You must have seen the kind of newspaper columns telling you the various ways in which you can be greener and save the planet. Well, if you're cutting down on paper consumption, you'll have read all that spiel online at any rate.

Some of this advice is of use: recycling your plastic bags; driving a more fuel-economic car - and some of it is worse than useless. In particular I am thinking of the big push towards eco light bulbs. Those things crack faster than the ice at a Billy Connolly show - particularly the swirly sort. I have had three of the buggers smash in my house in the past year. Environmentally friendly? That's so inaccurate anyone saying so should be prosecuted under the sales descriptions act. They are not environmentally friendly, they are environmentally lethal. They contain mercury, did you know?

And you have a mini biohazard to deal with when the inevitable breakage happens. There are some rules on how to embark on the clean up. I suggest you google about this beforehand. You can't just throw them in the trash either, they have to be specially recycled. I can tell you that very few people indeed will go to the trouble of finding where the hell you're supposed to take these pesky things. We haven't even been told of such a location. They'll be dumped along with all the other household waste and they'll contaminate the land and the water table. Whoever thought of this initiative can't have been too bright!

And what is more, while insisting we have to buy these scourges, the government blithely expands airports, motorways and you name it - immediately canceling out the optimistic projections of how far carbon emissions will be reduced by changing the light bulb. And they're going to ban the old style, standard bulbs. Perhaps people will end up going back to candles in desperation.

Companies know that "green" sells. People will pay more for "green" products and so it is a temptation ill resisted by manufacturers to tinker with their goods just enough to qualify them to seem environmentally responsible. Then people will continue on their consumer binging, buying stuff and dumping stuff while entirely guilt free. Almost no one wants to change their habits unless they can see a personal advantage from doing so

There is even an ethos growing amongst the common man that making or doing things yourself is to be looked down upon - it suggests you are a failure in life. This goes with the idea that "if you don't pay for it then it's worthless." Hence there is a general disregard for nature, which is taken for granted as a worthless "freebie." Certainly a shrewd businessman will see his opportunity to sell bottled water and indeed bottled air to a population who show so little interest in their surroundings and who are not at all outraged by the spreading pollution of both these resources, which should always be clean, pure and free.

Perhaps it is a good thing then, that decadence is becoming ever harder for people to afford. They may be prepared to make all kind of superficial excuses for their wish to buy while they can financially afford to, but the days of plenty are numbered. Food prices and the cost of living generally have led to everyone tightening their belts. It would have happened sooner had they not run up extortionate sums on credit, which they now find they can't pay back. Running out of cash is one way to make people genuinely greener. How's this for a slogan: "Make Poverty the Future"?

There have never been more people on Earth. There have never been more cows on Earth, nor pigs, nor chickens. We are using more pesticides today than at any other time in history and we are losing a greater percentage of the crops. At the same time, there has never been less clean water on Earth. There has never been less available topsoil, nor fewer fish, nor fewer mature trees. There has never been less cause for optimism for the future of the human race. Our natural resources are disappearing at an unbelievable rate, and our so-called leaders offer only cosmetic solutions. The Earth's population calls for more of everything while the Earth demands time to recover from years of abuse.
~ Howard Lyman

Why has the population of the world grown so quickly, why does it continue to grow exponentially, and why is so little being done to stop it?

The first explanation for this is the rise in technology and advances in medical science since the end of the second world war. The twin driving forces of unbridled capitalist greed and misplaced humanitarian concern for the so called "developing" nations led to a globalist push to industrialize. Suddenly people who used to have a sustainable way of life in the Third World were being fed and generally looked after. This led to a birth explosion, as well as greater levels of survival. Longer lives are as important a consideration as higher births as an explanation for overpopulation.

Old habits die hard, and the people of the developing nations have a tradition of large families for reasons of status, attempts to beat the odds of perceived risk of death before adulthood, competition and religion - as well as lack of contraception or interest in it. For many families, children are an investment because there is no state pension and they hope their offspring may take care of them.

Tribal conflicts have an effect of upping the birth rate. We have seen a noticeable drop in births in Ireland coinciding with the advent of peace there. Before this, the Protestants and Catholics rivaled each other to produce more babies. Obviously the Catholics were more successful there with the religious ban (now rarely observed) on contraception. Indeed the Pope is far from helpful in attempts to curb world population because he fervently encourages Catholics to breed and is opposed even to condoms to protect from AIDS. Now that Muslims have overtaken Catholics in number over the world, the Pope is only going to react by further entreaties to Catholics to get breeding. And the Muslims themselves have an expansionist agenda. In Palestine and Israel they make no secret of the design to defeat the Jews by outnumbering them.

People feel power from their numbers and there is an instinct to expand as long as resources allow for it. This is happening in many countries and amongst many ethnicities, although one rarely hears mention of it in the western media. If we understood this principle better we would not have the politically correct attitude required of good sheeple.

For some time now some nations have been trying to curb their birth rates because they are running out of resources and their governments have realized the economic advantages in reining in the expansion. Since 1979 China has had a "one child" policy which has slowed down their growth, although far from stopped it. China is colonizing areas of the world, and those who leave China have full permission to breed to their hearts' content.

India is also making attempts to reduce numbers. And while there was worldwide horror and condemnation of Indira Gandhi's program to offer transistor radios in return for sterilization in the 1970s - so all such attempts in the world were stamped on - India is now offering similar bribes without much murmur of opposition. There is a scheme offering men gun licenses for having vasectomies!

The Indian government has no jurisdiction over their north-eastern Khasi population however - who are so keen on expansion that they offer hundreds of dollars to any woman exceeding fifteen offspring!

And while we are talking of paying women to have babies - this is precisely what European nations are doing. Estonia even offers mothers, from their first child, about $2000 a month for a year. Japan, whose population is aging even more rapidly than Europe's, has a company offering $10,000 for each of its employees' children born after the first one.

India and China face problems in the future with an aging population born during their baby boom, should they succeed in reducing their birth rates. The whole thing is an utter fiasco.

As yet, the official bodies who should be engaged in active solutions to help reduce world population are refusing to acknowledge the problem. This becomes even more shocking when you realize that in the 60s and 70s such organizations and politicians were publicizing the severe danger of overpopulation and seriously formulating strategies to deal with it. Suddenly all this stopped, as if by some greater authority decreeing the whole issue out of bounds. And now we can thank the internet for allowing the many thousands who are fully aware of the situation to speak out publicly, together with the fact that symptoms, such as food prices soaring, point inexorably in the direction of overpopulation as a cause. Soon the politicians and various green parties who have been such traitors to the Earth will turn around and behave as if they were never responsible for suffocating voices of concern on the issue.

