconsumed, and subject to destruction/extenction because no one has ownership rights in them and thus has no vested interest in protecting them.
Like Jared Diamond in Collapse, biologists simply don't understand how societies fail when they do not have effective feedback mechanisms. One can share Pianka's concern about man's effect on the world while disagreeing profoundly with his suggested solution, which clearly lies in trying to solve problems of market failure.
While we can criticize the various prophets of doom, we might still productve wonder whether there are real problems of market failure that need addressing, particularly in countries which do not have effective property rights regimes, supported by the rule of law.
Published: April 3, 2006 1:43 AM
When one group of humans want to eradicate another group based on a sense of biological superiority it's called eugenicism and genocide, and associated with the right.
When another group of humans want to eradicate the entire human race - including themselves (maybe) - based on extreme misanthropy, it's called radical environmentalism, and associated with the left (because it's more egalitarian I suppose).
I'm hard pressed to see how the latter scenario isn't WORSE than the former!
Published: April 3, 2006 1:43 AM
C'mon, this is ridiculous. Without discussing the evidence that environmental scientists are putting forth (his belief is clearly not shared by all and i'd bet the overwhelming majority of environmentalists).
This is clearly a strawman.
Published: April 3, 2006 2:45 AM
I guess I don't understand why so many people think this guy is a nut. His argument is the logical extreme of most catastrophe oriented environmentalist positions. He's at least finally saying the obvious. A dramatic population reduction through disease, or some other mechanism (e.g., famine, war, etc.), I think is the only logical conclusion. How else are you going to get the drastic reductions in carbon emissions the global warming fanatics think are needed.
Published: April 3, 2006 8:21 AM
This guy's view probably seems extreme, but it is true that in order for humanity to survive long term, we need to reduce our global population. I think China's view of limiting the number of children people can have is a good thing. It is irresponsible to have more than 2 children, and having only 1 is preferable. As technology continues to geometrically increase its scope, people, as a result of innovation, will live longer, exacerbating the overpopulation problem. Whenever populations become too large, nature does have a tendency to correct for that. I would imagine that is why the "dreaded" professor's comments pointed towards population decline via disease/plague.
Published: April 3, 2006 11:56 AM
"Market fsilure" is such an odd phrase. Its use can only mean that some people's peaceful personal preferences are wrong and should be controlled somehow.
Published: April 3, 2006 11:57 AM
"his belief is clearly not shared by all and i'd bet the overwhelming majority of environmentalists).
This is clearly a strawman."
These two don't necessarily follow. You have your hard-core and your sympathisers who will make light of the goals of the movement. Or that's how you would look at other genocidal movements.
Let's say the hardcore is 5%. That makes your first statement true but not your second.
Let us not be callous here. We should not forget the millions who died of Malaria when DDT was banned. Those out of the hard core merely need to look away when this sort of thing happens.
Everyone talks differently when outsiders aren't around.
Published: April 3, 2006 2:19 PM
"This guy's view probably seems extreme, but it is true that in order for humanity to survive long term, we need to reduce our global population."
No that's not true at all. We need to get the pricing right. We ought to link up nature corridors. There's a few other things but its policy, not population.
Had there never been state supplied transport infrastructure or height restrictions on buildings this worry about diminishing nature probably would never have occured.
Published: April 3, 2006 2:25 PM
Roy, you say that "'Msrket failure' is such an odd phrase. Its use can only mean that some people's peaceful personal preferences are wrong and should be controlled somehow."
You've nailed it - market failures occur when producers don't pay for use of public goods or for the negative externalities of their actions (or cannot capture all of the positive benefits of their actions). The result is that common resources are overconsumed and undersupplied.
A public choice approach would say that any governmental interference is justified only when the benefits of tinkering with the market will clearly exceed the costs of governmental action.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
Cheers.
Published: April 3, 2006 10:18 PM
"Market fsilure" is such an odd phrase. Its use can only mean that some people's peaceful personal preferences are wrong and should be controlled somehow.
