Watermelons
Our friend Chan over at Weekend Pundit has a derisive term for many of the overbearing, snot-mannered, holier-than-thou environmentalists that Mother Gaia comes before any needs of humans:
Green on the outside - red on the inside. A thin veneer of green encasing a whole lot of red. Red as in Communist Red. Red as in fascist - we want you to behave as we believe you should because we know better than you. We want to control all that can do - all in the name of saving the planet. After all, Gaia comes before you.
Liberty? Freedom? Rights? Not a chance. What counts to them are birds, slithering reptiles, snail darters, fish....not your neighbor, your cousin, your spouse, your children. Even if they are wrong (as they are about to find out that global warming is about to become global cooling - and that will be much more dangerous).
And how do they believe they can act? Brendan O'Neil hits it out of the park!
Imagine a society where simply speaking out of turn or saying the "wrong thing" was openly discussed as a crime against humanity, and where sceptics or deniers of the truth were publicly labelled "criminals", hauled before the press and accused of endangering humanity with their grotesque untruths.
Imagine a society where even some liberals demanded severe restrictions on freedom of movement; where people campaigned for travelling overseas to be made prohibitively expensive in order to force people to stay at home; and where immigration was frowned upon as "toxic" and "destructive".
Imagine a society so illiberal that columnists felt no qualms about demanding government legislation to force us to change our behaviour; where the public was continually implored to feel guilty about everything from driving to shopping – and where those who refused to feel guilty were said to be suffering from a "psychological" disorder or some other species of mental illness".
[snip]
In the current debate on liberty, we hear a lot about the attack on our democratic rights by the government's security agenda, but little about the grave impact of environmentalism on the fabric of freedom. It seems to me that green thinking – with its shrill intolerance of dissenting views, its deep distaste for free movement and free choice, and its view of individuals, not as history-makers, but as filthy polluters – poses a more profound threat to liberty even than the government's paranoid anti-terrorist agenda.
Environmentalists are innately hostile to freedom of speech....
[snip]
But perhaps the main way that environmentalism undermines the culture of freedom is by its ceaseless promotion of guilt. In the environmentalist era, we are no longer really free citizens, so much as potential polluters. We are continually told – by government, by commentators, by radical activists – that everything we do, from wearing disposable nappies to using deodorant to allowing ourselves to be cremated, is harmful to our surroundings.
