A new revolution is gripping America, and un-doing the revolution of 1968. Instead of radical humanists rebelling against materialists, it's pragmatic people rebelling against a calcified liberal government that has become parasitic and corrupt.

Back in the 1960s, we had a revolution in the West. It was a peaceful one, arising from a groundswell of discontent. Its basic message was that our society had gotten sidetracked by materialism, and forgotten the human.

Now we've got another revolution -- one that says whether we pick humanism or materialism, the dogma replaces the reality, and our society drifts into complacent oblivion. Where in the 1950s a rising corporate culture emphasized a vapid pursuit of material comfort, in the 2000s a rising humanist culture has created a haven for selfishness of another kind.

The modern West has become a willing host to any parasite willing to show up, repeat our official dogma of equality, diversity and freedom, and then take whatever we hand out. In our zeal to escape the stodgy 1950s cash culture, we have created another cash culture -- one that supports people just for being human. In just 42 years we have reversed direction and found ourselves facing the exact same problem.

As a result, our government has become a parasite. In addition to throwing trillions of dollars into welfare programs that do not consider whether the individuals they subsidize are contributing at all to the common good, government itself has grown to an immense size.

Let's look at what government means to the average person:

• More paperwork than ever before. To get a house built, a business established, or even deal with the death of a family member, we must navigate a vast bureaucracy. Inevitably this means paying experts and lawyers.
• Government views us as a cash cow. Fees have gone up, and practices like the creation of de facto speed traps have continued to drain citizens, without any regard for whether these people are contributing members of society who need a break, or repeat lawbreakers.
• In addition to hiring legions of consultants and contractors, most of whom get placed at the front of the line for being minority- or female-owned, government has surged in size and pay for bureaucrats, even as efficiency has declined.
• The rise in bureaucracy and tendency to hand it over to people without considering their competence has created a culture of corruption that "threatens the fabric of the US", according to the FBI. It even reaches the White House.
• Government now operates in "moral" humanistic mode, which means that it supports any idea no matter how impractical which endorses our holy trinity of secular humanity -- equality, diversity and freedom -- while ignoring the consequences. As a result, we now have legions of diversity consultants, counselors, educators, presenters and other nonsense "make-work" bureaucrats.
• Having this many relatively incompetent but highly paid people causes them to seek to justify their position by publicly enforcing laws rabidly, and starting all sorts of new and pointless programs. The origin of the Nanny State is not an Orwellian desire for control by the state, but a desire by incompetent individuals to justify their salaries.

No matter how we cut it, this means government has become a parasite. It takes from the productive, and gives to the unproductive. Even if we object to measuring life through money, we have to recognize that rewarding the good means that they have an incentive to outperform others. It's that incentive that is the foundation of evolution and natural selection as well as any healthy society.

I'll spare you the comparisons to Communism and instead make a comparison to 1776 and 1968. In 1776, bureaucrats from England were taking money from the productive colonies and using it to prop up their failing empire. In 1968, fat dumb guys in suits were in such a mania to profit from the post-war boom that they forgot their souls.

And now in 2010, the same pattern is repeated. We thought humanism was an antidote to soullessness just like we thought revolution was an antidote to bad leadership. Once we slayed the dragon, we thought we could blow off the problem for the interim. But now we see that the dragon regenerates, because wherever we stop paying attention, parasitism grows.

If anything is going to drive the Tea Partiers -- and they now have similar movements in the USA, UK and mainland Europe -- to success, it's going to be that the average functional citizen recognizes that government is sabotaging what he or she is doing. That sabotage then pays for the dysfunctional, who cause more than their share of social problems.

The left has rebelled with their same-old slogans and objections. They are trying to prove that the Tea Party goes against the values of 1968 -- that's the blind equality, diversity and freedom dogma -- so that they can debunk the Tea Party. But the problem is that Tea Partiers are objecting on a pragmatic ground, which is that in the name of fairness and anti-materialism, we have become cancerous and self-consumptive.

When the left was rebelling against a calcified culture of materialism, they at least had some degree of accuracy -- even if their methods were bad. Now that what the left created has become just as calcified, the right has taken over and adopted their methods. In the middle, the citizens who have been ignoring politics in order to have careers and raise families have started to notice, and they're siding with the Tea Partiers.

In this study, Danish researchers, troubled by rising male genital birth defects, decreasing sperm counts, and increases in testicular cancer, compared these statistics to genetically, culturally, and historically similar Finns. By measuring, ellipsoidal volume at birth, it was found that Finns have larger testicles and average three times more testicular growth.

Another study measured baby penile lengths, showing boys with more testosterone had longer lads. "The Finns are doing so much better from every parameter, semen, testes size, and cancer," Main bemoaned.

As for the relevance concerning wider health concerns, the article continues:

One study from 2006 found 40 percent of young Danish military recruits had suboptimal sperm levels. In the land of Lego, 7 percent of all live births in 2007 required "assisted" reproduction. (In the United States, it's around 1 percent.) There's gloomy news about other measures of manhood as well. About 9 percent of schoolboys have at least one undescended testicle, compared with 2.3 percent in Finland. This condition, called cryptorchidism, doubles the risk for testicular cancer. And, in fact, Danish testicular cancer rates are about one in 100, about three times higher than the Finnish or U.S. rates.

The guilty measure responsible for causing these genetic differences were found to be exposure to chemical, environmental toxins. Although far-fetched, the fact that less testosterone, and hence a population of more effeminate males, is solidly linked to pesticide use, biphenols, and even the usage of hairspray in mothers.

In a curious study published in November in the International Journal of Andrology, U.S. researcher Shanna Swan measured young boys' tendencies toward traditional "male" play. Those boys who played the least with toy guns were exposed to the highest uterine levels of phthalates, as measured earlier in their pregnant moms' urine.