Not only that, it's a very old-socialist idea (i.e., before Mises showed that socialism can't work). People who talk about "market failures" think the supposed failure can be fixed by government; e.g., by appropriate taxes. But knowing how much to tax would require knowing the "true" market value (the value the market would have if the "failure" wasn't present). If you could know that, you could run a socialist economy without a market - Mises proved that was impossible; the same argument proves that "fixing" so-called "market failures" is impossible too (STM you can't even know if a "market failure" is occuring!)
Published: April 3, 2006 10:37 PM
Tom. To what extent is the alleged negative externalities the result of past compulsion? This is something we should try and suss out everytime someone says 'externalities'.
Citing Wiki for political/economic matters is poor form. They are great for obscure technical matters but not for where politics intrudes.
Published: April 4, 2006 12:23 AM
Peter:
People who talk about "market failures" think the supposed failure can be fixed by government; e.g., by appropriate taxes. But knowing how much to tax would require knowing the "true" market value (the value the market would have if the "failure" wasn't present).
Several points:
1. Maybe you missed my last post reference to public choice theory - which acknowledges that it is not appropriate for people to try to use government to solve every problem, even when there is a clear market failure problem.
2. As market failures stem from lack of effective proprty rights, one CAN solve market failure problems without government "knowing" how to "correct" the price - by changing the property rights regime. This is what the guys at Political Economy Research Center focus on, for example in advocating private property rights in fisheries: http://www.perc.org/about.php?id=700.
3. Sorry, but I fail to see what is socialist about fixing market failures. After all, sometime the cure is to privatize governmentally-owned resources.
Published: April 4, 2006 2:33 AM
Graeme:
That Wiki reference is handy source of links, which is why I added it. Maybe you can poll Roy as to whether he thought it was helpful. But I appreciate your advice.
To what extent is the alleged negative externalities the result of past compulsion? This is something we should try and suss out everytime someone says 'externalities'.
I agree with you, and as I already noted to Prof. Reisman and to Nick on the 3/28 post, I'd love to turn alot of our laws upside down, and am in favor of the types of approaches discussed in these places:
http://commonsblog.org/about_freemkt.php
http://www.vanderbilt.edu/vcems/papers/ELRVersion2.pdf
http://www.yale.edu/envirocenter/cv_dce.pdf
http://home.earthlink.net/~jhadler/freegreentext.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-market_environmentalism (my pardons!)
TT
Published: April 4, 2006 2:41 AM
This sounds a bit like Tom Clancy´s scenario in Rainbow Eleven (interesting idea, whatever you may otherwise think of Clancy´s books). A bunch of nature-loving scientists band together in order to create a modified version of the Ebola virus that doesn't suffer from a high mutation rate. They also develop a vaccin to be injected into chosen people. This virus is meant to be spread at an olympic event and then carried home by people returning to their home around the world. This scenario actually assumes that close to 100% of all people will be killed off, with only a few thousand remaining alive to roam the wilderness in perfect accord with nature. What a load off bollocks.
Published: April 4, 2006 3:47 AM
Rinbow SIX, not eleven...
Published: April 4, 2006 3:49 AM
The first thing I thought of when I read this article is that this crackpot sounds like Pol Pot. When I was younger I was involved in the radical left subculture. The main things that turned me against it were political correctness and this kind of eco-freakiness. The eco-fanatics always seemed to me be to be more of an apocalyptic cult than anything else.
Published: April 4, 2006 7:21 AM
There is already a movie about this. It is called "28 days later". The movie is scary as hell and is set in a gutted London. Envirnmentalists release infected monkeys in London.
Published: April 4, 2006 8:00 AM
Environmentalists also hate the environment. Check this website out.
http://www.co2science.org/scripts/CO2ScienceB2C/education/reports/health/ch3.jsp
I'd been saying that CO2 is what plants breathe. But I'd also said for variation that it was plant food and that it was free fertiliser. I figured that was a pretty good joke but I knew that it was true to the extent that CO2 makes plants grow faster.
But the scientists behind this website are saying the exact same thing. The exact same phrase.
