The following article was originally published in the Laugh, Feast, Fight Magazine.
We are continually lectured by politicians, TV talking heads and movie stars about a climate calamity caused by greenhouse gases emitted by the selfish activities of industrialized human beings. These influencers threaten that unless the use of fossil fuels is greatly curtailed, Earth’s vast ecological system will fail and humanity will perish.
Are they correct? No.
Is there pollution? Yes.
Can it be cleaned up? Absolutely—and in the United States we have done a remarkable job of doing so. But to declare that there is a global eco-emergency fueled by fossil fuels and subsequent carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, reveals an atheistic, anti-capitalist plot that’s been advancing for nearly 150 years.
Temperature swings and extreme weather events—or the lack thereof—have always fluctuated wildly on this planet. During the Carboniferous period (300 million years ago), temperatures are estimated to have been as much as ten degrees (F) warmer than today. The last ice age witnessed glaciers extending into regions of the earth that are today known for moderate climates. More recently, readings were two-degrees (F) warmer during the period known as the Medieval Warming (900-1300AD), a figure that cannot be pegged to industrialization.
Also, there is no scientific correlation between increases in atmospheric CO2 and tornadoes or hurricanes. Even the recent “atmospheric river” events on the west coast are purposefully misleading. Such weather events, formerly referred to as a “baroclinic leaf,” have occurred over the Pacific regularly, forever.
It is a phony eco-crisis that receives no fact-checks from the establishment media.
And the father of this environmental propaganda campaign?
Karl Marx himself, and furthered by subsequent disciples.
Born in Germany in 1818, Marx conceived an atrocious plot to infect the world with his philosophy of “organized collectivism”—a.k.a. communism, or, for the more PC, socialism.
His rebellion began at the University of Berlin. He was strongly influenced by progressive philosopher Georg Hegel who held that Christianity had a negative effect on society and a new orthodoxy, built on scientific reason, was needed. Marx joined an radical college group, the Young Hegelians. Their initial goal was straightforward: liquidate Christianity and promote scientific understanding.
In 1841, Marx received a doctorate in philosophy; his thesis was on Epicurus, the ancient atheist Greek philosopher and father of the theory of matter—atoms, molecules, and the otherwise unseen—or “materialism.” Epicurus taught that the physical world was all there was and all there would ever be.
The following year Marx met his writing partner, Frederick Engels. The two held that “if science can get to know all there is to know about matter, we will then know all there is to know about everything.”[1] They believed that time, not a divine Creator, was the wand allowing all matter to evolve.
In 1849 Marx and Engels tucked their materialistic assumptions and antagonist view of Christianity into a formula for revolution to re-birth society, The Communist Manifesto. In chapter two, they unequivocally state their top priority: “…the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: abolition of private property.”
Property is not just physical things you may own—it is your possessions, thoughts, ideas, beliefs and goals. Personal property, they declared, is a myth; matter is all there is, and no individual can claim matter as their own.
They just needed the ultimate hook on which to hang this plot.
GUANO, THE ORIGINAL ECO-SCARE
In 1862, a fellow materialist and colleague of Marx, German chemist Justus von Liebig, published an updated version of a book he wrote entitled, Organic Chemistry in its Application to Agriculture and Physiology. The new edition was unique; for the first time an environmental argument was used to attack capitalism. The issue at hand was bird droppings, or guano.
In the mid-1800s Britain’s citizens were living longer, healthier lives in comparison to the rest of the world. Much of this good fortune was the result of newly developed farming techniques that delivered an abundance of affordable food to the people. A key ingredient in the Brit’s farming success was the use of guano, an efficient fertilizer. Guano imports to England first began in 1841. Twenty years later some 3.2 million tons of the phosphate-rich additive had been brought into the country.[2] Guano was being carried to market from mountaintops, fields, and caves in Europe, North America, South America, Africa and the Caribbean.
Though von Liebig understood the theoretical benefits of utilizing guano as a fertilizer, he believed guano hunters were destroying nature, taking advantage of underpaid workers to turn a profit, and forcing crops to grow at a rate which superseded nature’s intention. Now, people were living better lives and having larger families. Bigger families required bigger houses, and more animals for transportation. A teeming population and additional animals meant more excrement and pollution.
Von Liebig loathed it all, saying Great Britain’s use of guano,
“…deprives all countries of the conditions of their fertility. It has raked up the battlefields of Leipsic, Waterloo and the Crimea; it has consumed the bones of many generations accumulated in the catacombs of Sicily; and now annually destroys the food for a future generation of three millions and a half of people. Like a vampire it hangs on the breast of Europe, and even the world, sucking its lifeblood without any real necessity or permanent gain for itself.”[3]
At the time of von Liebig’s launch on Great Britain’s agricultural methods, Marx was completing one of his signature works, Das Kapital. In the book he would write that one of “von Liebig’s immortal merits,” is having “developed from the point of view of natural science, the negative, i.e., destructive, side of modern agriculture.”[4]
FURTHER FOUNDERS OF THE GREEN AGENDA
Beyond Marx and von Liebig, there are three additional names you may be unfamiliar with, but who certainly are revered by today’s leading environmental activists.