To me, this seems like practical knowledge: the more natural the environment, the better your health, the heartier the men, and the more fertile the women.

When we were searching for a house, we weren't concerned with square footage or whether or not the house would look good on HGTV. Ever watch those shows where annoying, yuppie couples pick apart a brand new kitchen and talk about how they'd add this or that? Our house is by no means dilapidated; in fact, it was built in the 1950s when people still built houses with pride. But it's dated, so it'll take some work to bring it to where we want it to be. This will involve a fresh coat of paint in the spring, and some other minor fixes. The "bones" of the house are quite nice - many people living in houses built in the 1980s would be envious of how solid the floors and walls are, let alone the craftsmanship.

More important than the structure itself is the land and the community. Our lot is mostly wooded but has a small patch of flat surface and a hill going up. This will be great for sledding when our son is outside playing in the snow, and nice for him to climb up and explore a bit of our land before he tires of it. It's still a suburban neighborhood, so there will be plenty of things to do outside our property. New England suburbs are a bit different than in many other parts of the country because the land is so hilly and uneven, and the area has been settled for so long, that there is very little room for things like subdivisions with same-looking lots stretching for over a mile. I've always felt this has added to the charm of living in New England.

Our particular community is one where people enjoy staying involved. We have lived here for nearly three years as renters and I grew up close by, so I know people take a lot of pride in living here. This is reflected in simple things like trash collection. Without giving people ego boosts simply for showing up with a recycle bin, they regulate how much trash you can throw out on a given week or else you have to pay extra for special bags or an additional barrel (the barrel has arms on it which can be grabbed by the truck, and everyone is given one). The documentation states this should push you toward using your recycle bins more, and you have to sort things a certain way. Some people would cry about personal freedom and time wasted on sorting your garbage, but it's quite easy when you get used to it - and this method comes with extra perks like free by-appointment appliance and electronic disposal, since it saves the town a lot of money.

Neighbors seem friendly and property taxes are kept reasonable by a huge swath of commercial space (corporate HQs, malls, etc.) that are all clustered together away from most of the residential property. Michael Arth would be proud.

While fortunate to have been able to purchase property in a state that is known for exhorbant real estate prices, we also worked our way toward this purchase with clear goals in mind. We didn't need stainless steel appliances or four/five bedrooms with a master suite and jacuzzi. We wanted to live in a decent community, not too far from family. I've known people who moved half the state away just to be able to afford a nice big house (and with it, a 2 hour commute). The problem is, all they ever see is their own home and their own immediate family, because they've moved into a community they don't know full of strangers, one neither of the parents grew up anywhere near. To sacrifice the family time and community roots for another 1,000 square feet didn't seem worth it to us, so we feel we've chosen wisely.

As someone who considers things philosophically, I get annoyed when people consider legitimate, stand-alone issues as necessarily political. Environmentalism has been the sexiest, new issue on the agenda to be co-opted by the left, placing anyone who does not identify with partisan politics as opposed to environmentalism.

Ridiculous for a host of reasons, but mostly how leftist partisan politics concerning environmentalism is rife with contradiction. For instance, another en-vogue issue is third world development, but I ask to what degree? Environmental and economic sustainability is not possible if everyone lived as decadently as the Western world, but raising this glaring issue is mostly met with emotivist, empathetic responses.

I won't claim to be an authority on the matter, but I wonder why third world development is an inherently positive thing. For example, a mutually beneficial exchange would occur if Western influences were withdrawn from the African continent. A continent ridden with tribalism, and a concomitant culture that does not value rationality, does not stand to gain anything from adhering to a capitalist structure. Nor do we in the developed world, stand to gain anything from industrializing and pumping empty resources someplace that does not even possess an infrastructure of sorts. Logically, environmentalism cannot exist as a priority if simultaneously third world development also exists as a priority.

Brendan O’Neill at the Spiked is your typical liberal who doesn't want to touch the issue of overpopulation. Nobody wants to because it means admitting we've grown too greedy for our own good, and who would like to be caught with their hand in the cookie jar? Here are his three anti-Malthusian arguments:

The first mistake Malthusians always make is to underestimate how society can change to embrace more and more people. They make the schoolboy scientific error of imagining that population is the only variable, the only thing that grows and grows, while everything else – including society, progress and discovery – stays roughly the same. That is why Malthus was wrong: he thought an overpopulated planet would run out of food because he could not foresee how the industrial revolution would massively transform society and have an historic impact on how we produce and transport food and many other things. Population is not the only variable – mankind’s vision, growth, his ability to rethink and tackle problems: they are variables, too.

But if those other variables cannot make up for the growth in population, without destroying biological diversity, what's the point?

The second mistake Malthusians always make is to imagine that resources are fixed, finite things that will inevitably run out. They don’t recognise that what we consider to be a resource changes over time, depending on how advanced society is. That is why the Christian Tertullian was wrong in 200 AD when he said ‘the resources are scarcely adequate for us’. Because back then pretty much the only resources were animals, plants and various metals. Tertullian could not imagine that, in the future, the oceans, oil and uranium would become resources, too. The nature of resources changes as society changes – what we consider to be a resource today might not be one in the future, because other, better, more easily-exploited resources will hopefully be discovered or created. Today’s cult of the finite, the discussion of the planet as a larder of scarce resources that human beings are using up, really speaks to finite thinking, to a lack of future-oriented imagination.

If we consume something quicker than it regenerates, such as oil, it will soon be a depleted resource. Even a five-year-old understands that.

