Of ‘Nature Fakery,’ Eco-Destruction, and the Nature of Fakery
At the Hoover Institute, Bruce Thorton dusts off a favorite term of pioneering conservationist Teddy Roosevelt:
At the turn of the twentieth century, President Theodore Roosevelt became embroiled in a public controversy over how some writers and naturalists described the natural world in overly anthropomorphic and sentimental terms. In a 1907 article attacking Jack London, among other writers, Roosevelt popularized the moniker “nature fakers,” those writers whom Roosevelt called “an object of derision to every scientist worthy of the name, to every real lover of the wilderness, to every faunal naturalist, to every true hunter or nature lover. But it is evident that [the nature faker] completely deceives many good people who are wholly ignorant of wild life.”
The “nature” the sentimentalists described was not the real nature, but one conjured from old myths and imaginative projections of human ideals onto an inhuman natural world. Unfortunately, a century later “nature fakers” are still promoting their sentimental myths about nature, only now with serious repercussions for our national interests and security.
These days “nature fakery” lives on in school curricula and popular culture, from Earth Day celebrations to Disney cartoons like Pocahontas. Only now this myth is renamed “environmentalism” and disguised with a patina of scientific authority. Worse yet, this allegedly scientific information provides the basis for government policies that impact our economic productivity and national security. The furor over global warming illustrates this unholy alliance of ancient myth and misleading science. For years we have heard claims that the evidence for global warming caused by human-generated “greenhouse gas” is “incontrovertible,” as the American Physical Society claimed last year in a policy statement, and that “if no mitigating actions are taken, significant disruptions in the Earth’s physical and ecological systems, social systems, security and human health are likely to occur.”
In a recent column titled “The High Priests of Eco-Destruction,” Michelle Malkin writes that the nature fakers themselves aren’t opposed to causing their own significant disruptions to man’s physical and ecological systems:
Despite repeated judicial slaps for their “determined disregard” for the law, the Obama administration continues to suppress documents related to that junk science scandal. Last month, House Republicans threatened to subpoena the Interior Department for information. Call it a greenwash.
—Water wars and the Delta smelt. The infamous, endangered three-inch fish and its environmental protectors continue to jeopardize the water supply of more than 25 million Californians. Federal restrictions have cut off some 81 billion gallons of water to farmers and consumers in Central and Southern California. Previous courts have ruled that the federal biological opinions used to justify the water cutoff were invalid and illegal. Last September, the U.S. District Court of the Eastern District of California admonished two federal scientists for acting in “bad faith.” The judge’s blistering rebuke of the Obama administration scientists concluded that their slanted testimony about the delta smelt was “an attempt to mislead and to deceive the Court into accepting what is not only not the best science, it’s not science.”
GOP Rep. Devin Nunes, who represents the hard-hit San Joaquin Valley area, noted that Salazar recently “doubled down on the illegal policies of the Department of Interior and attacked critics as narrow minded and politically motivated. Ironically, these were the same basic criticisms levied against his department by the federal court.”
While Salazar manufactures a new biological opinion on the matter to get the courts off his back, unemployment and drought plague the Central Valley. And the White House stands by its “scientists.”
—Dams in distress. In Siskiyou County, Ore., local officials and residents announced last week that it intends to sue Salazar and Team Obama over their potential removal of dams on the Klamath River. Once again, the administration’s systematic disregard for sound science and the rule of law is in the spotlight.
Salazar is expected to make a decision by the end of March on environmentalists’ demands that four private hydroelectric dams be demolished to protect salmon habitats and “create” demolition and habitat restoration jobs. Opponents say Salazar has already predetermined the outcome. Green activists blithely ignore the massive taxpayer costs (an estimated half-billion dollars) and downplay the environmental destruction the dam removals would impose. GOP Rep. Tom McClintock put it most charitably: “To tear down four perfectly good hydroelectric dams at enormous cost is insane.”
