The big-name, big-budget environmentalist mini-movie "No Pressure" has drawn sharp reactions in the last few days, with criticism coming from both the right and the left. James Taranto did the most thorough job I've seen of taking apart this light-hearted, tongue-in-cheek, gory eco-fascist murder fantasy. He observed that in the past, white supremacists have blown up children, as have Islamic supremacists. "Green supremacists" are still only joking about it — for now:
There's a new kind of supremacist on the scene: green supremacists. They haven't blown up any children–not in real life. But they've been thinking about it.
A British outfit called the 10:10 Campaign hired Richard Curtis, a writer and producer of cinematic comedies, to produce a four-minute video promoting its effort to encourage people to cut "carbon emissions." The result, titled "No Pressure," struck James Delingpole, a global-warming skeptic who writes for London's Daily Telegraph, as "deliciously, unspeakably, magnificently bleeding awful." He's being too kind.
Read the whole thing. And watch the movie:
[YouTube link ]
[alternate YouTube link]
[another alternate YouTube link]
Taranto closed with:
One may hope that Jim Edwards is right when he denies that "this is actually what environmentalists want." But it's bad enough that this is what they fantasize about–and that they manifestly felt no inhibition about airing such a depraved fantasy in public.
But we have plenty of evidence that this — or much worse — actually is what quite a few environmentalists want. We have their own words:
We have wished, we ecofreaks, for a disaster or for a social change to come and bomb us into Stone Age, where we might live like Indians in our valley, with our localism, our appropriate technology, our gardens, our homemade religion — guilt-free at last! — Stewart Brand
Everything we have developed over the last 100 years should be destroyed. — Pentti Linkola
I suspect that eradicating small pox was wrong. It played an important part in balancing ecosystems. — John Davis, editor of Earth First! Journal
Human beings, as a species, have no more value than slugs. — John Davis, editor of Earth First! Journal
The extinction of the human species may not only be inevitable but a good thing….This is not to say that the rise of human civilization is insignificant, but there is no way of showing that it will be much help to the world in the long run. — Economist editorial
We advocate biodiversity for biodiversity’s sake. It may take our extinction to set things straight — David Foreman, Earth First!
If radical environmentalists were to invent a disease to bring human populations back to sanity, it would probably be something like AIDS — Earth First! Newsletter
Human happiness, and certainly human fecundity, is not as important as a wild and healthy planets…Some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along. — David Graber, biologist, National Park Service
The collective needs of non-human species must take precedence over the needs and desires of humans. — Dr. Reed F. Noss, The Wildlands Project
If I were reincarnated, I would wish to be returned to Earth as a killer virus to lower human population levels. — Prince Phillip, World Wildlife Fund
That's just a portion of the quotes collected at one site. There are many more here, here, and elsewhere.
The leadership of the environmentalist movement is full of people who are anti-capitalist, anti-industrial-revolution, anti-modernity, anti-progress, and ultimately anti-human. There's nothing amusing about the sick self-loathing that causes a person to wish most or all the members of his species were dead.