And the third and main mistake Malthusians always make is to underestimate the genius of mankind. Population scaremongering springs from a fundamentally warped view of human beings as simply consumers, simply the users of resources, simply the destroyers of things, as a kind of ‘plague’ on poor Mother Nature, when in fact human beings are first and foremost producers, the discoverers and creators of resources, the makers of things and the makers of history. Malthusians insultingly refer to newborn babies as ‘another mouth to feed’, when in the real world another human being is another mind that can think, another pair of hands that can work, and another person who has needs and desires that ought to be met.

You cannot create something out of thin air--it comes from somewhere. We call that "somewhere" raw materials, like water, oxygen, grass and so on. You might create things using those raw materials, but that's a different story, and doesn't escape the basic dilemma: What do you do when more people request an increasing amount of a limited resource, even if only "limited" for a certain period of time? Each person gets less. We'll see more of that in the future. No wait, we're already seeing it. Time to wake up.

The Copenhagen climate change summit is both winding down and coming undone, with the entire world wondering: "what can Alfred teach us about global warming?". Well I shall tell you.

I haven't done a single bit of first-hand research, nor have I looked at other people's evidence or arguments. Instead of placing my trust in one, none or both sides of a debate in which zealous combatants of all sides inculcate a strange kind of deeply filial bond to their opinions, what I have done is rely on common sense; that strain of cynical, optimistic and humble logic that always remains untainted from the virulent subject matter at hand.

The way I see it: the world may very well be getting warmer. Or not. It may be getting colder. It's snowing outside - a rare prelude to the Christmas season in England - and our last winter was among the coldest ones on record. It may even be staying the same for a while. However, the climate's various variables surely change at one point of another; I would hazard that the temperature of the Moon has been stable for millions of years now, perhaps as a mutual trade-off for not enjoying a single wheeze of breathable air. Are we contributors to this change? Surely yes, but surely not all of it. We are of course one factor to be considered among many.

The Earth's climate will always be changing, but the crowd remains predictably the same. People love to get whipped up into a frenzy about doomsday scenarios; it makes them feel important. Even more, they love announcing dramatic platitudes or flaunting trivial acts in response to the problem of the day (just check Twitter); this makes them seem selfless, anti-elitist and egalitarian, and thereby makes them popular. These twin tactics have historically always brought lots of empty souls together; look at the G20 protests for example. I guess that every individual there felt both important and popular.

That is why I am cynical about the global warmongering lobby. I would require an incontestable burden of proof before I agree to give away Mt. Everest sized chunks of money to incompetent third-world leaders that promise to use the money to sacrifice their own growth and economy, and to sit around and build solar panels instead. All of that to find out one year later that they were lying all along, thinking it a much better investment to purchase several thousand gold-plated AK47s.

But I recognise that my cynicism may very well be misplaced; in simple terms, we should always be wary that there is no smoke without fire, even if it's a very meek, smouldering kind of conflagration. Yet I remain optimistic in the face of such danger. We know that our behaviour is sometimes no good for the environment, it's just that sometimes it takes us a while to realise it en masse. This is why free-range eggs are now so popular, why CFCs are banned pretty much everywhere, why wind farms are being erected, clean coal technology being developed, why fly-tipping is frowned upon, overpopulation becoming a major issue, and why the old, garishly orange, sky-pollutingly inefficient lights on my high street have been replaced with elegant white-light LEDs.

The Copenhagen talks, if they went the way of its most fervent supporters, would have the entire planet infinitely bound into an awkward, anti-democratic and self-harming agreement over an issue widely contested and highly capricious. If, in the course of global events, we eventually come to a stark, irrefutable conclusion that we are taking an ineffable dump on our planet's well-being, perhaps something similar would be the best course of action. Yet despite the humorous foibles of the crowd, evolution has consistently shown humankind to be highly adaptable, and it is in this process I trust. To choose to regress is a failure to adapt, and signals demise.

I do think action is necessary to reduce our negative impact on the Earth. Crucially, we just need to keep to ourselves and I offer one example in support of that idea. Land situated next to a nature reserve behind my town has been left to fallow indefinitely by the local landowner. Within a couple of years, the result is that a beautiful meadow has sprung up and the riverside edges are now populated by a thicket of adolescent foliage. Playing children, hikers and dog walkers have trod a scenic footpath through the middle, and the local deer can be heard courting in the area during many summer nights. Species once endemic to the area can now spread back.

But more practical action is available; I strongly support research into renewable and environmentally friendly technology, despite being a Copenhagen cynic, but I generally do not believe in coercion. I recognise someone's freedom to happily drive an SUV around the home counties, but I don't recognise their intellect. The relevant motto is John Milton's: "opinion in good men is but knowledge in the making". A skyscraper is about to be erected in London that houses three giant wind turbines at its helm. The energy created is enough to power the entire living complex, and some of the area around it. This kind of action should be encouraged, but the capability to utilise such local solutions would be seriously hampered if we were to tax our pioneers and throw their money elsewhere.

Even with all of the most pious ranting available, we cannot force the world to act on our behalf; Europe's cajoling, China, India, and America's reluctance, and the limpet-like financial demands of third-world states have made talks too volatile to enforce global consensus. Yet unless all of these people are actually psychotic, they will each want what's best for their people, or at least themselves.

So in the wake of the conference's failures, what is my answer? I see no point in presenting an entire manifesto, so here are just a few simple words in a vaguely chronological order: be patient, develop, adapt, praise, share and change.

This is a conversation with a tenant who was renting a room from me some time ago. The guy was one of those artsy open-minded progressives, so his view on the world was more than a little strange. As he was packing up some cardboard and glass to take to the nearby recycling bins, he observed:

"You're not much of a consumer, are you?"