Sir Edwin Ray Lankester was a zoologist at University College, London. Though Lankester was some thirty years younger than Marx, the two were close friends, fellow materialists and communists. Lankester penned powerful papers on species extinction due to human causes with fiery urgency. In his most popular screed, Nature and Man, he describes humans as the “insurgent son” of Nature.[5]
According to Lankester,
“We may indeed compare civilized man to a successful rebel against nature who by every step forward renders himself liable to greater and greater penalties…[H]e has willingly abrogated, in many important respects, the laws of his mother Nature by which the kingdom was hitherto governed; he has gained some power and advantage by so doing, but is threatened on every hand by dangers and disasters hitherto restrained: no retreat is possible—his only hope is to control…the sources of these dangers and disasters.”[6]
Lankester’s star pupil was Arthur Tansley, a botantist who coined the term “ecosystem.” Tansley was a fellow traveler deeply concerned with “the destructive human activities of the modern world.” Tansley argued, “Ecology must be applied to conditions brought about by human activity.”[7]
In the 1940s, Tansley had a young protégé named Charles Elton who further developed the ecosystem concept. In a blazing 1958 condemnation of the use of pesticides, Elton declared that “this astonishing rain of death upon so much of the world’s surface” was largely unnecessary and threatened “the very delicately organized interlocking system of populations” in the ecosystem.[8]
And then there was the first political leader to implement an environmental attack on human freedom, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.
Lenin was born April 22, 1870. By the early 1900s, he was a well-known Marxist author writing books on materialism and communist economic theory. In 1917, Lenin was named chairman of the new Russian government and Soviet state.
Banks were quickly nationalized, private businesses taken, and all private land captured by the state. A devastating civil war ensued as freedom fighters tried to withstand the new government and its Red Army, but they were brutally defeated.
The war devastated Russia, yet one of Lenin’s top priorities was to institute the most audacious nature conservancy program of the 20th century.
In 1918, a decree entitled, “On Land,” declared all forests, waters, and minerals property of the state. Later that same year, as people desperately cleared portions of the forest for firewood and construction material, Lenin issued a stern decree entitled, “On Forests.” Forests were protected as “monuments of nature” and only small, insignificant sectors were established for harvest.
Animal rights came next in 1919, with the decree, “On Hunting Seasons,” which ended open hunting seasons and protected the most popular game used for food.
EARTH DAY
On April 22, 1970, a trio of radical dreamers established the first Earth Day. Not by coincidence, the date was the centennial of Vladimir Lenin.
The concept was conceived a year earlier by Senator Gaylord Nelson (D-WS), congress’ leading environmentalist. Nelson’s efforts were aided by Denis Hayes, a former Stanford student body president well known for organizing anti-Vietnam war protests. Rounding out the troika was Professor Paul Ehrlich of Stanford. In 1968 Ehrlich authored a bestseller, The Population Bomb, in which he infamously spouted, “A cancer is an uncontrolled multiplication of cells; the population explosion is an uncontrolled multiplication of people…We must shift our efforts from treatment of the symptoms to the cutting out of the cancer. The operation will demand many apparently brutal and heartless decisions.”
In the summer of ‘69 Senator Nelson met with Ehrlich to discuss overpopulation and said, “My God—why not a national teach-in on the environment?”[9] Hayes was brought in to play a pivotal role with implementation.
In a New York Times article published the morning after the first Earth Day, headlined, “Angry Coordinator of Earth Day,” Hayes bragged that five years earlier he fled overseas because “I had to get away from America.” Hayes was so committed to his communist cause that he made no one produced Earth Day bumper stickers. “You want to know why?” he explained to The Times, because “they go on automobiles.”
GOD’S PROMISE
From guano to global warming, the green agenda is an Marxists assault on humankind driven by scare tactics clothed in junk science. It is a godless agenda that disregards your needs, lifestyle, dreams, desires and feelings. It seeks control of your property, both physical and intellectual.
After the flood, God made a promise to Noah and his descendants, While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease (Genesis 8:22).
Will climate change? Absolutely. It has wholly done so in the past, and it will change in the future. But even as the climate alters, God promised that our earth will continue to have predictable seasons that will allow us to grow food.
The ultimate answer to authentic environmental concerns is not more laws, bigger fines, or more government control. The answer is the good news of Jesus Christ. As people turn to Him for salvation they become transformed by the power of the Holy Spirit and walk in a way that pleases Him.
That, in turn, determines how they treat His creation.
Brian Sussman is the author of Climategate: A Veteran Meteorologist Exposes the Global Warming Scam, and, Eco-Tyranny: How The Left’s Green Agenda Will Dismantle America.
Follow him on Instagram: @briansussmanshow
[1] Friedrich Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach, 1886.
[2] C.H. Millar, Florida, South Carolina, and Canadian Phosphates, Eden Fisher and Co., London, 1892, p. 15.
[3] The translation of this passage from the introduction to the 1862 edition of von Liebig’s book follows Erland Marold in “Everything Circulates: Agriculture, Chemistry, and Recycling Theories in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century,” Environment and History 8, (2002) p. 74.
[4] Karl Marx, Das Kapital. Volume III, Part One, Chapter Six, “The Effect of Price Fluctuation,” Section Two, http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/ch06.htm
[5] Sir Edwin Ray Lankester, Nature and Man, Oxford Clarendon Press (1905) p. 23
[6] Sir Edwin Ray Lankester, Nature and Man, Oxford Clarendon Press (1905) p. 27
[7] Sir Arthur G. Tansley, “The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts and Terms, Ecology, 16, no. 3, (July 1935), pg. 299, 303-304.
[8] Charles Elton, The Ecology of Invasions by Animals and Plants, London: Methuen and Co. (1958), 137–42.
[9] History 179, North America Environmental History, Lecture 20, Brown University.
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