People of faith aren’t what’s bedeviling America. Blame the high voodoo priests of eco-destruction in Washington who have imposed a green theocracy on us all. Science be damned.
Speaking of fakery, at Scientific American, a presumably “liberal” columnist explores Peter Gleick’s recent immolation, and works hard to talk himself into believing that lying to advance the right left cause is perfectly justified. After hemming and hawing over the philosophical pros and cons, here’s his conclusion:
Kant said that when judging the morality of an act, we must weigh the intentions of the actor. Was he acting selfishly, to benefit himself, or selflessly, to help others? By this criterion, Gleick’s lie was clearly moral, because he was defending a cause that he passionately views as righteous. Gleick, you might say, is a hero comparable to Daniel Ellsberg, the military analyst who in 1971 stole and released documents that revealed that U.S. officials lied to justify the war in Vietnam.
But another philosopher my students and I are reading, the utilitarian John Stuart Mill, said that judging acts according to intentions is not enough. We also have to look at consequences. And if Gleick’s deception has any consequences, they will probably be harmful. His exposure of the Heartland Institute’s plans, far from convincing skeptics to reconsider their position, will probably just confirm their suspicions about environmentalists. Even if Gleick’s lie was morally right, it was strategically wrong.
I’ll give the last word to one of my students. The Gleick incident, he said, shows that the “debate” over global warming is not really a debate any more. It’s a war, and when people are waging war, they always lie for their cause.
Umm, if it’s “a war,” who are you at war with? God? Mother Nature? Your fellow man who disagrees with you? If it’s the latter, does that man that violence is justified in the name of “war?” The “moral equivalent of war” argument has been used to justify a century’s worth of bad decisions by the left. But if you’ve shaved off the first three words of that formula, who will you attack next?
Of course, as the old cliché goes, truth is the first casualty of war. Even eco-war, I guess. But perhaps what’s relatively new are members of the left who are willing to publicly admit they’re lying, as we explored in 2010, when a member of the Journalist, the self-described “non-official campaign” to elect Obama in 2008 tweeted:
As I noted back then, legacy media house organ Editor & Publisher ran a piece in 2007 that advocated similar tactics for the man-made global warming crowd titled “Climate Change: Get Over Objectivity, Newspapers.”
Not to mention former CBS anchorman Dan Rather telling Bill O’Reilly back in 2001 that “I think you can be an honest person and lie about any number of things:”
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Bill O’Reilly: “I want to ask you flat out, do you think President Clinton’s an honest man?”
Dan Rather: “Yes, I think he’s an honest man.”
O’Reilly: “Do you, really?”
Rather: “I do.”
O’Reilly: “Even though he lied to Jim Lehrer’s face about the Lewinsky case?”
Rather: “Who among us has not lied about something?”
O’Reilly: “Well, I didn’t lie to anybody’s face on national television. I don’t think you have, have you?”
Rather: “I don’t think I ever have. I hope I never have. But, look, it’s one thing – “
O’Reilly: “How can you say he’s an honest guy then?”
Rather: “Well, because I think he is. I think at core he’s an honest person. I know that you have a different view. I know that you consider it sort of astonishing anybody would say so, but I think you can be an honest person and lie about any number of things.”
— Exchange on Fox News Channel’s The O’Reilly Factor, May 15, 2001.
And former Democrat Congressman Paul Kanjorski of Pennsylvania, who lost his reelection bid in 2010, telling his constituents in 2008 this his party lied to take back Congress in 2006:
“I’ll tell you my impression. We really in this last election, when I say we…the Democrats, I think pushed it as far as we can to the end of the fleet, didn’t say it, but we implied it. That if we won the Congressional elections, we could stop the war. Now anybody was a good student of Government would know that wasn’t true. But you know, the temptation to want to win back the Congress, we sort of stretched the facts…and people ate it up.”