In 1974, the US government study - NSSM 200 - called for a drastic world population decrease, and the Carter administration released a document "Global 2000" saying that an immediate reduction to 2 billion was necessary. At the time, environmentalist groups agreed with these concerns, and Oxfam publicly supported zero population growth, while a Greenpeace slogan stated "Stop at Two".

This was suddenly replaced with the present Green policy that overpopulation is not a problem, that immigration to the west is a moral imperative, and that the cause of environmental collapse is down to polluting by western industry. This they say, while calling to end poverty all over the world - ie spreading the same consumerist lifestyle aspired to by our middle class.

Can you smell something rotten? That would be the necrocapitalism. Big business has bought our governments and our environmentalist groups. Evidence for the latter comes from the revelation that the Sierra Club, a leading US environmentalist group, accepted donations from a certain David Gelbaum, of over $100million in return for staying schtum on the impact of immigration on environmental problems.

Cheap labor and spreading globalist capitalism through loss of ethno-nationalist unity are essential for the necrocapitalists.

Corporate greed; religious doctrine; ethnic competitiveness; the wonders of modern medicine and humanitarianism - all are to blame for driving world overpopulation. Only when it becomes uneconomic for the situation to continue will our politicians agree to change things. By then it could be too late for the planet. We must struggle to destroy the farce of democracy and replace it with active solutions now!

Just like the crazy things that people buy these days say a lot about their character and interests, federal spending, that in the U.S. makes up for more than half of the total government spending, reveals the true state of America today. A total of 42 % of the entire Federal Budget goes exclusively to two things: national defense and social security. Paranoia and self-defeatism. The once biggest superpower in the world has now become a confused and hurt animal, and no matter how much it kicks to scare away enemies, it's effectively digging its own grave.

It shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone that America is spending lots of money on defense. What we're currently seeing today on the world political arena is a growing Cold War Redux, with increased tensions between the growing powers in the East ("Mother Russia" and Iran being two of them) and a globalist-capitalist alliance in the West (where America is still in the forefront); it's a war about power expansion, natural resources and cultural-ideological conflicts. Given this context, it's no wonder our national defense costs us a fortune -- despite the message of "peace," we're constantly fighting useless wars to track down spooky terrorists across the globe, and under our current regime, the world is apparently full of them. If there aren't any terrorists, we create them, arm them, and then hunt them down (Saddam, anyone?!).

Apart from the endless stream of enemies that force us to sleep with the gun under our pillow, the second economical drain on the budget is the social security. A system overloaded by illegal immigration, baby boomers and parasites, combined with a dysfunctional economy that's debt-based and currently collapsing in on itself thanks to the unstable housing market, will eventually wreck the budget and plunge America into a semi-third world state. The priorities reveal that the economy is bleeding cash and that all our bought up puppet politicians are able to do is to try to cover the wounds with cash already spent. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that this is not going to work, despite the blessings from God on our dollar bills. Hey, that's why the new presidential candidates have already given up on their tasks and instead ask of you to believe in change -- if God can't fix this, we're screwed anyway, they reason.

The fact that only 1 % of the budget is spent on the environment, tells us that any serious societal reform would have to rearrange the economical priorities in this country. Ron Paul had this right: cut down on social welfare that keeps idiots and bloodsuckers alive. Reform the economy by disallowing the organized oligarchs to issue our money based on nothing, and make the money supply a state-run institution, not a leak hole for corruption. Stop the Iraq war and cease being part of the globalization process (to avoid future wars we're destined to lose anyway). Localize this huge bureaucratic machine and start caring for the environment. All of our social and political problems can be solved by recognizing that our enemy is not in Iraq, Iran or Russia, but within. We're bleeding because we're not operating correctly. Let's get back on track by fixing our internal problems here and now. It can be done, with or without God's blessing, and it will save America from becoming the next Brazil in collapse.

Wild salmon are going extinct at an alarming rate thanks to the practices of a lucrative and unconcerned fish farming industry. The farmed salmon we find in the supermarkets today are naturally gray but usually modified to look pinker. Wild salmon is pink/red in color. To make their fish more attractive, salmon farmers resort to cosmetics and, as well as these chemicals, farmed salmon are loaded with dioxins, PCBs, anti-biotic and other nasties. Unlike the wild variety, the health advisors say you cannot risk eating farmed salmon any more than once every two months, and not a big portion either.Unlike the wild variety, the health advisors say you cannot risk eating farmed salmon any more than once every two months, and not a big portion either.

Now industry is going in for the krill. Described as "pink gold", krill is a very lucrative commodity and there are fears it will soon be mined to hell. This will hit wild salmon, as well as other wildlife such as penguins that rely upon this food source.

Farmed salmon are often raised in crowded underwater pens. Of all the fish to choose, salmon are particularly unsuited to this habitat. Such treatment is both cruel and idiotic. Think of the natural life cycle of the salmon, in which the young swim down rivers to the ocean and, as adults, return to their spawning grounds undergoing the trial of flinging themselves upstream in rapidly flowing water, ensuring only the strongest survive to keep the species healthy. They are a far cry from the degenerate and flabby domesticated salmon.

The toxic soup in which the farmed fish are raised has, unsurprisingly, allowed a deadly virus to emerge, that is quickly wiping out salmon in Chile. Domesticated salmon are also teeming with sea lice. Mother Nature, in all her wisdom, ensured that baby wild salmon were not infected, since adults die before infestation could take hold and be carried back to the ocean. Now, thanks to the wonder of modern food production, the young wild salmon must run a gauntlet of infected farmed fish. This is an explanation for the crashing salmon stocks in Ireland, Scotland, Norway and the Chinook salmon in California, with Canada following close behind.

But the lice and the virus are not the only threats. Millions of farmed salmon have escaped, and their inferior genetic quality is having a horrific effect on wild populations. Perhaps because of the parallels regarding human bad breeding, this is not a story we hear much about.

In Autumn 2006, the estimation was that up to 90% of salmon returning to some rivers in Canada, Scotland, Ireland, the Faero Islands and Norway are in fact of farmed origin. These are not the same strains of salmon as the wild ones, and 70% of the hybrid offspring die in the first few weeks due to genetic incompatibilities. The first hybrid generation seem just fine, and anglers are thrilled with the bigger fish. ("Isn't out breeding wonderful?") but then the population collapse occurs in the next generation. Farmed salmon have a success rate in the wild of 2% that of a pure wild salmon.