"Uh, I eat twice as much food as you do."

"Yeah, I guess it just doesn't come with a whole lot of packaging."

Huh. That's one weird definition of consumption.

Doctors should be interested in climate change and the environment for many reasons, including those outlined here:

Some of the headline findings were that rising temperatures are likely to increase transmission of many infectious diseases, reduce supplies of food and clean water in developing countries, and raise the number of people dying from heat-related conditions in temperate regions.

It is actually arguable whether any one 'developed' country should really care about developing countries. However, in this world strangely filled with images of starving African guilt and endless global guilt about them, the masses will accept and be motivated by this without question. Or maybe another possibility: perhaps they are just assumed to do so. In any case, although this seems to be the focus of the article, what is more important for the individual making any changes are the costs and benefits to them or their country.

Is a more environmentally friendly society an economically viable society? The answer to this is complex and beyond the scope of this post.

Is a more environmentally friendly society a healthier society? More exercise, less reliance on electricity, more locally and homegrown products. I believe the general agreement on this is that the answer is yes.

This doesn't mean that everything that's environmentally friendly is healthy:

"A low-carbon economy will mean less pollution. A low carbon-diet (especially eating less meat) and more exercise will mean less cancer, obesity, diabetes, and heart disease.

"Opportunity, surely, not cost."

Trans fats have been proven to be culrprits in the above diseases, more or less without question. Saturated fats also have been implicated and well.

However, villifying meat as a food product seems to be unfair. It is a source of protein and iron, working well if grilled or boiled and supplemented with cereals, vegetables and fruits. What's most dangerous is including fish under this heading, which is one of the healthiest foods to eat.

Image by Ivan Petrov.

One of the fundamental problems we face in the West is how to reform a system designed to thrive only on constant economic growth. As environmentalists like John Feeney and Pentti Linkola point out, the limited resources on our planet guarantee that's an unsustainable way of organizing society. So, one becomes "anti-consumerist," or someone who believes in limiting how we use our Earth's resources to produce things people want to buy. But where does that lead us?

Anyone wanting to buy a book attacking consumerism is faced with an embarrassing range of choices. There are so many different tracts, using so many different terms, saying more or less the same thing. The differences between competing brands of soap powder are more significant.

To the extent there is any originality in Lawson’s work it is to blame the rise of turbo-consumerism on what he calls ‘free market fundamentalism’. From this perspective a group of rabid free marketeers, led by Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek, led an intellectual revolution which ultimately led to an obsession with consumption. In Britain it was Margaret Thatcher, the Conservative prime minister from 1979 to 1990, who put the ideas into practice.

It is also hard to square the idea of free market fundamentalism with the massive role of the state in the British economy. The most striking indicator of this is that state spending in Britain is equivalent to about 45 per cent of gross domestic product. This is a huge distance away from the minimal role of the state favoured by the likes of von Mises and Hayek.

Clearly there's hypocrisy at the core of leftist-oriented anti-consumerism. Europe has never really embraced free market principles like America has, and even if we isolate the US, we have to take into account the recent rounds of bail outs and government-owned sectors now increasingly adding up to something resembling European-style capitalism.

So we barely have "free" markets in an absolute sense, if such an economy can even exist in reality, but how do we construct a society not built upon the principle of constant growth? If we want the government out of the market as much as possible and offer consumer choice, we need to look at this equation:

Population size X average per capita consumption = total consumption

To reduce the consumption we need to reduce the number of people on this planet, as well as our consumption rates, but clearly the most fundamental factor in the equation is the population size. The fewer we are, the more we can consume without overshooting the planet's carrying capacity. So the real elephant in the room is overpopulation, which right now is such a sensitive moral issue that only leaders like Michael E. Arth, Pentti Linkola, Albert Bartlett and NWO oligarchs dare to address it in public.

We don't want the government to destroy the open market, because it leads to European socialism, which spells slow death for civilization. What we do want is to honestly tackle the population issue, not just in the third world but also in the West, because although the latter doesn't suffer from an overpopulation problem as big as in, say, Africa, it still maintains insane consumption rates per capita. We can solve this by moving away from the idea that you are what you consume, to the notion of you are what you make out of your life in relation to your community, family and culture. The Western consumerist religion is a problem of culture and values, and not something that can be solved with leftist-oriented policies calling for government intervention.

We are Conservatives and believe in Conservative solutions. To be a Conservative anti-consumerist simply means you believe in higher values than radical individuality and the right to consume. You believe your function in a community is more important than occupying a rung on the commercial ladder. This is why commercialism per se isn't bad; our priorities and values are. We need a better humanity focusing on reviving great art, great architecture, great science, and joyful exploration of the future with the wisdom of the past to guide us:

The conservative wishes to channel change without losing sight of some critical points of reference. These are tradition that is established folkways, and the existing attitudes and preferences with which we are endowed. In this case, change is welcome but it is to be structured in such a way that we do not lose our essence in the process.

Our essence is our inseverable bond with the planet that sustains our very existence. Never bite the hand that feeds you.

Racists have spent the past few decades marginalized, neglected and ignored by mainstream society. But no more!

About a decade ago, biologists David Schwartzman and George Middendorf of Howard University in Washington DC hypothesised that our modern brain could not have evolved until the Quaternary ice age started, about 2.5 million years ago. They reckoned such a large brain would have generated heat faster than it could dissipate it in the warmer climate of earlier times, but they lacked evidence to back their hypothesis . . .

A new study by Schwartzman and Middendorf suggests that a small drop in global temperatures may have made a big difference. The pair used basic equations of heat loss to estimate how fast the small-brained Homo habilis would have been able to cool off. Assuming overheating limited the size of H. habilis's brain, they then calculated what drop in air temperature would have been needed for Homo erectus to be able to support its bigger brain... They found that a drop in air temperature of just 1.5 °C would have done the trick.

