Lovelock assures us that he does not agree with the “totalitarian greens, sometimes called ecofascists,” who want to see most of the human race “eliminated” by genocide so as to leave a “perfect Earth for them alone.” That’s a relief. But wait—he then tells us that if we survive the current crisis, our next goal must be to forcibly reduce our numbers: “If we are to continue as a civilization that successfully avoids natural catastrophes, we have to make our own constraints on growth and make them strong and make them now.” As it is, we are unintentionally at war with Gaia and must agree to “wartime” rationing and temporary “loss of freedom.” Strong constraints? Loss of freedom? What’s the difference between this and ecofascism? And how far down will our population have to plummet to satisfy Gaia? Actually, Lovelock states that something like nine-tenths of our population must vanish: “Personally I think we would be wise to aim at a stabilized population of about half to one billion.” To accomplish this goal, both the birth rate and death rate would have to be “regulated” as “part of population control.” So we are to be bred, managed, and put down just like a herd of animals on a farm. If this isn’t totalitarianism, what is?
How could such a misanthropic ecofascism have spread so far, so fast? Very likely the decline of Christianity in the West has led to the rise of this neo-pagan abjection before the material world. Lovelock believes that all the traditional religions of the world are out of date, for they were all founded when we were few in number and when we “lived in a way that was no burden to the Earth.” Past teachings on morality no longer apply now that we have become “six billion hungry and greedy individuals.” He reserves a special animus for Christianity, where man is seen as the steward of creation: “The idea that humans are yet intelligent enough to serve as stewards of the Earth is among the most hubristic ever.” What Christians need, he sneers, is “a new Sermon on the Mount” to tell us how to live “decently with the Earth.” He finds fault with “secular humanists,” too, for he thinks they need to turn to Gaia and “recognize that human rights and needs are not enough.”
Gaia Theory and Deep Ecology are two handmaids of the Culture of Death. Their precursor was the eugenics movement of a century ago that imposed birth control and forced sterilization on the supposedly “unfit.” Today an artificially created panic about ecological catastrophe, derived from Gaia Theory and Deep Ecology, lies behind a seemingly unstoppable movement for sterile sex by way of birth control, sterilization, chemical and surgical abortions, homosexuality, and the infanticide of newborns (called “infant euthanasia”). Deep ecologists and Gaia theorists try to terrify us with environmental degradation in order to pursue their main program—population control. For even when their prophecies of doom prove to be false or exaggerated, these zealots immediately point to another imminent disaster and call for man to reduce his numbers.
We should understand that when the leaders of the Culture of Death look at us, they don’t see so many individuals with immortal souls and eternal destinies, each one having an incalculable value in the eyes of God, since the divine Word saved us with His own blood. Rather they see a plague of alien creatures infesting an imagined divinity. History shows that none are more fanatical than those on the march to Utopia. The Gaia theorists and the Deep Ecology zealots are certainly marching lockstep right now toward their imagined paradise. The mirage they have in view is one with so few people left on the planet that their great goal will finally be achieved—the total “noninterference” of man with the wilderness of the Earth. What a dismal, misanthropic idea of paradise!
http://www.newoxfordreview.org/reviews.jsp?did=0608-gardiner