Incredibly, some brands of farmed salmon are labeled "organic". Comparing the farmed "organic" with the wild variety, you notice not only the gray shade, but the mesh of creamy fatty veins and the floppy muscle tone similar to a twenty stone couch potato. When fried, it falls apart quicker than a pair of paper underpants, and has been described as tasting watery and bland, compared with the sweet juiciness of the wild version. This makes a mockery of organic standards. Farmed salmon is a completely unsustainable and destructive industry and we should boycott its produce. Also needed is an all out ban on salmon fishing until stocks recover. But don't hold your breath.

Do you want to know why people today live confusing lives? Because the media constantly sends double signals about everything. I came to think about this today when sitting on the train, reading the Metro. On one page they had an article that described how 25 % of the Swedish children today are overweight, and how this was going to make life insurances for children more expensive in the future (modern society: always about money). Turning to the next page, I see a smiling man posing as a "Hamburger University Principle," talking about how great it is to educate workers within the McDonald's company. "I eat my lunch at McDonald's every day," he said proudly. What a moron.

Why does a magazine choose to first warn us about the increasing problems with child obesity - and then praise some corporate nitwit running one of the biggest fast food restaurants in the world? Easy: media is essentially advertising space for lobby groups and corporations. You'd think that most people reflect over things like this, but they don't. When you think about it, the media is full of these double messages that make us more confused than informed about what's going on in the world. I remember when they aired long documentaries on the news about how potato chips could cause you cancer. People went nuts and threw all their potato chip bags in the trash. The next week they explained the findings; it turned out you'd have to eat several kilos (!) of these products to be even tiny close to an increased risk of cancer. No wonder people don't react to critical information anymore.

Apart from the dishonesty, there is a problem with confusing people like this: by hyping all that's negative and turn it into apocalyptic bible tales, while down-playing and even ignoring the actual problems that we need to deal with here and now (overpopulation, ethnic conflicts, political corruption, hollow values), people eventually turn off their brains and see all information as pure entertainment. No reason to take anything seriously anymore, since it's just advertising. "Who cares about obese children -- tomorrow they'll say hamburgers make us thinner." All the useless information we process every day overcrowds whatever small percentage of quality information that is actually useful to us. Our mind turns into a city dump and we become too lazy to clean the place up to pave way for anything that is not garbage.

To people who read this: You need to become more conscious of the information you receive. Don't just consume like everyone else; reflect over what you're reading, hearing and seeing. Not everything in the media is true but that's not a reason to ignore all information. If you're going to read the major papers, watch TV (in general: don't), listen to the radio or overhear the discussion between your co-workers during the coffee break, do so with a critical overlook of things and place claims, assumptions and facts in their proper context. Don't be fooled by the way the way an article is spun or made for you to react in a certain way. You can avoid being brainwashed by reducing the emotional and moral drama. What you've got left is probably mostly garbage anyway, which is why staying "up-to-date" should be one of the few reasons to stay in contact with the public media at all.

Soon it's one year since the Korean-American student Cho Seung Hui went on a rampage at Virginia Tech University that led that 33 deaths, including Cho's suicide shortly after the massacre. Big newspapers construct glamorous, mournful, psychological analyses of why Cho committed the act, and to no one's surprise, we're supposed to believe that 33 people lost their lives "at random" because of a depressed and deranged student. "It just happened." Bullshit.

Cho was before the killings diagnosed as suffering from selective mutism, which means that the person alienates him- or herself because of social anxiety. Coupled with depression, this explains why Cho wasn't very social in the classroom. From here, TV priests and pop psychologists alike draw the conclusion that Cho began to grow feelings of resentment toward people around him, which eventually led to the school shooting. Note the word "eventually." This is where the media constructs a slippery slope-argument that fails to explain what actually happened.

Why was Cho feeling socially anxious and depressed? Just like any other high school student, he was confined within an environment that's defined by money, escapism and popularity. Cho, like his Finnish counterpart Pekka-Eric Auvinen, was probably unusually aware and intelligent. He quickly learned the social mechanisms behind the behaviour of his Western classmates and saw only emptiness and fear. In his suicide notes and the videos he sent to NBC, he crusades against "rich kids," "debauchery," and "deceitful charlatans." It's a reaction, not against his fellow students, but against a behavioural pattern in our society.

Cho chose to deviate from the essence of our society. Driven by commerce and desperate, hedonistic urges, the modern West is an obese monster devouring itself while in denial of its own self-destruction. Cho came from an Asian background and probably experienced a stark contrast between a cultural behaviour of self-control and what he saw in American teenagers as "debauchery;" alcohol, sex and materialism. This conflict led to his eventual downfall, which reached a bloody climax just before his death. His retaliation found an expression no one would be able to ignore.

The Virginia Tech massacre is no random phenomenon. By merely counting the number of school shootings the last 2 years, this is obvious. The public media is trying to cover these shootings up by focusing on the perpetrator alone and depicting him as a lonely, depressed and hateful individual. While this picture might be accurate in many cases, it fails to address where this social alienation comes from. It also hides the motives behind the shootings, effectively writing all suicide notes and manifestos off as "ramblings of hate." These school shooters don't hate people - they hate society, and they make people suffer for it.

We construct a false image of these perpetrators because we want to avoid panic. All people know, deep down inside, that these incidents are not random events. They all point to a breakdown of the social foundation behind our society and it's falling apart faster than ever. We will see more of these shootings in the future, possibly in other forms, as long as we continue to live in denial. Cho's act of vengeance was a violent revenge against our neurotic lifestyles that force us to compete with money and social fashion, until we cannot take it anymore and self-destruct. For Cho, it was a last, desperate cry for help in a society where everyone's too busy to pay attention to its downfall at micro level.

Originally trained as a psychologist in the scientist-practitioner model, John Feeney, Ph.D., is today an environmental writer. His current primary areas of focus are population growth and the media's failure to acknowledge the gravity of the global ecological crisis. Today John lives with his family in Boulder Colorado, USA, where he continues to research and to write and speak about ecological topics.

1. Please tell us about how this all started; what sparked your interest and concern for the environment?

First, I want to thank Alex Birch and Corrupt.org for making this interview possible. The questions are great, and I appreciate the chance to share these thoughts with the readers here.

Now to answer the question, I was mildly concerned even in grade school. I remember the thought occurring to me then that overpopulation was probably the biggest problem the world faced. I was also something of an outdoorsman as a teen, so some concern for the environment was natural.

But I drifted away from that and the population issue was squelched in the media and I pretty much forgot about all of it until about five years ago. That's when I moved with my family to tiny Mount Vernon, Iowa in search of a sort of utopian small-town-America life. In some ways it lived up to our hopes. It's a beautiful little Victorian town. But there was a new development going up that would (and will) just destroy the town's character.