So, hominids living in a slightly warmer climate cannot have human brains? Of course, only white supremacists who believe that peoples living tropical climates have inferior brains and may not even be fully human would buy into such a theory. But why is science suddenly reviving ideas which have been socially unacceptable since roughly the 1940s? It's all because of global warming:

If global cooling allowed humans to evolve their big brains, will today's global warming take them away again? "I'd hate to think that a difference of 1.5 °C might mean the end of humans because our brains cook," says George Middendorf of Howard University in Washington DC, "but I guess it's a scenario that might play out."

Yes, climate science is reaching out to you racists. You can no longer be ignored - your help is needed to fight global warming. It must feel great for you to be taken seriously by science, especially by a highly prestigious branch of science with its Nobel Peace Prize and its highly amusing public food fights.

Some people aren't buying this study - John Hawks attempts to debunk it, but apparently his travels have taken him to tropical lands one too many times as this is what he concludes:

OH NOES! Me brain, she be sizzlin' away like a hot ball o' buttah. WHAAAAAAH! hot Hot HOT HOT!

Martin clearly upset some people when he reviewed Gregg Easterbrook's "A Moment On The Earth," a book that suggests environmentalism has been hijacked by bitter people who fail to recognize hope and success where it's due. The reason some people take offense when confronted with a positive message is that deep down inside they are mainly motivated by negative emotions. They become involved in environmentalist issues out of fear and despair, which is why they only see doom and gloom ahead, even if that is not an entirely accurate view of reality.

I've known a few vegans/vegetarians in the past. They were mainly motivated by their love for animals, not by hate towards the meat industry or crowded zoos. The meat industry is despicable at times and it's true that a lot of species really shouldn't even be kept in zoos at all - but that's not the point here. If you want to succeed with a goal you need to have a constructive and positive attitude. Environmentalism today is neurotic in part because it doesn't recognize its vast successes over the years, and only highlights the effects of environmental problems, such as climate change, without addressing the underlying causes (urban expansion, overconsumption, overpopulation).

No wonder leftism hijacked environmentalism--bitter, angry people love to get involved in causes lacking substantial goals, but which give you license to bitch all day about how the world is going to end tomorrow. Well, it's not. Environmentalism today will largely fail to do anything constructive about critical issues (this is probably why the Bush Admin. ignored the Kyoto protocol; it smelled like a giant failure from the beginning) as long as its goals are to repeat negative dogma. Instead, ironically, the anti-science and anti-technology crowd may want to reconnect with its Romantic roots:

Herschel's discoveries represent one face of what Holmes calls, loosely but suggestively, Romantic science. The phrase sounds like an oxymoron, as Holmes acknowledges: "Romanticism as a cultural force is generally regarded as intensely hostile to science, its ideal of subjectivity eternally opposed to that of scientific objectivity. But I do not believe this was always the case, or that the terms are so mutually exclusive. The notion of wonder seems to be something that once united them, and can still do so."

But the most potent Romantic warning against the peril of science was Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, to which Holmes devotes a chapter. Holmes shows that Shelley was alluding to Davy when she wrote, in Frankenstein, of how modern scientists "have acquired new and almost unlimited Powers: they can command the thunders of heaven, mimic the earthquake, and even mock the invisible world with its own shadow." But the lesson of her book is that these powers are too great for human wisdom—that once they are unleashed, they may return to destroy their masters as Dr. Victor Frankenstein's monster turns on him.

Finally, The Age of Wonder places more faith in science's "beauty" than in its "terror." "We need," Holmes writes in a heartfelt epilogue, "the three things that a scientific culture can sustain: the sense of individual wonder, the power of hope, and the vivid but questing belief in a future for the globe." Yet it is only because of science and technology, of course, that the future of the globe is in question. Without nuclear weapons and global warming, not to mention the Large Hadron Collider, we wouldn't need to reinforce our "hope" and "belief" in the survival of the species, which, until the 20th century, was taken for granted. There is a reason that Herschel and Davy, heroes in their own time, have been overshadowed by the eminent contemporary whose name everyone still knows, Frankenstein.

To succeed with anything you need wonder, hope and positive goals. When any project or movement lacks those goals, it will slowly collapse in on itself like a depressed individual and reinforce its own negativity. That's how modern leftism works, and that's the pattern modern environmentalism is following. Romantic environmentalism, on the other hand, makes perfect sense: Our environment is strained and we need to preserve its biodiversity, so we constrain and configure our society to make it sustainable and beautiful again. That is why, when Michael Arth claims we can reduce 90 % of the world's cars in 20 years, we listen. We want a better future, not a gloomy eternity.

Do you like nature but hate environmentalists? In A Moment On The Earth, Tuesday Morning Quarterback and my favorite leftist Gregg Easterbrook reminds us why environmentalists are so despicable. He begins by reminding us that nature is a lot tougher than we tend to think (even those of us who have expended great efforts trying to eradicate weeds), has survived conditions far worse than mankind could ever create, and far from having a "correct" state is always changing - and far from being in retreat is currently growing stronger and more lively.

Although the author praises the environmentalist movement's actual accomplishments of gaining influence and making the world a cleaner and nicer place to live, he points out that the environemtalists themselves are not proud of these and expend great energy pretending that they've never accomplished anything and things are steadily getting worse everywhere. The consistent pattern of overblown rhetoric aimed at spreading panic gets exposed and criticized with example after example. The reader also gets a long list of success at reducing various categories of pollution and preserving natural areas. Environmentalists also get criticized more briefly for attracting misanthropes and that especially dangerous subtype of misanthropes known as socialists. I wish those who want humanity to live in medieval or Stone Age conditions also got hammered too, along with those using environmentalism as a substitute for religion. It's much more productive to see such criticism from someone who strongly believes that environmental problems are serious and need to be addressed, rather than from autistic libertarians or right-wingers.

