Under The Shadow of Environmentalism

I was cutting down trees in the forest this weekend (not for fun or out of a hatred of squirrels -- forests are man-made environments and have to be maintained, the sort of fact that unthinking tree-huggers don't like to get their heads around). Watching the smoke of the oil fire drifting overhead, I remarked how it would seem a high-priority target for terrorists, and maybe that would come out in a few days as the cause.

One of my axe buddies lifted her head and added, 'Oh, yeah, when I attend Greenpeace meetings, there are people there from the fringe groups like Earth First. I wouldn't put it past them. Those guys are basically terrorists.'

Well, I eased my jaw back into place. I had, of course, meant Islamist terrorists, whose interests in bringing down Western economies and in attacking our oil supplies are well-documented. But I think it is an important truth that came out in that unguarded and strikingly uncritical remark. Extreme movements survive because of a penumbra of those who support their cause but not their methods, just as the IRA fed on support from America and Palestinian terrorists get a lot of intellectual and economic support from Europe these days. This is true for the Jihadists in Britain, though it is hard to get a politician to admit it, and it is true for the animal rights and environmentalist groups who believe in violent attacks for their cause as well.

I heard Peter Singer on the radio saying he couldn't be responsible for what lengths people went to under the intellectual cover of his animal rights philosophy. That seems to me fundamentally wrong. If there is a dark heart to your cause, you are responsible for helping to keep it beating. Such violence is a sign of ideologies that, as a whole, cannot grasp compromise. They are far from the abiding message of the West, home and guardian of liberty, toleration and balance. We say, to such groups: you can have something if you come to the table and talk, or you can have nothing. We will not give you all. In the face of such offers, a system of thought that has no subtlety must descend into violence or shatter into nothingness. Having too much pride for self-destruction, they begin to descend a ladder of cruelty that goes down into the depths of human depravity.

Well, we have begun to see what vile acts animal rights extremists will contemplate, and it is interesting that a keen environmentalist should see such a catastrophe as the oil blaze as what is to be expected from green brothers in arms in the future. Far worse is that she did nothing to condemn it out of hand. That unwillingness to be judgmental is the sign of a dark future ahead. The penumbra of environmentalism is Greenpeace meetings and smiley posh people like Zak Goldsmith; at its heart is a burning fuel depot such as peacetime Europe has not seen.