I got involved with a group trying to fight the development but wondered why I was the only one advocating a true "no-growth" policy. Everyone else was pushing for "smart growth." As I researched the topic I came to see how pervasive was the rhetoric of the growth industry, hammering away with the message that growth was "inevitable and good" (hence, the defeatist notion that "if we have to grow we might as well make it 'smart growth.'"). I started reading the few alternative voices out there, such as Eben Fodor and Gabor Zovanyi who exposed the truth of such rhetoric and began to point me toward broader environmental issues. I also started a blog to try to debunk developer propaganda.

As I continued, I began to dig into issues I'd merely glanced at in the news: population, climate change, the whole array of environmental declines, peak oil, etc. I suppose everyone sees these mentioned in the news, but for me it took purposefully tracking down and connecting these things to see that we faced a profound global crisis. The convergence, at this moment of history, of several huge ecological problems, all nearing potential global crisis points, made me quite concerned about the future my kids would be heading into.

I was especially drawn to the population issue because it seemed clear it was a driving force behind the growth and sprawl which had first prompted my activism. And it is!

We moved to Boulder, Colorado where I spent about half a year thinking about how to deal with these issues. I decided to go with another blog, this time reaching out not just to my immediate community but to the world. I've used it as a kind of home base on the Web, and hope now to be able to reach out more to some large publications in an effort to reach more people.

2. Many people today witness how once green, untouched land is being transformed into concrete suburbs and shopping malls at a rapid speed. The effect and impact are overwhelming; how do you think this development is affecting the human mind? Does the lack of free, wild, untouched nature have a negative psychological impact on how we feel, think and behave as individuals throughout our everyday life?

A fascinating question. First let me just underscore what you point out by mentioning that I grew up in the Phoenix, Arizona area. It's been one of the fastest growing cities in the US for many decades. A few years ago I came across the population statistics for Scottsdale, a suburb of Phoenix. I can't find the link now, but if I recall correctly the population numbers were... 1950: 2000, 1960: 10,000, 1970: 68,000, and on up to something like 225,000 today.

One advantage of being a half century old, is that I've been around long enough to have seen first hand what urban growth and population growth have done. I remember some dirt streets in Scottsdale in the '60s. No one new to the area today would believe that. There was vast, beautiful desert to the North which today is housing developments and car dealerships. And while I can't prove it, I would contend it was a far more liveable place 40 years ago. Today, it could pass for just another suburb in West L.A. There's an amazing video showing the history of sprawl in the Phoenix area, how it's completely transformed such a huge amount of land.

But yes, I think the shrinking amount of untouched land has to have a negative impact on our ways of thinking and behaving. Oddly enough, though, despite my background in psychology this is something I've only recently begun to look into. So I'll just share a quick thought or two.

We've replaced wilderness with concrete and maybe a smattering of trees and grass. We spend most of our time in homes not at all of the earth. This has to affect our ways of perceiving ourselves, our surroundings, and the connectedness of the two.

Some have noted that, compared to us, hunter-gatherers had/have a tremendously heightened awareness of their surroundings. I suspect they'd see us as dulled in our ways of perceiving much of the world.

One has to wonder, as well, how a disconnection from the natural world may impact a person's emotional life or patterns of psychopathology in our culture as a whole. Such disconnection coincides with disconnection from other people as our social organization today is completely different from the smaller, more cohesive groups which were characteristic of hunter-gatherer cultures.

Now I won't argue there was ever a utopian culture. I'm not even sure there was ever a truly ecologically sustainable culture. (Certainly many came much closer than ours today). But this isolation from nature and loss of social connection which was once integral to living has to have had some serious, pervasive impacts. There is a growing field of "ecopsychology" which I have not looked at closely, but which examines those among other issues.

3. Some people have spent their whole life in vast cities and never been in real contact with wild forests. How do you think the ever-increasing urbanization is affecting the interest and understanding for nature in general? Is it true that what we don't see nor hear, we don't think of?

I think so. We are progressively out of touch with the natural world. In the US there are fewer visitors to national parks than there were a few decades ago – which is remarkable considering that the US population is much bigger now. This is of course good for the parks (perhaps outweighed though by the spread of chemical toxins to the parks) but hints, I think, at a troubling loss of interest in the wilderness, in nature. I have to think it makes it more difficult under such conditions to generate concern among people about the state of the environment.

That is, in fact, almost certainly a major reason behind our having let things slide as far as we have. Just to summarize, we see a long list of environmental problems including a mass extinction of species, climate change, extreme overfishing of both the oceans and fresh water environments, deforestation, huge "dead zones" in the oceans, extensive loses of coral reefs, the global spread of chemical toxins (e.g., fire retardant in the bloodstreams of polar bears, who are themselves threatened), the peaking of world oil production, and projections of serious water shortages to come. The real worry is that all of these are converging at once. The big ones, like mass extinction, climate change, and oil depletion are all nearing crisis points, and all have the potential for major societal impacts.

It's difficult to drum up concern, though, when most of us feel separate from nature and have the sense things are just going along as usual in our urban lives. But we're still living within and dependent for out lives on the biosphere even if we've made our immediate surroundings (e.g., a city) quite artificial. Somehow we need to get people to appreciate that they're still dependent on the web of life and are just one of millions of species within it. We also need to come to an understanding that humans have no special privileges among species. Then maybe we'd treat other species more respectfully – which simultaneously means saving ourselves.

4. After global warming became a worldwide phenomenon via public media, there has been a growing interest in turning environmentalism into a "green lifestyle." Do you believe this has had an overall positive effect on environmentalism action in general, or is modern green awareness fading out into just another social trend?

Mainly the latter. It may have had a few positive effects, but on the whole I think it's been a tremendous distraction and to a large extent a waste of time. Look at the more popular environmental sites on the Web or even at most of the major environmental organizations these days. The focus is mostly on how to "go green" in your lifestyle, what kind of products to buy, how to reduce your driving, and sometimes on considerations of things like carbon trading schemes. People get the message that this is what environmentalism is about.

While some of those things do have value, their emphasis is an evasion of fundamental ecological truths. There are far too many people consuming too much. The overconsumption part does get some play (which is why I don't focus on it much), but the "too many people" part is avoided at all costs by most environmentalists and groups. This has the potential to go down as the most tragic instance of intellectual dishonesty in human history.

We also have a corporate driven economy based on a notion of endless growth. This ties into the population issue in complex ways, but suffice it to say an economy cannot grow endlessly on a finite earth any more than can the human population. Yet economists tend to be aghast at the thought of stopping growth. They fail to consider that there will be no economy at all without a viable global ecosystem.

