Environmentalism – Maverick Philosopher

What is Fueling the L. A. Fires?

The obvious answer in terms of tinder-dry flammable materials, the Santa Ana winds, etc. does not cut deep enough. Ideologically, nature idolatry plays a major role in the ferocity, force, and human impact of the L. A. fires. Their source is in radical environmentalism. Radical environmentalism, as opposed to a wise stewardship of nature, is an anti-humanism. This species of wokery issues in extreme misanthropy. By radical environmentalism I mean positions like that of David Foreman, founder of Earth First. His extremism is displayed in the following quotations:

“Our environmental problems originate in the hubris of imagining ourselves as the central nervous system or the brain of nature. We’re not the brain, we are a cancer on nature.”
“Phasing out the human race will solve every problem on earth, social and environmental.”
“Humanity is the cancer of nature.”
“I believe that human overpopulation is the fundamental problem on Earth Today” and, “We humans have become a disease, the Humanpox.”
“The optimum human population of earth is zero.”

This AI-generated list may be verified at AZ Quotes.

Now not every environmentalist on the Left embraces the late Foreman's absurdities. But the mitigated forms of leftist environmentalism are also objectionable. Here is a paradox worth thinking about. A sane environmentalism cannot be anti-human. It must promote human flourishing. But this will require various violent interventions in nature including drilling, mining, farming, dam-building, tunneling, road-building, and the like. These are anti-environmental actions. To refuse to manage nature for the sake of human flourishing by engaging in these anti-environmental actions will lead, as it has in the case of the California conflagration, to a worse environmental outcome.

That is the paradox. A sound environmentalism must be in some measure anti-environmental. But a paradox is not a contradiction, and this is one that must be accepted.

So, even apart from arson, the L. A. inferno is in large part man-made by the likes of Governor Hair-Style and Mayor Dumbass. (Those choice epithets courtesy of Kurt Schlichter.) Wildfires there will always be. Their benighted policies, however, have made things worse than they had to be.

Earth Day 2024

Substack latest.

Earth Day 2022

Maverick Philosopher doesn't celebrate anything as politically correct as Earth Day. Maverick Philosopher celebrates critical thinking. So I refer you to William Cronon's The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature. A rich and subtle essay. Excerpt:

Many environmentalists who reject traditional notions of the Godhead and who regard themselves as agnostics or even atheists nonetheless express feelings tantamount to religious awe when in the presence of wilderness—a fact that testifies to the success of the romantic project. Those who have no difficulty seeing God as the expression of our human dreams and desires nonetheless have trouble recognizing that in a secular age Nature can offer precisely the same sort of mirror.

To put (roughly the same) point with Maverickian aphoristic pithiness: Nature for the idolaters of the earth is just as much an unconscious anthropomorphic projection as the God of the Feuerbachians.

Thus it is that wilderness serves as the unexamined foundation on which so many of the quasi-religious values of modern environmentalism rest. The critique of modernity that is one of environmentalism’s most important contributions to the moral and political discourse of our time more often than not appeals, explicitly or implicitly, to wilderness as the standard against which to measure the failings of our human world. Wilderness is the natural, unfallen antithesis of an unnatural civilization that has lost its soul. It is a place of freedom in which we can recover the true selves we have lost to the corrupting influences of our artificial lives. Most of all, it is the ultimate landscape of authenticity. Combining the sacred grandeur of the sublime with the primitive simplicity of the frontier, it is the place where we can see the world as it really is, and so know ourselves as we really are—or ought to be.

Related: Timothy Treadwell and Nature Idolatry. (Treadwell was the romantic fool who camped without protection among grizzlies in Alaska, thought it acceptable to end up bear scat, and did, along with his girl friend.)