Not that the picture is all rosy; much work remains to be done, especially in the Third World. Based on the track record so far, though, the author believes that even the current doom scenarios of greenhouse gas levels and human population will be resolved much more quickly and inexpensively than anyone imagines. After all, this is what happened with all previous doomsday crises. An interesting but scary point Easterbrook makes is that environmentalism is just about the only area in which progressive ideology has actually managed to accomplish its goals; certainly compared to attempts to wipe out racial inequality, alcoholism or Christianity (just to pick a few random examples), eradicating pollution has been a smashing success in developed countries. Progressives should therefore point to their successes in order to win more influence and funding for their other programs. Well... I certainly hope they don't, but I see why doing so would make sense.

Towards the end of the book things get metaphysical and spiritual; inevitably, this part is the least convincing. It is mercifully short, though, and does contain some very valid thoughts, such as the idea that man should soon advance from the stage of protecting nature from his own actions and start protecting nature against natural phenomena such as extinctions, asteroid and comet strikes (one of Easterbrook's longstanding obsessions), and in the distant future even the lifecycle of our Sun. Inbetween those, though, we get some not-so-convincing ideas such as genetically engineering predator species to become vegetarians so we can have a kinder, gentler nature.

The main message of the book's nearly 700 pages is best summed up in this quote:

Rather than being a corridor of instant doom, environmental control is a tunnel with a bright, beckoning light at the end. Programs work; nature recovers; societies that invest in ecological protection see benefits within the lifetimes of those making the investment.

To put that at a more human scale: it sure is nice to only need to wash my windows twice a year instead of having them covered in soot in a couple of months. And to think that to get there all we really had to do was get rid of central economic planning which also made everyone a hell of a lot wealthier.

This book has been out for over a decade and sadly has apparently had zero influence; environmentalists are still the panic-spreading misanthropes they've always been. And why not? Prophesying doomsday makes you respected even when the prophecies prove completely false, after all. I doubt I'll live to see an optimistic environmentalist movement that's proud of its accomplishments and grounded in reality. That's a shame...

Our promotion work for Pentti Linkola's "Can Life Prevail?" so far:

• We've hit numerous environmentalist forums and boards, much thanks to the help of Brett Stevens.
• We're on Amazon, with 2 customer reviews so far.
• Peter Salonius, research scientist at the Canadian Forest Service, has read the book and is now in contact with Linkola personally.
• Steven Salmony at Sustainabilityscience.org has contacted us to show his appreciation for Linkola's ideas and work.
• Russell Hopfenberg, Ph.D. at Duke University, along with several other academics, have been sent a copy of the book from Integral Tradition.
• Keith Thomas at evfit.com has provided an extensive summary of the book, which is soon to become a review published in a journal.
• Ever since the publication of the book, Penttilinkola.com has received and published several new translations of famous articles by Linkola.

This is the beginning of a new era of environmentalism where we look at ecological problems with clarity and respond with practicality. No more green trends, no more hippie leftism hijacking important questions facing humanity. Life will prevail.

Our recently published translation of Finnish ecophilosopher Pentti Linkola's "Can Life Prevail?" is quickly drawing attention from academics and intellectual environmentalist groups alike. For those of you who haven't ordered the book yet, but want to know more about what it's all about, EVFIT ("Health and fitness in an evolutionary context") provides an excellent summary intended as an upcoming review for journal publication next month:

This book is a translation from the Finnish of 35 essays and articles written between 1989 and 2002 with the author adding a preface in 2004. They begin with the author’s reflections on nature and the human impact on nature, drawing heavily from the author’s 50 years of ornithology-centred travels on foot, bicycle and rowing boat through Finland. As the book progresses, the author’s focus shifts from describing and lamenting the damage to Finland’s ecology and humans’ separation from nature to advocacy of what he feels his whole country needs to achieve real sustainability, healthy citizens and a rich biosphere.

In his native Finland, the only country in which his books are published, Pentti Linkola (b. 1932) is a controversial figure. Can Life Prevail is the first collection of his writing to appear in English.

His ideas will be no less controversial in Australia if this book is discussed here. He tackles ecological problems as a biologist driven by a “love of life”, not as a politician. He outlines what he believes must be done and leaves it for others more adept in the political sphere to implement a successful transition. Although all of Pentti Linkola’s proposals are fully consistent with the aim of achieving long-term environmental sustainability, few – if any – feature in the green manifestos we are familiar with. If nothing else, Linkola reveals to us the ideological constraints we have imposed on our planning for more sustainable biophysical arrangements.

This is really worth reading. Please contact the site owner to provide comments and criticism.

Human civilization works in cycles; that much should be obvious to any astute observer. Hopefully, this is an indication we're evolving back into a somewhat sensible species:

The four-year liberal arts college has given up tractors in favor of oxen to plow and hay. It’s installed solar collectors atop a barn roof to heat water for its two-cow dairy operation. Carbon dioxide emitted from the metabolisms of 80 chickens is shared with a next door greenhouse where CO2 levels can dip during the winter.

“Modern agriculture is heavily reliant on oil and other fossil energy sources – it’s extremely inefficient, with more than 20 calories required to produce and deliver one food calorie to a consumer’s plate,’’ said farm manager and ecology economist Kenneth Mulder. The college's effort is helped in large part from a $110,000 grant from the Jensen/Hinman Family Fund.