I think the economic growth issue is beginning to get some attention among mainstream environmentalists. The UK magazine, The Ecologist, just did a cover story on it. And George Monbiot wrote about it in a recent article. Unfortunately, he used it to try to dismiss the importance of population, weaving a terribly flawed argument resting on a blatant, basic math error. (For interested readers, I talk about that in a post on my blog.)

I'm afraid Monbiot's stance is, at this point, simply in line with what gets approval from the left. It's beginning to be okay to question economic growth, but talking about population remains politically incorrect. The writers on the right are even worse; they deny environmental problems in the first place, and argue that unending population growth is a good thing.

This is why I'm shifting most of my focus to population. Among these basic ecological issues, that's where there's a real need for more voices.

5. It's become popular among corporations to produce products labelled "green," something that seems to have sparked a recent consumer interest in this field. Is there a danger in equating environmentalism with the consumption of "green products"?

Yes, it gives people the impression that they're being good environmentalists if they simply buy the right products, if they just make sure they buy the non-toxic stuff or the biodegradable stuff. Not only does it blind them to much bigger and more fundamental issues such as population, but it also promotes continued consumption at rates (population size x average per capita consumption) the earth can't sustain.

We're seeing some corn based plastics, for instance, which are supposed to be biodegradable. There's value in that. But as we're seeing with ethanol, as we shift agriculture toward producing other products, be they fuel or plastics, we ultimately take away from food production. One way or the other, there are trade-offs and costs, and as long as we remain at numbers so vastly in excess of what the earth can support sustainably we'll run into them.

We can and should switch to hybrid and then electric cars but they still involve a physical throughput of material "stuff" (such as mined metals which exist in the earth in finite amounts) at rates beyond the earth's absorptive and regenerative capacities.

6. Why is the issue of population growth among many environmentalists, the public media and the world political arena, either not acknowledged or seen as a taboo problem?

The most complete article on this is by Roy Beck and Leon Kolankiewicz. They focus on the issue of US population, but many of their points apply to the global issue as well. Dave Foreman (Earth First! founder) also wrote a good piece on it. (PDF)

There are a number of elements at work. In my experience two stand out especially strongly. First, the environmental movement used to emphasize things like wilderness protection and land conservation. That was when it was represented by people like David Brower. People read and appreciated an author like Edward Abbey. But environmental organizations have since become dominated by folks with a different agenda.

As Beck and Kolankiewicz point out, they began making noise as long ago as the early 1970s. They came from backgrounds focused more on social justice and human rights, and have shifted the focus of environmentalism from conservation to things like the human environment and urban health issues. A part of this has been a shift from population numbers to things like "reproductive justice." Any discussion of population numbers is seen as a violation of a woman's right to control her own fertility. The problem, of course, is how to bring numbers down without talking about numbers. Hmmm...

The political roots of this trend were, to some extent, in socialism, and the tendency is to see all problems as matters of social justice inequities and unfair distribution of resources. That is, there is no real population problem, only political unfairness, and any focus on numbers is seen as a distraction from these, the "real" problems. Advocates of this notion, such as Betsy Hartmann at Hampshire College (You can see her views in this discussion.), believe we cannot effectively attend to such issues as women's rights and poverty as long as we focus on population numbers. They also believe a focus on numbers has to lead to inhumane actions. These are both, rather obviously, logical errors. There is no reason we can't address important issues of human rights and welfare while also addressing population. And humane, successful population programs in countries as varied as Mexico, Thailand, and Iran contradict the notion that attention to numbers has to mean inhumane interventions.

More fundamentally, the trouble with this thinking is that there is, in fact, such a thing as an ecological problem. There is such a thing, on a finite earth, as too many people – pure and simple. We've far overshot carrying capacity and, importantly, no remotely realistic amount of reduction of per capita consumption would, at our current and projected numbers, be enough to bring us back down to within Earth's limits. (More to come on that. I'm trying to interest a major paper or other publication in an article I've written which, IMHO, is a very solid proof of that last statement.) Remember, our total resource consumption is the product of population size times per capita consumption. At this stage, we absolutely have to reduce both. But population is actually a bit more fundamental. Only the lack of a consumer can mean no consumption at all. And had we far fewer people on Earth, we wouldn't be worried about individual consumption levels. But those who protest any focus on numbers or any intervention aimed at reducing fertility rates often go so far as to deny a population-environment link.

For some excellent observations about the tendency to see ecological problems as purely political I'd recommend William Catton's book Overshoot. It's one of the best books for getting at the essence of all these topics, by the way.

At any rate, their position really crystallized at the UN's 1994 conference on population in Cairo. Responding to pressure groups, leaders there decided to go along with the idea of avoiding dealing with population in terms of numbers in favor of a focus solely on social issues, some of which are thought to be linked to population growth. A major report from the UK last year summarized this very well. It solicited the input of scores of scientists and population experts, and concluded that this shift of attention has been a serious setback to the population issue and to environmental matters worldwide.

Those opposing addressing population are, I should also say, extremely anthropocentric or speciesist if you will. Everything is seen as a matter of human rights with no regard whatsoever for the rights of other species which are disappearing at rates 100 to 1000 times normal. Anthropologist Jeffrey McKee at Ohio State University has demonstrated convincingly that this "sixth extinction" (the fifth eliminated the dinosaurs) is due primarily to our sheer, growing numbers.

That's a key point too; the sixth extinction is a breakdown in the very web of life. Even those who can't appreciate the moral issue of extinguishing other species should be able to realize humans are as dependent on the web of life as any other plant or animal. This mass extinction will continue as long as our numbers keep growing. I think it may be the most compelling reason to reverse our population growth.

The second factor has to do with immigration. Among the few environmentalists willing to tackle population, some observe that the US's (and Canada's, and many EU nations') population growth is now largely immigration driven. The US total fertility rate (average number of children born per woman) has, for about three decades, been close to the replacement rate of 2.1. With no immigration or emigration that would mean that in a few more decades the population would stabilize. But with legal immigration levels near 1 million per year, possibly a comparable level of illegal immigration, and far less emigration, population will simply keep growing unless immigration levels are reduced.

The carrying capacity of the US is probably less than 200 million and we're now over 300 million. So, purely for environmental reasons, some population activists urge immigration reduction. It's a valid argument, and I think it should be on the table, open for discussion. But its a magnet for accusations of racism. Even though legal immigration to the US was in the neighborhood of 200,0000 in the 1960s (after which a change in the law allowed it to rise) and there's always been some limit, any call for discussion of limits based on environmental factors draws shouts of racism. Even those who point out that it's purely a matter of numbers, that it would make no difference if all immigrants were coming from Scandinavia, get hit with the same accusations.

The irony is that those on the left making such accusations are playing right into the hands of the corporate uber-capitalists who want unlimited immigration so that they don't have to pay a living wage.