Now imagine that you have this thing that businesses are putting out for free that makes plants grow faster.
Wouldn't that be some sort of ancient fantastical dream-wish that you could do that? Like Manna from heavan. And what person in his right mind would turn such a gift for the planet down?
These guys are talking about 75% increases in plant yields. Unbelievable positive externalities.
And by the way any interventionists out their owe me money next time I go jogging on account of the externalities of my heavier breathing.
Published: April 5, 2006 12:14 AM
Mark Twain was discussing the merits of a planet without mankind a century ago. It is impossible to argue that the planet as a whole would be cleaner if man disappeared. Mankind is so focused on themselves and their false Gods and cultures that they find it difficult to imagine that they are just another cancer.
Published: April 5, 2006 12:19 PM
Bill English,
If you truly believe that you are a cancer upon the earth, then you owe it to the earth to eradicate yourself.
On the other hand, given that we are only just now beginning to tap our potential as thinking beings, I foresee, in the not-too-distant future, a world in which humans transcend their biology -- http://www.singularity.com -- and all but disappear in terms of impacting the environment the way we do now. After all, as they ancient (originally Latin) apothegm says, "There is nothing greater in nature than man, and there is nothing greater in man than mind."
Published: April 5, 2006 2:11 PM
"Bill English" What on earth do you mean by CLEANER?
And what good would a mud-free soap-scrubbed world mean without the concscious individuals to appreciate it?
Published: April 5, 2006 7:14 PM
David and Graeme:
I think that there are lots of people who find better qualitites in their dog than they do in the rest of humanity. The point here is that we have an interesting ability to look past ourselves and to appreciate the rest of the world (it's our own values, not something "intrinsic" out there). The long line of people who have commented on how we are screwing up the Earth aren't exhibiting a death wish personally - they're noticing what's happening and are concerned about the environment, to which we are inextricably connected - and they prefer to see relatively fewer humans on whole.
There are three other aspects worthy of note: first, nature of course is unconcerned about man. Just bring along another meteor and we may very well take our places in history alongside the dinosaurs.
Second, except for a few favored species, man has been an horrific adversary to other species inhabiting the planet. Through technology, we are eating the rest of creation out of house and home, and inadvertently wreaking havoc in many environments by development and introduction of alien species that run out of control. In this way, if we view our impact on the planet impartially, we can be seen as a cancer, simply because we are far more successful than other species and have found that our technology allows us to have our way with the world.
Third, Pianta is quite correct that mankind is terribly vulnerable to any type of virulent epidemic that might develop. Given our crowding and ease of transportation, it will be nigh impossible to confine an outbreak of a nasty bug to a small locale. It was the difficulty of transport that spared us from larger plagues in the past; bottled up, these bugs burnt themselves out.
Tom
Published: April 6, 2006 10:53 PM
"..they're noticing what's happening and are concerned about the environment, to which we are inextricably connected - and they prefer to see relatively fewer humans on whole.>>>"
But why? And what business is it of there's how many kids I have. And what is the connection between me having fewer kids and the extinction of species or the closing off of nature corridors?
The connection is weak to none. So Tom you seemed to have come in from the cold but then the old bad habits come back..
A handful of Aborigines destroyed the mega-fauna of Australia. If we were colonising Australia today we would be showing up far greater in number, destroy less of the species, and not spend as much time burning all the trees
In Brazil they for a long time and might still have policies which encourage the burning off from the edges of the Amazonian rainforest.
Now I would think it was an OK idea to exploit pockets within. And expand the size of the region without. But instead these poor Brazilian farmers are burning and cutting it down like the Western front.
So its not wealth or population. Its policy.
To my mind the WORST policies over the very long haul is height restrictions to buildings. Not the proximate but the long-term cause, along with subsidised and non-user pays infrastructure, of environmental attenuation.
But you can both fix all this up and have MORE kids. Especially now that we know that wealth creation and conumption contains the positive externality of CO2.
Then I think there is just the wrong policy of National Parks. You don't want big naitonal parks. You want a massive set of unbroken corridors so that the critters can move everywhere if the habitat where they are is no longer any good.
