September 06, 2005

To all who care about whether environmentalism is a worthwhile endeavor, or whether it has been a fraud perpetrated on naive individuals and cultures who just don't have the facts to render a decision one way or another.

In order to see anything clearly, you must have a sufficiently broad perspective, accompanied by hard data, repeatable long-term observations and verifiable facts. If you look at the ground, your perspective and your field of view are quite limited. If however, you are standing on the top of a mountain, your perspective broadens exponentially. And thus it is with the subject of environmentalism. Without a broader view it is almost impossible to know who or what to believe. So a short history of the Earth is in order.

The Earth has endured never-ending sunspots, reversing poles, shifting magnetic fields, drifting continents and ice ages in its 4.5 Billion year history. About 600 Million years ago the Cambrian explosion occurred where life almost magically erupted, emerged and evolved at a pace never before seen. No one knows why. It has experienced the wondrous 165-million year dinosaur experiment.

Over its lifetime, the Earth spun, tilted, heaved, shifted, rose and shrunk, drastically changed, expelled gases and molten lava, grew hot and then cold. Whole continents drifted first towards each other (Pangea) and then away, until finally arriving at the seven existing continents of today. Polar ice caps and glaciers melted and sea levels rose and then lowered. About 10,000 years ago, at least one third of the Earth's surface was covered in a layer of ice over one mile thick. During that ice age, which lasted longer than civilized man has lived on Earth, there were no animals, plants, insects or habitat that could survive in this harsh environment, except those very small creatures that adapted to a life on or in the ice. But life on Earth still survived in other places less hostile. The ultimate thaw and the rushing torrents carved deep gouges and massive channels in the Earth's surface. It created riverbeds and dry falls and lakes and inland seas and other features in the Earth's crust, not there before. Now that was global warming on a grand scale.

And yet, for 99.93333% of the Earth's estimated 4.5 billion years, not one homo erectus walked upon its undulating surfaces, climbed a mountain, traversed a plain, sailed on or swam in the vast expanse of its oceans, lakes, rivers or streams. In that time 99.9% of every species that ever lived on Earth, became extinct. Nature rolled the dice with zillions of evolutionary experiments. It is still rolling those dice, even today. We humans are but an integral part of that continuing evolutionary experiment. And yes, we probably are having some affect on the environment, but the question is, is that affect greater or lesser than nature itself? After reading this, the answer will be self-evident.

Whole forests grew and then died out. Mountains rose out of the bowels of the Earth, pushed up by continents in collision and then flattened back into the crust. Rivers changed direction. Monster lakes were formed. Giant meteors struck the Earth at galactic speeds, carving out massive holes in the crust and sending continent-size clouds of sunlight-dimming dust into the atmosphere. The atmosphere became opaque and cut off the life-giving Sunlight, rendering lifeless, enormous parts of the planet. Millions of species of plants and animals evolved, survived, reproduced and then died out, to be replaced by entirely different species of plants and animals.

These events changed the life processes on Earth forever. New processes emerged and new life rose up out of the moist rich soil, where those conditions existed. However, major changes seldom occurred in cataclysmic events. They almost always took place agonizingly slowly, over eons of time, through the tedious, grinding, random, chaotic, disorganized process of natural evolution. The variables were almost infinite and still are.

And today, those same agonizingly slow processes are at work. We are an integral part of those processes but we will have little or no affect on any final outcome. We will but only tickle the grander elements such as the Sun, the moon and the Earth itself, none of which is predictable, much less measurable to the degree necessary for accurate predictions. A few spewing volcanoes or an episode of Sunspots can totally invalidate any computer models. The variables are just too great to model, but the environmentalists use these inaccurate models to create "crises" so that they can entrench themselves in an ever-growing culture of "the sky is falling" and get you to donate money to them, or have it confiscated from you by conning the government into giving it to them. Just look at weather predictions by scientists and weathermen. Any prediction is good for about 2 hours and that is why the environmentalist's models were predicting an ice age 20 years ago and now they are predicting global warming. It's ludicrous and an insult to true science.

My other issues with environmentalists have to do with their getting in the way of a free society to provide the resources necessary to keep that society going economically. Environmentalists have stopped oil refineries and nuclear power plants from being built for over 25 years. That's why a gallon of gas is now well over $2.00 and will not likely come down and that's why our power capacity is at or near maximum. Environmentalists, in concert with radical international environmentalists, are trying to lock up private lands in the U. S. for biospheres and wildlife corridors without compensating the owners of the private lands they want to take. Environmentalists have stopped the drilling for oil in areas of known oil reserves, thus making us more dependent on foreign sources and driving up the cost of oil and oil-associated products, accordingly. The unnecessary cost for overt and radical environmental protection has been in the Trillions of dollars since it came in vogue and it has severely weakened our economic engine, reduced our power capacity and eroded our constitutional form of government almost beyond repair.