In any case, it's the same kind of intellectual dishonesty which pervades other aspects of the population debate. It's ideology put before rational thought, logic, and intellectual honesty.

In my case, in my heart, I don't like the idea of immigration restrictions, but from an environmental point of view I see no way around the issue.

The immigration issue and consequent fear of being labelled "racist" is a key reason why many environmentalists avoid the population topic. For the NGOs I'm sure it's a fear of a loss of funding. For individual writers it's just plain fear of criticism, I suppose. They put their fear of criticism ahead of their concern for the planet and the potential loss of billions of lives.

I will add that my own politics have historically leaned toward the left. But I've been so disillusioned by the intellectual dishonesty I've witnessed from those on the left in investigating the population issue, including the Green Party, that I've returned to just calling myself an "independent" as I did at an earlier time in my life.

There are other factors as well, such as pressure from the Catholic church, but the two above are the ones I see the most clearly on a day to day basis.

7. Many people logically realize we need to do something about the environmental problems, but inevitably feel helpless as lonely individuals when considering the powerful financial and political interests that seem to control how most of our society works. What is your advice to those who want to help and do something constructive for the environment? Is there hope for action on an individual level or do we need to be a part of the system to change it?

I have no pat answer here. But I have a few thoughts. First, just working within the existing system, I think a large enough number of individual actions can indeed have an impact. I write in the hope of adding to whatever chorus there is on these topics, with the aim of raising awareness. With enough awareness, I think you get a certain critical mass which leads to significant action.

We've seen this to some extent with regard to climate change. True, much more action is needed, but the rising chorus on climate change, mostly from the scientific community, had sparked international meetings, new policies, etc. If it continues to grow, there will be more change. I don't know if it will be enough, but it's significant. If we could generate a similar chorus and increase in awareness concerning population and, more broadly, the whole global ecological crisis (the troubling convergence of things like peak oil, mass extinction, climate change, aquifer depletion...), we might really see some action instead of the complete lack of action we see now.

The more awareness there is, the greater the chance talented people will come up with ideas or organizations that really make a difference. Just imagine what it would be like if people with talents like those of the guys who founded Google were to apply the same ingenuity and creativity to tackling the ecological crisis.

Much of the way I think about trying to have an impact revolves around the idea of getting the most "bang for the buck." I think it goes back to my time as a professional poker player and learning the importance of thinking about those concepts which really made big differences in one's results rather than all the minutia which, while interesting, can bog players down in unimportant stuff.

While it may sound hokey, I actually think letters to the editor have a lot of "bang for the buck." They're quick and easy to write and large numbers of people do read them! Similarly, you can leave comments under posts on the blogs with really large readerships such as this one. (He's been touching on the population issue, though so far hasn't quite grasped the nature of overshoot.) Or start a petition here and get thousands of people to sign it and send it to their government representatives.

My general advice would be to go with your strengths. If you're decent at online research and writing you might take a route similar to mine. If you're a good organizer, you might think about forming an activist group of some sort. If you can teach, then try to reach as many young people as possible with ecological concepts not often taught today prior to college. If you like working on the Web or have site-building skills, build a site and promote it. This site (Corrupt) appears to me to be doing exceptionally well in that regard. It seems to have developed a large readership, and there are short and longer term plans for growth and ideas for how to accomplish specific goals.

But to maximize your impact in relation to the energy and time you expend, think about "bang for the buck."

All of the above are "within the system" actions. As I understand it, Corrupt is of course interested in seriously transforming or perhaps ending the system as we know it. That is a large challenge, to say the least, but I fully agree with going right to the root causes of the problems we see today.

I see a lot of validity to the argument, for instance, that the fundamental structures of civilization are untenable and unsustainable. I may ultimately go more in the direction of a Derrick Jensen. And I feel a definite affinity for the rewilding movement. There is much to be said for acknowledging civilization itself is the problem and taking it from there. But for now I have some things I hope to accomplish in just raising awareness of some basic problems.

So, at this point, the question of how to take the foundations out from under the "system" itself is not my expertise. But I'm sure the readers here need no introduction to those who have thought about and are involved in such things.

Questions from our readers

From Markus Nordman

8. You recently changed focus to writing for "larger venues." What kind of hope do you hold out for the Internet in general to get crucial environmental messages to the general public, or to enable change?

I still believe the Internet is a very powerful tool. If I'd wanted to spend more time promoting it I might have simply stuck with my blog, adding to its readership, ultimately forming a nonprofit organization, hiring some help and competing with the larger environmental sites. There are blogs and sites out there with huge readerships. But I'm not keen on that kind of work, and I see an opportunity to leapfrog all of that and just write for publications which already have huge readerships. The cost is that I have to go around begging people to publish my articles. But with added successes that should become easier.

On the other hand, the Web always holds out that possibility of launching a site based on a new idea which really takes off. That can be very attractive.

9. As a psychologist and poker player tackling major environmental problems, how much do your readings of the motivations of people or groups attacking or denying these issues actively play into your approaches (if at all)?

Well, I think about that some. I do try sometimes to speak to those motives in my arguments. For instance, I try to point out to those on the left who avoid the population issue that addressing population is one of the greatest humanitarian steps we can take. I may do a bit more of that, much as mainstream environmentalists do in convincing corporations that they can profit more from "going green." (I think it might help to nudge corporate heads to think about their children and grandchildren and the world they'll inhabit.) But so far I've mostly just to relied on the power of truth (as I see it), assuming that trying to get the truth in front of enough people will make a difference.

10. How do you feel about the notion of certain peak oil adherents that peak oil will effectively "solve" looming ecological problems?

Well, on a certain level it will help, as long as oil isn't replaced by coal. But on other levels some think it and related problems will trigger terrible humanitarian problems in places like Sub-Saharan Africa and subsequently elsewhere. The ideal course would be to start weaning ourselves off of oil, moving to renewables and helping developing countries do so, while lowering fertility rates enough to allow world population to start shrinking. But our leaders don't usually go along with the ideal course, eh?

11. What role do you see in addressing immigration with regard to world population issues? Clearly this is a major sticking point even among advocates of population reduction.

To what I touched on above I'll just add that one good argument for including immigration in the population discussion is that, as Al Bartlett has written, (PDF) it's hard for the US to tell others to reduce their population growth if we aren't doing so with our own. We can take the moral high ground by setting an example.

And addressing population is only going to happen on a country by country basis. Unless we're happy to let environmental degradation run amok in the countries attracting the most immigration, then it seems those countries with populations growing mostly as a result of immigration need to think about that immigration, no? I see no logical way around it.