But if future farming is to be more local and sustainable, he believes students should be exploring organic growing in the context of traditional farming practices. It also gives students a more “intimate relationship” with the farm.

This is a good step forward from simply slapping an "organic" label on a fruit and selling it at Whole Foods. While this will inevitably be turned into a marketing ploy to get people to pay high prices for organic goods from this farm, the idea is nice: using a real life example to show people that we can still simplify society; that there is reward in doing things efficiently, building character the old-fashioned way. And this is in Vermont, where for at least two seasons per year, farming is nearly impossible.

If we are going to use electricity and power for anything on a regular basis, it should be for things like farming. So the point may be lost on people who care about power seats in their cars or, worse, power reclining sofas for their living room (sadly, I think these do exist, even for those not stricken with handicaps). While realizing that it would be difficult to give up modern day conveniences most don't even see, such as certain farm machinery, it's also important to understand that without huge growths in population, these machines never would have existed for the purpose of making farming ultra-efficient as farming is best suited to being localized instead of nationalized as it is today.

Some environmentalist organization in my country has put up billboards around town asking the viewer to not buy any products made from endangered species. In the center of the billboard stands a rhinoceros. This got me thinking... who in this country might actually be in the market for some rhino products and could this billboard be effective in dissuading them? The rhino horn aphrodisiac market is on other continents thousands of kilometers away. I don't know if rhino meat is even edible. I guess rhino skin might be great if it's much like elephant or hippo, but it's got to be hideously expensive. Very few people in this country could afford a pair of rhino hide boots even if they could be made, considering that the last pairs of anteater boots made after trade in the skins was restricted a few years ago were all priced over $2000. How many people in this entire country might have that kind of money, be willing to spend it on a pair of boots, and want those boots made from rhinoceros hide? Five? One? Zero? I suspect it's the latter.

It is still possible to buy antiques made using hawksbill turtle shell, but I didn't see any turtles on the billboard. If these environmentalist were actually concerned about reducing the sales of things made from endangered species, that is what they should be going after. I suppose this is the perfect environmentalist statement, then. It's not like these billboards are in fancy new housing developments where wealthy people might live - we're talking places like the train station. All the people looking at these billboards don't have money for any rhinoceros goods, wouldn't have any idea where to buy them, and only a few might want them even if they were available and affordable. That is wonderful because it lets all the viewers, even the unemployed and poor, feel morally superior to those evil people the billboard is against. Letting everyone feel superior to people who don't even exist by doing absolutely nothing - environmentalism has finally reached perfection!

Can Life Prevail?
- A Radical Approach to the Environmental Crisis
Pentti Linkola

Pentti Linkola is the kind of thinker that surrounds himself with controversy. Commenting on the school massacre that took place in Finland in 2007, Linkola, as always, took the opportunity to flame the press:

- The massacre was too small. In the long run it doesn't help shooting some fellow students. What is needed is a larger movement to reduce the population.

It doesn’t get much more upfront than that, does it? But Linkola, despite appearing in the media as some kind of ultra-radical green troll, is far from the bitter old man people make out him to be. If this was previously unclear, he certainly presents a different side of his persona in his latest book, "Can Life Prevail?" The book is a collection of articles and shorter essays spanning more than a decade of radical environmentalist thought. The topics range from childhood reflections, food hygiene, and bird watching to deforestation and terrorism. Social issues neatly tie into politics, and vice versa.

Far from being a simple propaganda pamphlet, Linkola's writing is full of warmth and wisdom: the importance of growing up as a fisherman together with his family, his strong passion for birds and forests, and how he and his wife have travelled on bike through Europe. In short, Pentti Linkola is a man who has lived and seen the things he talks about. He's not just another trendy green trying to cash in on a political trend; Linkola lives environmentalism. He's protecting a heritage, or as he puts it himself: "Fighting for forests means fighting for Finland. If the forest is flayed, Finland is flayed."

The essence of Linkola's ecophilosophy, which he calls conservationism, is to view man and nature as one and regard ecosystems as holistic entities. Each entity as a whole carries a value higher than the individual value of its parts, and any part may be sacrificed to protect the value of whole. He convincingly applies this argument to society and describes how the technological, economic and industrial expansion is pushing away wilderness and species. His plan to stop ecocide is simple: roll back human expansion to sensible levels and return to a local, practical and simpler lifestyle in harmony with nature.

To back his views up, he cites tons of examples, addressing how serious the deforestation crisis in Finland is, how the import of foreign animals and the growth of predators have driven entire species to the brink of extinction, and how the Finnish agriculture is rapidly shrinking. Linkola, to be fair, is cynical about the situation. He recognizes that a population ruled by utilitarian democracy, in which political leadership panders to popularity and individual desire, will always satisfy special public interests instead of looking at the cold reality. Linkola's answer to our current society is a centralized government mercifully controlling its citizens, cutting down on technology and economy, and focusing on building a foundation for culture, education and practical knowledge.

Does it sound fascist, socialist and oppressive? It is. And Linkola isn't afraid of saying it. It's hard to tell whether he's trying to set new standards for environmentalist debate or if he's actually serious about his "ABC of the Deep Ecologist." Maybe it's ultimately irrelevant. As Brett Stevens notes in his insightful introduction, at the end of the day, Linkola's main motivation seems to be uncompromising love. He is, after all, not a bitter old man, but a surprisingly idealistic, warm-hearted and sharp thinker. Most of what he says, although it would force even the most radical green-leaning liberal to back down, is close to what many of us would call traditional common sense. We only have one planet. One life. We need to protect the biodiversity that inhabits this Earth, or else we fail as a species on what is possibly the most important mission before us. Linkola's cry, "Can Life Prevail?," does not just ask the question--it provides us with an answer to how we can win.

