The very sharp-looking War on Humans website is now live, highlighting the upcoming documentary and e-book by our colleague bioethicist Wesley J. Smith. The film premieres here in the Seattle area on February 3 at 7:30 on the campus of Northwestern University, hosted by Wesley (that’s him on the right) and one of our favorite radio hosts, David Boze (left), who is both witty and wise. For information about how to reserve your seat, see here. It’s free!
After you’ve done that, assuming you’re reasonably local, explore the site, which includes the trailer and an excerpt from the Introduction, “People Are the Enemy.”
In 1972, Canadian science broadcaster David Suzuki told some giggling students, “One of the things I’ve gotten off on lately is that basically… we’re all fruit flies.” But that was just the start: Suzuki then likened us to “maggots” who are “born as an egg” and “eventually hatch out and start crawling around,” eating and “defecating all over the environment.”
Denigrating humans as maggots was edgy back in the hippy-dippy days (and Suzuki looked the part with his long-hair and John Lennon-style glasses), but few took such assertions very seriously. They were made to shock or get attention more than to express genuine misanthropy. Back then, the environmental movement didn’t generally denigrate human beings. Rather, it advocated preventing and cleaning up pollution, protecting endangered species, and conservation as a matter of human duty. Those are noble goals, ones that I support.
Unfortunately, the primary values of the original environmental movement have gone the way of bell-bottom jeans. In recent years, like termites boring into a building’s foundation (to borrow a Suzuki-type metaphor), anti-humanism has degraded environmentalist thinking and advocacy. Indeed, environmental activists today routinely denigrate humans as parasites, viruses, cancers, bacteria, and murderers of the Earth….
Go over there and read the rest.