Environmentalists have brain washed an entire civilization into believing that environmental protection has a higher priority than constitutional safeguards and this has been perpetrated on free citizens by a rogue and oppressive government at their urgings. They took over Oregon, Washington and California and they have taken +over many local and State governments, as well as the U. S. Congress, all the while beating the drums of the "environment" into the heads of naive citizens who live in cities and have no stake in unconstitutional takings. They have disenfranchised rural landowners and made them victims of their crimes. They decimated an entire culture of loggers, mill operators and wood product employees in the Pacific Northwest and forced them into bankruptcy and scattered them to the four winds because of their distorted desire to "save" one stupid owl that was going extinct for natural causes that had nothing to do with logging or loss of habitat. I repeat, 99.9% of all species that ever lived on Earth are now extinct and the Endangered Species Act is bad legislation for that very reason alone and should be repealed. Environmentalists use junk science to win their battles and extort monies from naive citizens to fund their radical agendas in court.

They have the mistaken, naive and dangerous mindset that privately held, rural land is their land to do with as they will. It isn't. It belongs to the millions of individuals that own it in fee-simple title and paid for or inherited it and the inviolate right to own that land by those individuals is protected by the 5th and 14th Amendments to the U. S. Constitution. They don't own it and neither does any State or the Federal Government.

Obviously, if we believe the environmentalists about habitat preservation, or global warming, or CO2 in the oceans, or auto emissions, or warming or cooling currents, or depletion of the ozone layer, or DDT use, or deforestation, or melting glaciers, or biospheres, or wildlands, or yellow rain, or endangered and invasive species, or any other of "the-sky-is-falling" disasters "they" say will befall us, if we don't capitulate and live "green", civilization as we know it will surely die. This is nothing but drivel and lies to get your money.

No matter what humans do or try to do, they will not have anywhere near the affect that the natural forces governing the Earth, the Sun, the other Planets, the galaxies and the Universe as a whole, will have.

Because you see, the Universe, our Solar System and even our Earth are violent, dangerous places to humans and other life forms and always have been. Just ask the dinosaurs. So far, we have just been lucky. A close-by (in galactic terms) supernova in the spiral arm of the Milky Way, in which our solar system resides, could flood the Sun and planets with massive amounts of deadly radiation and render them lifeless. (There is a theory being discussed right now, where massive extinctions on Earth correspond with super novae explosions throughout time, in our part of the galaxy.)

If the Sun changed its energy output by a significant fraction, all life on Earth could cease. An errant asteroid or gigantic rock could be driven into the path of the Earth's orbit and the resulting collision could dramatically change the pattern of life, or terminate it altogether. The Earth itself is chock-full of cataclysmic surprises, many of which have the power to erase the human species from its surface forever.

Environmentalists make decisions and cry "wolf" on very little data and way too short time periods to come up with meaningful predictions. But in the final analysis, environmentalism has become very big business. It employs millions of so-called experts and scientists, most who work for the government, coming up with models, studies and equations based on variables so wide as to make most of their predictions meaningless.

The only way to stop this madness is to stop donating to environmental groups. Dry up their funds and you render them impotent. Spread the word that environmentalists have one goal in mind. That goal is to save mother Earth from their perceived ravages of the human infestation. Force humans to live in high-dense cities like rats. Get them out of their cars. Make them walk or take a bicycle to work. Have them live on top of each other in 25-story buildings and 800 square foot apartments in densities approaching 55,000 people per square mile. Oh, and don't let cities encroach into the rural lands. To gain ground, don't go out go up. Environmentalism has become a cult. It has become a cult of mindless followers with a distorted vision on how humans and the Earth should relate to each other. Earth gets the highest priorities. I for one, completely reject this premise.

The human population in the United States occupies only 5.6% of the landmass since it was first colonized by Europeans, some 400 years ago. So plants, trees, birds, insects and animals have 94.6% of the landmass to occupy, not to mention they also occupy our 5.6%. If we grew to occupying say 10% of the land mass in the next 200 years, wouldn't that seem a fair and equitable distribution of the available land for humans and other of Earth's occupants? Am I saying to trash the land we live on, of course not. But stealing private land for the radical environmentalist's agenda by government regulation without due process and without compensation as required by the 5th and 14th Amendments, is dead wrong.

Radical environmentalism is less than a hundred years old and born in the United Nations. The Earth is at least 4.5 Billion years old. Civilized societies have only been around for about 5,000 years. 5,000 years represents .000111% of Earth's existence. Put it in perspective. Humans are in fact part of the evolutionary and natural process of Earth and those processes, not environmentalists or governments, will determine the final outcome. This is why radical environmentalism is an unmitigated farce and this is why it should be inhibited or eradicated wherever it arises. To do otherwise is to invite environmental enslavement, where you have no rights whatsoever.

Ron Ewart, President
THE RURAL MAJORITY
4451 308th Ave. S. E.
Fall City, WA 98024

Editor's note: The only thing I can add to this is the fact that the Earth and all life on it is the product of God's creation, not some "magic" of the soil. God has given us both our human rights, and full responsibility for the use we make of them in our daily lives and relationships with both nature and other people. Integrity and responsibility are the missing factors in most of human society, including enviornmentalists. We must hold them and each other to the highest level of moral integrity if we wish to live in peace and prosperity. The alternative is death and slavery.