Video here:
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Back in 2004, Thomas Sowell said:
There’s something Eric Hoffer said: “Intellectuals cannot operate at room temperature.” There always has to be a crisis–some terrible reason why their superior wisdom and virtue must be imposed on the unthinking masses. It doesn’t matter what the crisis is. A hundred years ago it was eugenics. At the time of the first Earth Day a generation ago, the big scare was global cooling, a big ice age. They go from one to the other. It meets their psychological needs and gives them a reason for exercising their power.
And justifying lying. Fortunately, then and now, the American public as a whole are much smarter than the nature fakers, and as Steve Hayward writes in the Weekly Standard, they don’t much like being bullied:
The Gleick episode exposes again a movement that disdains arguing with its critics, choosing demonization over persuasion and debate. A confident movement would face and crush its critics if its case were unassailable, as it claims. The climate change fight doesn’t even rise to the level of David and Goliath. Heartland is more like a David fighting a hundred Goliaths. Yet the serial ineptitude of the climate campaign shows that a tiny David doesn’t need to throw a rock against a Goliath who swings his mighty club and only hits himself square in the forehead.
Oh say, almost forgot. If it really is a war as Scientific America claims, if the American people want it concluded bad enough, it can be over — or at least the fighting by the aggressors greatly reduced — by Christmas:
“There’s something Eric Hoffer said: “Intellectuals cannot operate at room temperature.” There always has to be a crisis–some terrible reason why their superior wisdom and virtue must be imposed on the unthinking masses. It doesn’t matter what the crisis is. A hundred years ago it was eugenics. At the time of the first Earth Day a generation ago, the big scare was global cooling, a big ice age. They go from one to the other. It meets their psychological needs and gives them a reason for exercising their power.”
that’s putting it mildly. Exercising power is supposed to good because, as we all know, or are all supposed to know, exercise is good for you. This is more like a completely false premise used as the pretext, the causus belli if one will, for the abuse of power.
As is pointed out above, none of this is to solve any problem that has been established as such, but for the “environmentalist” audience to soak it up on faith, served up (via lies) from the ‘nature fakers’ under the pretention of serving the faith, but it is not, it is the means to usurp more and more power, for the sake of it, to eliminate opposition where it arises from any human or scientific sourse of data. And exterminate and depopulate all these villains of the nature myth, as John Holdren has envisioned in his published papers. http://zombietime.com/john_holdren/
“It’s a war, and when people are waging war, they always lie for their cause.”
Actually, they shoot guns. If you would like to go there, my guess is you will be obliged.
I should presume you are addressing the professor being quoted?
Sherman, why should they shoot guns? They are getting what they want by ignoring the law as it suits them.
I had been a subscriber to Scientific American since I was eight years old, last year I stopped my subscription due to SA’s rabid global warming blindness to solar forced climate cycles….watch out for sunspot cycle 25 and get a warm overcoat!
“A hundred years ago it was eugenics. At the time of the first Earth Day a generation ago, the big scare was global cooling, a big ice age. They go from one to the other. It meets their psychological needs and gives them a reason for exercising their power.”
Don’t forget, we had acid rain and the ozone hole between global freezing and global warming. I figure this is about one major environmental scare per decade. Long enough for people to realize that all the disastrous consequences are not materializing, so the environmentalists quietly move on to the next big thing. It is disheartening that people haven’t caught on tpo their scams.
Oh, I think there is already a replacement when global warming is no longer profitable. Global dimming is already being blamed for the current trend of no warming this past decade.
Don’t forget the emergency critically important issue of the “rain forest” being destroyed at a rate of a zillion acres per nanosecond in South America.
Around this same period the left found time to whine about the supposed problem of zillions of homeless people and zillions of other people who somehow couldn’t read.
I think that some of this driven by parasitic non-profit groups whose existence depends upon government grants to “solve” or “address” these overblown issues. They latch onto a new scam to claim is the critical issue of they day and the feds throw money at them for it. Later they switch to another scam.
