A portrait of Dorian Gray as an environmentalist [update 7]

Just as people do, just as Dorian Gray’s portrait did, movements too sometime show their real face—they let it slip—and what they reveal sometimes looks nothing like you thought they would. Behind the mask is someone quite different.

Back in April, for example, Greenpeace took time off from cuddling dolphins and claiming polar bears are becoming extinct to berate their enemies on their website, saying “We need to hit them where it hurts most, by any means necessary: through the power of our votes, our taxes, our wallets, and more…”

The proper channels have failed. It’s time for mass civil disobedience to cut off the oxygen from denial and skepticism.
    If you’re one of those who believe that this is not just necessary but also possible, speak to us. Let’s talk about what that mass civil disobedience is going to look like.
    If you’re one of those who have spent their entire lives undermining progressive climate legislation, bankrolling junk science, fueling spurious debates around false solutions, and cattle-prodding democratically-elected governments into submission, then hear this:
     We know who you are. We know where you live. We know where you work.
    And we be many, but you be few.

The offending post was swiftly removed and quarantined, replaced with a bland acknowledgement that something had gone wrong, and soothing words about how easy it is to “misconstrue” this sort of thing—or perhaps even “take it out of context.” 

Yeah right.

Something had gone wrong, all right. For just one moment the mask had come off. That the piece had been written, published and promoted showed that no-one saw anything wrong with it at all—not until the phone calls and emails started coming in. This was how they felt.

Look, this really is how they feel. Remember this piece of fascist tripe they peddled a few years ago? A snotty kid warning his “enemies.” i.e., you and I.

Or this sick piece of inhuman gloating put out by the World Wildlife Fund.

Scratch so many environmentalists, and this really is how they feel.  This is what’s behind the mask. In their view, humans come a distant second to “a wild and healthy planet.” We are at best simply here to “provide stewardship for the environment”—to “sweep the rain forests and rake the beaches”—and if we’re not going to be obedient, we can go.

Fundamentally, according to so many environmentalists, “the extinction of the human species may not only be inevitable, but a good thing...”

That’s how they feel.

This week the mask slipped again.

A bunch of British environmentalists got behind the 10:10 climate campaign—an anti-industrial campaign sponsored by the UK Taxpayer, ActionAid, The Carbon Trust, and The Energy Saving Trust—to produce a celebrity video they thought was “extremely funny.” Written by New Zealander Richard Curtis (writer of Black Adder, Four Weddings & A Funeral, Notting Hill etc.) and starring every luvvie looking to advance their career, it shows precisely what’s going on behind the mask. It was lovingly put together, widely promoted, then sent out proudly onto the high seas of the world’s media to make its point.

It did. People saw it, and immediately understood: This is how these people really think. This is what’s behind the fury. No wonder everyone involved is now ducking for cover.

Watch it yourself, and see why.

Dorian Gray is getting old.

[Hat tip Jonathan V.]

UPDATE 1:  Turns out O2, Sony and Kyocera helped pay for this illustrative piece of man-hating, with The Guardian acting as a “media partner.” So if you want to express your disgust, those would be good places to start.

UPDATE 2:  Gareth Renowden at NZ’s warmist Hot Topic blog reckons 10:10’s sick misanthropy  is “on the button,” and that those who don’t laugh must have “a sense of humour failure.”  Yes, exploding children has always been funny.
Commenters have been deservedly telling him what a vile turd he’s revealed himself to be.

UPDATE 3: Updated the post with the WWF poster from a couple of years ago. Hat tip Whale Oil.

UPDATE 4: Richard Treadgold has posted contact addresses of the main sponsors, and an apology from o2—and anyone who supports Tottenham Hotspur might want to drop them a line.  And it turns out there are rather more 10:10 sponsors than first thought.

UPDATE 5: Cuddly old warmist Bill McKibben from 350.Org announces he is ‘Shocked! Shocked!’ that his friends at 10:10 could do such a thing. [Hat tip Watts Up With That]

The climate skeptics can crow.  It’s the kind of stupidity that hurts our side, reinforcing in people’s minds a series of preconceived notions, not the least of which is that we’re out-of-control and out of touch — not to mention off the wall, and also with completely misplaced sense of humor… There’s no question that crap like this will cast a shadow, for a time, over our efforts and everyone else who’s working on global warming.

Of course, McKibben certainly knows what crap looks like and how to keep it hidden, because he’s been keeping up his mask since his 1989 diatribe The End of Nature, in which he quoted approvingly this “benediction to alligators “by John Muir, founder of the Sierra Club.  "A good epigram" he called it:

Honorable representatives of the great saurians of older creation, may you long enjoy your lilies and rushes, and be blessed now and then with a mouthful of terror-stricken man by way of a dainty.