I assume no one has missed the story of the depressed elephant Susi in Barcelona zoo. If you have, here's what's it all about:

The only elephant in Barcelona zoo could die of sadness unless she is moved to a bigger enclosure with other elephants, animal rights campaigners have warned.

Susi, a 36-year-old African elephant cow who was born in the wild on the African savanna, has reportedly been suffering depression since Alicia, her female companion of six years died early last year.

The animal rights charity Libera claims the elephant is showing classic symptoms of unhappiness and boredom that include eating her own excrement and repeatedly swaying her head and trunk from side to side.

This says a lot about how animals (and in extension, humans) behave in environments lacking adventure and sensual stimulation: they seek shelter and comfort in fellow creatures. That probably explains a lot of the oversocialization in society today; when people feel existentially bored with life, they usually become socially desperate for comfort. This is the situation Susi is in, lonely and depressed in her little zoo box.

So why don't her keepers release her or move her to a bigger home? Because they fail to think outside the box, which seems to be even smaller than the one Susi's in:

Admittedly, Susi looks sad. Her skin droops, and her dark eyes seem a little teary. She's said to occasionally rock back and forth, with apparent anxiety. And then there are reports of her eating her own feces. But does that add up to mental illness? Determining depression, let alone among nonverbal members of the animal kingdom, is always tricky business. But such is Susi's plight that the Queen of Spain and a famous writer have weighed in. And so now, the question about what to do with the Barcelona Zoo's star elephant has taken on new urgency.

Not so fast, say Barcelona officials. "If you're a patient, the person whose diagnosis you're going to trust is the doctor treating you," says Miquel Trepat, director of Barcelona Zoo. "And in this case, our veterinarians and technicians - the people who deal with Susi every day - say that she's in a perfect state of health." To be clear, he emphasizes, "Susi's behavior hasn't changed since Alicia died."

So what they're essentially saying is that since she is physically healthy, she is also psychologically healthy? How did these people become veterinarians? Even the most clueless of dog keepers, for instance, know when their dogs are sad without as much as checking their pulse. Humans feel depressed all the time, however fit and healthy they feel otherwise. The logic doesn't add up.

What should we learn from this? Well, if society decides to confine you within a small housing area and you want to get out, despite feeling depressed, chances are you need to find some social company, or else you can eat shit and die. Kisses and hugs from a progressive society that loves you and believes in your freedom.

Honda has been marketing fuel-efficient vehicles in the United States for decades, starting, ironically, with the T360 pickup truck. Their latest hybrid vehicle, a trend started by Toyota & Honda in the late 1990s to push people into compact cars with new technology, is the redesigned Insight, which looks essentially like a Toyota Prius twin.

Honda & Toyota have become “push” manufacturers, meaning they feel they can define the market for the consumer as a result of their market influence. Honda’s most recent Accord model has edged into full-size car status, as Honda grows the Civic to make room for the Fit. Between the Fit and Civic is a car that apparently not only fails Honda’s own strict standards for interior quality, but also drivability.

Much has been written about the Insight, Honda’s new low-priced hybrid. We’ve been told how much carbon dioxide it produces, how its dashboard encourages frugal driving by glowing green when you’re easy on the throttle and how it is the dawn of all things. The beginning of days.

So far, though, you have not been told what it’s like as a car; as a tool for moving you, your friends and your things from place to place.

So here goes. It’s terrible. Biblically terrible. Possibly the worst new car money can buy. It’s the first car I’ve ever considered crashing into a tree, on purpose, so I didn’t have to drive it any more.

"But let me be clear that hybrid cars are designed solely to milk the guilt genes of the smug and the foolish.”

This is Honda’s way of telling us that they can sacrifice the things that allowed them to progress from making glorified Kei cars to beautiful luxury cars which kept the tradition of fuel efficiency in a tight package. What you get with the Insight seems to be a hipster lifestyle choice, complete with an Un-Green technology in the form of an as-yet unrecyclable lithium ion battery which would kill you if you opened it up and let it leak onto your skin. Thanks, Honda, but no thanks: think about the economy and the driver next time instead of following the advice of your marketing department.

[…] the Brooks School, a North Andover boarding school for grades 9-12, is counting on […] an animated animal that lets students “see” their energy consumption in real time. Instead of showing students what energy they are collectively using in each of the school’s ten dorms with graphs or digital numbers, a “bear-o-meter” displays it more visually on a public screen with the bear’s well-being tied to how well students are conserving.
For example, when energy use is low, such as early in the morning, the bear is asleep and happy. But as energy use rises as students turn on computers, televisions and music devices, the ice can begin melting under the bear’s paws – and if energy use really peaks – the poor bear falls in and flails in the open water.

Something of note: these kids are in high school, not elementary school.

The question should be, "does turning out a light make a polar bar happy?" The answer, of course, is "no".

There are too many people on the planet, and for some reason, mainstream environmentalism is ignoring this, so we're not teaching our young people about this issue. Industrialized nations don't need any more people, but they allow them in anyway while falsely believing they're doing the world a favor. So you have more resource consumption in first-world lifestyles which only adds a positive feedback effect back home in the developing world.

More people escape to industrailized nations while less people realize that overpopulation is becoming a huge concern. Of course, that doesn't stop them from reproducing--they've just gained entrance to a high material lifestyle. In the meantime, our population continues to grow thanks to shortsightedness on both ends - developed & developing - and we end up with lip service paid to polar bears in a cheap attempt to turn environmentalism into a commercial product. Hey, didn't they do that in the new Disney flick, Earth?