12. Hypothetically, assuming a major population reduction on the level necessary for a sustainable future, what dynamics do you see at play that prevent this from occurring again almost as soon as the crisis is "solved?"

If I understand the question, I think you're asking how would we prevent another rapid population increase if we did manage to bring our numbers down sufficiently.

I guess it would me a matter of learning from our mistakes. There needs to be some cultural restructuring to build in processes which would insure against population growth beyond some optimum level. We need also to build in a widespread appreciation for ecological fundamentals. At the moment I see a looming crisis which needs emergency measures just to deal with the symptoms. But from a slightly longer term perspective we need to address the structures of today's civilization which have allowed for so much population growth.

From Sergio Ramirez

13. I've read recently that the average American consumes approximately twenty times as much as the average African. The U.S.A. is also noted for releasing 25% of the world's carbon emissions. If these figures are true (If they are wrong, please do correct), would it be wise to grant foreign countries the same liberties as those here in the States? How would one go about reducing such rapid consumption?

Those figures are probably in the right ballpark. They do highlight a key point. Population growth in the US is especially problematic because each person added here has a much larger ecological footprint than one added in a place like Africa or India or China. On the other hand, India, China, and other countries are growing economically very, very fast. As their populations continue growing (and India is expected to surpass China as the most populous country), so do their per capita consumption levels. That's a road to disaster. (Again, it's that equation, population size x average per capita consumption.)

In addition to further attention to population then, developed countries should aim considerable resources at assisting developing countries to transition to renewable energy as fast as possible.

Economically, the African countries are not at the same stage as, say, India and China. I have seen some writers use that to dismiss the problem of population growth there. That's nonsense. The crisis in Darfur is strongly population-related. And species threatened with extinction include the African lion (numbers down 90% since the1980s), chimpanzees, gorillas, etc. Africa is seeing some of the fastest population growth rates in the world, and the increase in sheer numbers, apart from energy use, has profound environmental impacts not acknowledged by those who dismiss it.

From a slightly different angle we must recognize that if things get much worse in Africa, with more Darfur-like situations and other humanitarian crises, reducing population growth there is one of the few measures which can help soften the blow. Fewer people born means fewer born into suffering, fewer deaths, and fewer competing for the same insufficient resources.

Moreover, those who dismiss the population issue in Africa on the basis of current energy usage seem to be accepting a continuation of abject poverty. If we hope to see Africa come out of poverty, it will mean increased per person consumption, which will mean even more need to attend to population.

I don't think we can begrudge other countries their desire to raise their living standards, but we can help them deal with population growth and begin radically shifting to alternative forms of energy. Our help in these areas is mostly quite welcome. A shift of a small fraction of the ungodly US military budget to these issue would go a long way.

From Milo Weinberg

14. What is the single greatest obstacle (be it social, political, psychological, etc.) faced by radical environmentalists as they attempt to disseminate their ideas throughout the mainstream?

Tough question. I think there are interrelated layers of obstacles. Two big ones come to mind and it's hard to pick just one. There's our whole modern view of ourselves in nature. The ideas I and many radical environmentalists try to convey fit essentially into the "deep ecology" view. To really get it, requires a shift in how we see ourselves as a species. Trying to get through to those who can't look at things that way is one obstacle.

Then there's the media's resistance. The mainstream media are not very open to publishing ideas that depart from, well, the mainstream. The semi-alternative media such as some of the medium sized "progressive" publications resist publishing ideas that run counter to their strongly held ideologies. So the media put up obstacles to reaching large numbers of readers.

Behind the media's resistance are politics and economic issues, and behind those are emotional issues. An editor may be so wed to an ideology that it's a part of his or her self image. To accept an article which contradicts that ideology may thus be a threat to self image. So much of what we see in most any heated debate is just two sides' respective efforts to protect self images in which they are heavily invested emotionally. I think the same goes on in trying to break through media barriers to get more radical (truthful) ideas published.

15. Do you believe that we'll reach the point where a sufficient proportion of the ruling class will "get it" about the population crisis before natural factors (epidemic disease, warfare, serial killers, etc.) begin to work more stridently to reduce human numbers?

Man, I hope so. We're not very close right now. But I do think we're a smidgen closer than we were a couple of years ago. It's a subjective judgement, but I think I've seen a noticeable increase in articles and other media presentations of relevant topics. You never know when progress will reach a point at which it accelerates.

It's an uphill battle though. Just published was a book, now getting a lot of press, offering the nonsensical view that because there have been some past failures and abuses in trying to reduce population growth we should abandon such efforts. Betsy Hartmann often uses the same line of argument. It would imply that those trying to fight, say, poverty should conclude, "Well, we've had some failures and some have abused the process. Let's abandon this because it has some problems."

16. Is democracy an adequate political mechanism for gearing society towards ecological sustainability, or do we need to find an alternative? Is there perhaps an inherent failure in the democratic process that prevents long-term planning from becoming popularized?

First let me just mention that there are some who study cognition and brain functioning who think there may be something inherent in the way our brains have evolved which prevents long terms planning. They argue we evolved to deal with immediate threats and can't easily be roused by long term threats. I would hope we could use our cognition wisely to overcome that.

But back to your question. I don't know. Our current system of democracy is clearly broken. But whether or not democracy per se is the problem is not my area of expertise. I mentioned above though that I do see real merit in grappling with the underlying structures of civilization which have enabled our ecological problems to develop.

17. What are some effective ways of communicating the population issue to consumption-oriented "soft-environmentalists," who'd rather promote a superficial economic reform--and actually enabling them to "get it"?

I think you need to sit them down in a dark room with a spotlight in their faces and force them for hours to try to justify their gutless, unforgivable avoidance of the real issues until they just fall apart and accept that they're wrong and ask to have Ishmael read aloud to them.

But seriously, it's tough. It goes back to the self image problem I mentioned above. I aim some of my efforts at spelling out concepts very simply but accurately, trying to bring a new clarity to some basic arguments. My hope is that a few of those "soft environmentalists" will read and suddenly "get it."

There is also something to be said for approaching such folks individually, diplomatically, and trying to get them to nudge their thinking just a little at a time. But I generally feel I'm not getting a lot of "bang for the buck" that way. Still, I'd love to sit down over coffee with an influential environmentalist such as Monbiot to see if I could make some headway. Typically I do my thing in writing online, but I look forward to a sincere, face to face discussion with someone like that.

From Magus

18. Population growth plays an undeniable role in humanity's impact on the environment. Cities within the developing world spawn people at unprecedented rates. Why is this and what can be done to prevent it?