And in a glowing review of Bill’s diatribe, National Park Service biologist David Graber showed he “gets it” too.

We are not interested in the utility of a particular species, or free-flowing river, or ecosystem to mankind [said Davo]. They have intrinsic value, more value—to me—than another human body, or a billion of them.… It is cosmically unlikely that the developed world will choose to end its orgy of fossil-energy consumption, and the Third World its suicidal consumption of landscape. Until such time as Homo sapiens should decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along.

“McKibben is a biocentrist,” said Graber, “and so am I.”

If “wishing for the right virus to come along” is what it means to be a “biocentrist” – if wishing alligators “a mouthful of terror-stricken man” is what it means to “get it,” then what Bill and his comrades can go and get is to get fucked.

NB 1: More similar quotes from McKibben’s confreres here.

UPDATE 6: George Reisman comments on the Toxicity of Environmentalism here, which discusses McKibben while neatly putting this whole discussion into  context—making clear why none of these ads or statements are any accident.

Recently a popular imported mineral water was removed from the market because tests showed that samples of it contained thirty-five parts per billion of benzene. Although this was an amount so small that only fifteen years ago it would have been impossible even to detect, it was assumed that considerations of public health required withdrawal of the product.
    Such a case, of course, is not unusual nowadays. The presence of parts per billion of a toxic substance is routinely extrapolated into being regarded as a cause of human deaths. And whenever the number of projected deaths exceeds one in a million (or less), environmentalists demand that the government remove the offending pesticide, preservative, or other alleged bearer of toxic pollution from the market. They do so, even though a level of risk of one in a million is one-third as great as that of an airplane falling from the sky on one's home.
    While it is not necessary to question the good intentions and sincerity of the overwhelming majority of the members of the environmental or ecology movement, it is vital that the public realize that in this seemingly lofty and noble movement itself can be found more than a little evidence of the most profound toxicity. Consider, for example, the following quotation from David M. Graber, a research biologist with the National Park Service, in his prominently featured Los Angeles Times book review of Bill McKibben's The End of Nature:
    "This [man's "remaking the earth by degrees"] makes what is happening no less tragic for those of us who value wildness for its own sake, not for what value it confers upon mankind. I, for one, cannot wish upon either my children or the rest of Earth's biota a tame planet, be it monstrous or--however unlikely--benign. McKibben is a biocentrist, and so am I. We are not interested in the utility of a particular species or free-flowing river, or ecosystem, to mankind. They have intrinsic value, more value--to me--than another human body, or a billion of them.
    "Human happiness, and certainly human fecundity, are not as important as a wild and healthy planet. I know social scientists who remind me that people are part of nature, but it isn't true. Somewhere along the line--at about a billion years ago, maybe half that--we quit the contract and became a cancer. We have become a plague upon ourselves and upon the Earth.
    "It is cosmically unlikely that the developed world will choose to end its orgy of fossil-energy consumption, and the Third World its suicidal consumption of landscape. Until such time as Homo sapiens should decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along."
    While Mr. Graber openly wishes for the death of a billion people, Mr. McKibben, the author he reviewed, quotes with approval John Muir's benediction to alligators, describing it as a "good epigram" for his own, "humble approach": "`Honorable representatives of the great saurians of older creation, may you long enjoy your lilies and rushes, and be blessed now and then with a mouthful of terror-stricken man by way of a dainty!'"
    Such statements represent pure, unadulterated poison. They express ideas and wishes which, if acted upon, would mean terror and death for enormous numbers of human beings.
    These statements, and others like them, are made by prominent members of the environmental movement. The significance of such statements cannot be diminished by ascribing them only to a small fringe of the environmental movement. Indeed, even if such views were indicative of the thinking only of 5 or 10 percent of the members of the environmental movement--the "deep ecology," Earth First! wing--they would represent toxicity in the environmental movement as a whole not at the level of parts per billion or even parts per million, but at the level of parts per hundred, which, of course, is an enormously higher level of toxicity than is deemed to constitute a danger to human life in virtually every other case in which deadly poison is present.
    But the toxicity level of the environmental movement as a whole is substantially greater even than parts per hundred…
    There is something much more important than [environmentalism’s toxicology], however--something which provides an explanation in terms of basic principle of why the mainstream of the ecology movement does not attack what might be thought to be merely its fringe

 Read on to discover that principle…

UPDATE 7: If that original run of 10:10 ads wasn’t “hard hitting enough” for you, or you want something ads more “on the button,” then don’t worry.  There are others.

These are the sort of people who might like to consider joining the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, before they do the rest of us further harm.