Energy Policy: The Dementocratic Approach

I gassed up the Jeep Wrangler this morning to the tune of 62.83 semolians for 13.787 U. S. gallons of regular at $4.499 per gallon at Costco in Mesa, Arizona. The line was not bad at all a little before noon. Victor Davis Hanson comments on the big picture:

Climate-change moralists love humanity so much in the abstract that they must shut down its life-giving gas, coal, and oil in the concrete. And they value humans so little that they don’t worry in the here and now that ensuing fuel shortages and exorbitant costs cause wars, spike inflation, and threaten people’s ability to travel or keep warm.

The Biden Administration stopped all gas and oil production in the ANWR region of Alaska. It ended all new federal leases for drilling. It is cancelling major new pipelines. It is leveraging lending agencies not to finance oil and gas drilling.

It helped force the cancellation of the EastMed pipeline that would have brought needed natural gas to southern Europe. And it has in just a year managed to turn the greatest oil and gas producer in the history of the world into a pathetic global fossil-fuel beggar.

Now gas is heading to well over $5 a gallon. In overregulated blue states, it will likely hit $7.

The sentence I bolded enunciates a truth little known, one that you cannot expect Uncle Joe's publicist Jen 'Circleback' Psakis to inform you of. The mendacious little weasel claims that the oil producers are not making use of their existing leases when she knows full well that drilling has huge upfront costs and that the oil companies need loans to proceed with projects the success of which is not guaranteed.

Psakis illustrates how truth can be enlisted in the service of deception. The truth that the drillers are not drilling is used to divert attention from the truth I bolded.

Recycle or Dump in the Trash?

My wife recycles religiously. I have long been agnostic about its value and efficacy. Here is an article by Ross Pomeroy that supports my skepticism.

Just as I suspected, a lot of what people dutifully recycle, after wasting water washing the containers, gets thrown into landfills anyway. My wife's a good Catholic girl. She doesn't worship the Green Goddess, but some of my neighbors do. Across the street there lives a pussy-hatted liberal lady, single and reclusive, who actually trekked to Trump's inaugural there to protest the Orange Racist in her pussyhat. Said neighbor pays for a special recyclables pickup. She allows us to use her barrel gratis. Now we already have two scheduled trash pickups per week. The recyclables one makes for a third. This causes further environmental damage. The heavy truck stresses our street, burns fossil fuels, and makes a godawful, cat-scaring racket worse than the "infernal cracking of whips" about which Schopenhauer so eloquently complained in his classic On Noise.

When wifey is not looking, I just throw the trash in the normal receptacle and cover it up with used cat litter and the output of the shredder, all the while thinking mean thoughts about Miss Occasional Cortex.

As I always say: No day without political incorrectness!

Mirabile dictu, you may be saving the oceans by not recycling! Read the article for the reasoning behind this startling claim.

As for Bergoglio the Benighted, he too should read the article, stop worrying about straws in the ocean, and start teaching the Four Last Things. Assuming he hasn't forgotten what they are.

Earth Day 2015: Earth as Idol

Many environmentalists who reject traditional notions of the Godhead and who regard themselves as agnostics or even atheists nonetheless express feelings tantamount to religious awe when in the presence of wilderness—a fact that testifies to the success of the romantic project. Those who have no difficulty seeing God as the expression of our human dreams and desires nonetheless have trouble recognizing that in a secular age Nature can offer precisely the same sort of mirror.

To put (roughly the same) point with Maverickian aphoristic pithiness: Nature for the idolaters of the earth is just as much an unconscious anthropomorphic projection as the God of the Feuerbachians.

Thus it is that wilderness serves as the unexamined foundation on which so many of the quasi-religious values of modern environmentalism rest. The critique of modernity that is one of environmentalism’s most important contributions to the moral and political discourse of our time more often than not appeals, explicitly or implicitly, to wilderness as the standard against which to measure the failings of our human world. Wilderness is the natural, unfallen antithesis of an unnatural civilization that has lost its soul. It is a place of freedom in which we can recover the true selves we have lost to the corrupting influences of our artificial lives. Most of all, it is the ultimate landscape of authenticity. Combining the sacred grandeur of the sublime with the primitive simplicity of the frontier, it is the place where we can see the world as it really is, and so know ourselves as we really are—or ought to be.