Problem with telling lies all the time, as the Democrats and their enablers are so comfortable doing, is that lies conflict with reality. The lies are exposed, and people see the liars for what they are: con-artists, pushing a case for their personal benefit when the case not only has no merit, but when it is positively opposed to the victims’ interest. What kind of moral midgets think this kind of conduct is appropriate? Children who never grew up; ignoramuses who don’t know any better; and ruthless totalitarians, like Obama, who work to plant their boot on our necks before we realize, too late, what their game is. The gangsters promoting this lying garbage are public enemies. At some point it behooves normal people to hold them accountable.
Just to be clear, the “you” referenced is the professor being quoted?
Arguments based on unproven assumptions are bad arguments. A change in the assumption leads to a completely different conclusion. Pretending you’re assumption is fact is intellectually dishonest. We cannot know with any certainty anybody’s intentions. Even our own. People lie and justify those lies by cowardly excusing themselves because of their good intentions. IOW, they believe their own lies. A lie, more often than not, is fabricated to protect ones self from the consequences of the truth. The biggest lie is the one we tell ourselves to justify our moral failings.
“I think you can be an honest person and lie about any number of things.”
This pretty much sums up my problem with the Dems since my early twenties. They are always play both sides of the issue depending whats most convenient at the time.
Unfortunately I have seen people I normally respect actually defend Gleick’s actions. I visit the blog of a semi-famous astronomer a lot. This astronomer is also known for his work in the (general) skeptic community. On AGW though, he has a blind spot. When talking about the latest Gleick revelation for instance, he “wasn’t sure” Gleick did anything wrong.
What people like this fail to understand (aside from the legal issue of doing the kind of things that got Kevin Mitnick serious jail time) is that “the ends justifies the means” works both ways. I’m sure the folks at Heartland believe just as strongly about their cause as Gleick believes in his. So crossing the ethical line to get (or just plain manufacture it)information about their opponents (like the astronomer, for instance) would seem to be justified. Of course it isn’t, but if you follow the logic being used to defend Gleick, that’s where it leads.
In the end, we are not talking about real (or the moral equivalent of) war. Heartland doesn’t really have any plans for world domination, nor are they the instrument of some satanic influence. They are just a group of people who do not share Gleick’s certainty about AGW, nor do they think much of his proposed cures for it. Apparently Gleick and his fellow travelers are incapable of dealing with a difference of opinion as anything less than an act of war. Sad really.
I was a regular poster at BAUT for years, achieving “KiloPI” status. I quit going there over a year ago for that exact reason.
Robert Heinlein: There are hidden contradictions in the minds of people who “love Nature” while deploring the “artificialities” with which “Man has spoiled ‘Nature.’” The obvious contradiction lies in their choice of words, which imply that Man and his artifacts are not part of “Nature” — but beavers and their dams are. But the contradictions go deeper than this prima-facie absurdity. In declaring his love for a beaver dam (erected by beavers for beavers’ purposes) and his hatred for dams erected by men (for the purposes of men) the Naturist reveals his hatred for his own race — i.e., his own self-hatred.
In the case of “Naturists” such self-hatred is understandable; they are such a sorry lot. But hatred is too strong an emotion to feel toward them; pity and contempt are the most they rate.
As for me, willy-nilly I am a man, not a beaver, and H. sapiens is the only race I have or can have. Fortunately for me, I like being part of a race made up of men and women — it strikes me as a fine arrangement — and perfectly “natural” Believe it or not, there were “Naturists” who opposed the first flight to old Earth’s Moon as being “unnatural” and a “despoiling of Nature.”
“‘Kant said that when judging the morality of an act, we must weigh the intentions of the actor. Was he acting selfishly, to benefit himself, or selflessly, to help others? By this criterion, Gleick’s lie was clearly moral, because he was defending a cause that he passionately views as righteous.’”
This guy has students? Anyone who’s sat through a survey course on modern philosophy knows that Kant was the guy who thought you must not lie, even to a murderer in search of his intended victim.
And people on planet Kant, who think moral judgments are categorical, just don’t use metaphors like “weigh”.
A good name to drop, though.
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