That's a complex issue. There are a few theories. There is a somewhat questionable but, I think, not completely invalid notion of the "demographic transition." It would suggest that such parts of the world are just at a predictable stage in economic and social development and may proceed to lower rates of population growth as development continues. Presumably, that development would have to involve such things as education and empowerment of women, improved health care and provision of family planning services, a shift in social norms toward later marriage, and improved child survival (so that families don't assume they need to have many children so that a couple survive).

Add to that the idea, outlined by Daniel Quinn in Ishmael and examined in an article by Russ Hopfenberg, that human population growth, like that of any other species, is merely the result of increases in food production. Social variables have finally lowered fertility rates in developed countries, but they remain high in developing countries simply because we keep increasing the global food supply to meet increases in population. People are made of food after all.

The idea is that famine occurs somewhere – an event which would, in any other species, lead to a decline in population until it returned to within the limits of its food supply. But as concerned humans, we go in with food aid, made possible by our continual growing of the food supply, which allows the population instead to continue growing, thereby promoting further famine.

The answer, from this point of view, is to stop growing the global food supply. Of course the first objection is that this would allow starvation to occur. But if you read discussions about this by Quinn and others, it begins to appear this would not be the case. It is, in fact, the growing of the food supply which fosters much more famine than there would be otherwise. But it's a tricky issue. No question.

We have no guarantee that the demographic transition will continue to happen everywhere. And we're so far into overshoot already that we need to do whatever we can humanely to bring about a more rapid reduction and then a reversal of population growth.

We can do that by fostering things like women's education and empowerment and family planning services, using the media to promote new cultural norms concerning family size and family planning and the role of women, and considering such things as tax credits for smaller families. I'm not sure we'll be able to get governments to stop growing the food supply. It seems unlikely they'll embrace that idea.

But we've waited so long that now some believe we'll need some sort of global one-child-per-family policy. It would definitely have the desired ecological effect, but is obviously a tough sell. But they may be right that things have gone too far to expect otherwise to avert catastrophe. Certainly, the longer we put off committed action, the more extreme the actions we'll have to consider.

19. Why is there no talk of nursing traditional tribal-hunter-gatherer lifestyles that in the past have enabled people to live harmoniously with the environment for centuries to counter this trend?

Great question! The more I've thought about that, the more acceptable the idea seems. While there is evidence hunter-gatherers did transform ecosystems and did contribute to some extinctions, they did come far closer to true sustainability than we do today. Note, however, that a world of hunter-gatherers can't occur at a population of 6.6 billion. It necessitates numbers well under 1 billion.

But note as well that humans were hunter gatherers for all but the last nanosecond of our history. It may well be that it's the only lifestyle with a real shot at sustainability, Certainly, out of necessity, hunter-gatherer populations grew much more slowly, if at all. It's too hard to carry more than one infant at a time from place to place. They made use of methods of population control such as late weaning, wider spacing of children, abortion, etc. They were more aware of ecological limits on population.

Rewilding advocates see this as the future, assuming a major societal collapse and population crash is inevitable. They prepare for that by learning primitive living skills that would allow them to thrive under such conditions.

I think the reason so few take seriously the notion of a return to hunting-gathering is simply that we're so removed from it. It sounds like a silly fantasy. It also sounds awfully rough and deprived of creature comforts. But I've found by just sitting with the idea for a year or so, slowly mulling it over, it's become more palatable. Not completely palatable, mind you, but more palatable. And if you agree that collapse is inevitable (I'm on the fence about it.) then it's clearly in your interest to begin learning how to live as a hunter-gatherer. Personally, as a start, I'm beginning to do more hiking and to get my family into it, and soon will start relearning the backpacking/camping skills I once had. It's also a nice way to get a little bit back in touch with the earth.

But what we'll actually come to is a fascinating question. It seems unlikely that we'll throw out all our technical knowledge. How might we integrate something like a hunting-gathering culture with a more technical one? It's not impossible to envision some sort of hybrid.

---

Interview was conducted by Alex Birch the 5th of April 2008.

Corrupt would like to thank John Feeney for kindly answering our questions and providing both us and our readers with his extensive knowledge on the topic of environmentalism.

Visit John Feeney's blog at http://growthmadness.org/

Just when everyone thought the outrage over the Danish Muhammed caricatures had settled, Dutch politician Geert Wilders drops the next bomb. This time it's a 17-minute film, "Fitna," consisting of compiled footage of Muslim extremism, religious statements against the West, and accompanying quotes from the Koran. Whatever the stated intention is, this is one complete failure to address the real issues and a pathetic excuse to defend a corrupt modern civilization.

Geert Wilders has joined the secular humanist crusade that began with Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh. Wilders and Van Gogh draw a line in the sand: the West, they reason, is tolerant; the Muslim world, they say, doesn't tolerate the kind of plurality of opinion that in their view defines the West. Defining Western values as tolerance, of course, makes little sense when campaigning against a religion. Wilders explains himself:

It's true, they don't carry the Koran under their arms. But it's at home. And their fathers go to the mosque. They don't tell their children that beating women or believers of other religions is not allowed. That's why we have to push harder for a kind of Leitkultur, a guiding culture. Not a monoculture but a culture that draws on our Christian, Jewish, humanistic traditions and that poses a challenge to the Islamic problem. This is patriotism, not nationalism, this is pride in our own culture.

- Interview with Geert Wilders about "Fitna"

Wilders' "Leitkultur" is no different than the statements made by the Muslims in his film; the belief that one system of values should apply to all people. What "freedom fighters" like Wilders and Von Gogh miss out on is that anything can become a dogmatic religion. Secular humanism is the most misinformed, ignorant and destructive dogma of all these new religions, because it blindly worships the individual and turns it into a superhero. So much for "progress."

The disease Wilders has caught, seemingly, is American-style patriotism of the post-WWII variety, summed up as "because we are tolerant, we are right and everyone else is wrong." This symbolic unity, based on political convenience, is responsible for the tolerance that allows not only Muslims but any other group with a conflicting idea into Europe. While condemning Muslims practicing their own culture, Wilders seems to want to destroy his own.

Fitna is supposed to be Arabic, meaning "disagreement and division among people." All pluralist societies eventually reach the point where they fall apart from within due to lack of consensus. This is convenient for those who make money, because it removes cultural barriers to massive profit. In blindness, the West is worshipping this disease and denies the truth of many Muslim arguments against the decadence and spiritless materialism they see here.

Islam has a right to exist, in the Middle East. It's not our business to decide whether it's "right" or not for other people, just as they shouldn't expect Europe to submit to Allah anytime soon. The current values of the West are rotten to the core and we don't wish to impose them on any people, including ourselves. It's time for a new world agreement, not to do with free trade or political alliances, but one that asserts the right for all people to create and maintain independence.