You know. Don't fence me in.
Now here I'm not saying government should do this or do that. Just talking about how the ecological question has nothing to do with wealth or population. And its nobodies business even if it did.
So the job of leftists would be to stop being sticky-beaks and try to expedite all pro-liberty changes that could help the ecology whatever they might be.
So you line up all the changes you could make and try and expedite whatever changes reduce government depredation AND ecological attenuation.
What you don't do is get stuck on stupid and start worrying about the dimly related issue of population.
So none of this suggests that population or wealth or consumption has really gotten anything to do with whether the environment is damaged or not.
Published: April 7, 2006 2:11 PM
Did Pianka actually advocate the active extermination of humanity, or did he say that current world population trends will RESULT in diseases capable of wiping out 90% of the human population? (Which is not likely. According to Scientific American, world population should stabalize at 8-10 billion by the mid-21st century.)
David White: Enivioromentalists are not the only ones who hate humans, singularitarians do, too. There would be no greater triumph for Marx than for a capitalist society to construct a computer to control everything. And then for us to "merge" with technology; perfect communist collective.
If we have our machines do our thinking for us, then we will be slaves to them. The Singularity is another example of humans being so impressed with the fruits of their labor that they worship it.
A cancer, at its most basic definition, is when a group of cells come to so dominate an organism that the whole suffers. This is the problem with the computer nerds who have thought up the Singularity: their brains (not even their minds) so dominate their bodies that they can't understand the body anymore and see them as "imperfect," as opposed to the "errorless perfection" of silicon chips.
Published: September 23, 2006 10:28 PM
What do you mean by "The Singularity"? [The website seems to be about advertising a book, but doesn't explain what it's about]
If this is Vernor Vinge's singularity, it has nothing to do with collectivism, or with worshiping technology.
Published: September 24, 2006 12:19 AM
Basil Jason Go
Metro Manila, Philippines
More Furious than a Forest Fire
People who have read population control articles have probably heard of the English economist Thomas Malthus who proposed that population increases at a geometric rate whereas food supply grows at an arithmetic rate if factors are held constant. Probably, Malthus’ Principle of Population is not so improbable after all when studies show that approximately 790 million people in the developing world are still chronically undernourished, almost two-thirds of whom reside in Asia and the Pacific.
In the Philippines, due to the Church’ heavy opposition against artificial birth-control methods and the masses’ lack of sex education, the problem of overpopulation continues to persist. What makes matters worse is that the natural family planning methods are somewhat hard to instill in the minds of the Filipinos especially those that are not so educated. What solution do I propose then? I believe that the government should start implementing a policy similar to that of China’s one-child per family. I repeat similar and not exactly, since what right do we have to impose how many children a couple would want to have? Hence, I am not saying that the government should immediately implement the one-child per family policy here. I think it would be best if the Filipino community would first agree upon a consensus on the number of children they would want to have.
In line with this, the current tax system in the Philippines of giving a tax exemption of P8,000 per dependent child not exceeding four seems not to be very effective since there are a lot of people still have more than four children. Instead, I think it would be better if from the agreed upon number, the government can give more incentives to those who follow the quota. Given this, it would be more attractive for the people, especially the masses, to have lesser children. For instance, if the set quota of children is four and the family only has two children, then there should be an additional incentive for this family. Unlike China’s one-child policy, I believe that there should be no penalty if a couple exceeds the quota since the couple has the right to have as many children as they want. Although this entails a lot of discipline for those who will implement it, I believe that this a step in the right direction for curbing the population growth in the Philippines.
Currently, the Philippine population is around 89 million, growing at a rate of 1.8 percent. In ten years, the population will reach 107 million, an increase of about 20 percent. Clearly, the figures speak for themselves. With the present population growth rate, the supply of resources such as food, shelter and clothing won’t be able to meet demand. Population growth is like a forest fire, we have to do something about it now. If we don’t, when is the right time?
Published: October 19, 2006 7:53 AM