Interview: Author Elizabeth Nickson Discusses her new book, Eco-Fascists
Jonah Goldberg brought H.G. Wells’ meme of “Liberal Fascism” out of the memory hole of the 1930s and into the 21st century, and as he noted, environmentalism has long been a key component of that ideology. Veteran journalist Elizabeth Nickson, who was the European Bureau chief of Life magazine, in addition to contributing to Time, the Guardian, Vogue, Harper’s and numerous other MSM magazines, which typically have at least one boilerplate “green”-themed issue a year, found that out the hard way, hence the title of her new book, Eco-Fascists: How Radical Conservationists Are Destroying Our Natural Heritage:
An investigative reporter documents the destructive impact of the environmental movement in North America and beyond.
When journalist Elizabeth Nickson sought to subdivide her twenty-eight acres on Salt Spring Island in the Pacific Northwest, she was confronted by the full force and power of the radical conservationists who had taken over the local zoning council. She soon discovered that she was not free to do what she wanted with her land, and that in the view of these arrogant stewards it wasn’t really hers at all. Nickson’s long, frustrating, and eyeopening encounter with these zealots started her on a journey to investigate and expose the hugely destructive impact of the environmental movement on ordinary people and communities across North America—and the world.
What she discovered is shocking. Forty million Americans have been driven from their land, and rural culture is being systematically crushed, even as wildlife, forests, and rangelands are dying. In Eco-Fascists, Nickson explores how environmental radicals have taken over government agencies at the local, state, and federal levels. The result? A wholesale sequestration of forest, range, and water—more than 40 percent of North America—impoverishing us all, especially the most vulnerable. This confiscation of America’s natural heritage is a major factor contributing to our current economic decline; until it is acknowledged and addressed, our economy will not recover.
Nickson traces the tens of billions of dollars environmental nonprofits marshal every year to promote the notion that our essential natural systems are collapsing, and finds, in a brutal example of self-fulfilling prophesy, that their corrupted science is desertifying the heartland. She visits once-thriving communities that are turning to ghost towns because environmental legislation has forced mines, ranches, and mills to close and has forbidden critical forest, range, park, and wilderness maintenance.
Eco-Fascists exposes the major fallacies of the environmental movement—from wildlife protection to zoning to forest-fire management—and introduces us to the individuals who are fighting back. Fast-paced, highly accessible, and sure to be controversial, this is a work that will change the national conversation about environmental protection and its impact.
Some of the topics we discuss include:
- How does eco-fascism prey on the citizens in the hinterlands of western states such as California, Washington, and Oregon?
- What is eco-fascism’s impact on the logging industry?
- What is the relationship between eco-fascism and Obama’s crony corporatism?
- Will California’s cap and trade program finish off state’s already moribund economy?
- For those of us who haven’t drunk the green Kool-Aid, is there any hope for the future?
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OT, but re your comment at Instapundit, today, FDR was not in office in 1929. That was Hoover.
Better tell Joe Biden that!
Apparently #1 was not doing too much reading a month ago when Biden made that GAFFE about FDR and the 1929 crash.
Here’s a HotAir link
http://hotair.com/archives/2008/09/23/biden-on-fdrs-management-of-the-1929-crash/
You’re right. I missed that one.
Hoover was plugging his vacuum cleaners on tv in 1929.
For information, Saltspring Island is in the Province of British Columbia, Canada.
Salt Spring Island is, indeed, part of British Columbia. The Pacific Northwest does not, as it happens, end at the Canadian border.
The ecoactivist community has “renamed” the entirity of the region’s waters as the “Salish Sea” instead of the Strait of Juan de Fuca, the Georgia Strait, the Admiralty Inlet, and the Puget Sound, kind of scrubbing provincial, state, and international borders off the map.
Many of us who live in the area are less than amused.
Renaming, rewritting, and redefining is fundamental to the marxist theology of power and control. He who owns the language owns the culture… If you can define it, you can control it. What is missing in the construct is the outcome. Just because you can define it and control it does not matter a bit if in the process of doing so renders the outcome useless. Which of course is a shining example of the democrat policy makers as of today.
Saltspring Island is in Canada, Province of British Columbia.
Apologize for the double post – I thought my comment had disappeared into the infamous PJMedia comment swallowing abyss.
I wish someone would write an article on how the EPA and energy demands by governments have ruined our major appliances! Do not buy a dishwasher these days! Absolute junk.
I was thinking along the same lines when Obama was bragging about his new fuel efficiency standards in the last debate, claiming they “double” mileage and more or less saying that high gas prices didn’t matter because of increased efficiency.
And what kind of cars can go 40+ miles on a gallon of gas?
1.Tiny four cylinder weed-eater sh*t boxes of the kind prevalent in Europe
2.Hybrids whose batteries do more to damage the environment than help it and whose costs either price them out of the range of most consumers or require government subsidization.
I’m sorry but you can’t make a decently powerful truck or SUV, or van capable of carrying a family with current technology that can get that kind of mileage. They’re trying to sweep a major decline in our standard of living under the rug
Oh, and a tip for washing dishes these days:
The EPA banned trisodiumphosphate (TSP) in detergents. TSP was formerly a major component and works exceptionally well at facilitating the removal of grease. Fortunately you can still buy bulk pure TSP at your local hardware store, should come in a cardboard container for a few dollars. Add that to the normal soap in the detergent holder when you run your dishes and you’ll see much better results.
I fear that our current property tax structure will continue to make this situation worse.
For all intents and purposes, none of us really “owns” the land we have purchased, even after paid in full. As long as your occupancy of said land is conditional on paying your property tax, and it is, you really don’t own it. Try not paying your property taxes and eventually, if you are willing to take it this far, the state will show up at your house and forcibly remove you at the point of a gun. You are also, if convicted of tax evasion, likely to be incarcerated.
True ownership of anything can not be predicated on a contractual relationship with your government to pay taxes on the thing owned. What you are really allowed to do is pay free market prices for your land and permanent rent to the government forever. The former you eventually can pay off if you are so inclined to do so, the later can never be paid off.
You can’t have a system that offers the fiction of property ownership, where your fellow citizens will confiscate it from you for failure to pay your taxes and pretend that this doesn’t, at least subtly, enforce the meme that everything is really owned by the state.
To me this is no different than the Federal Government setting up private sector bail outs for corporations which privatize profits while making risk public.
Both have to change if we are to survive as a people truly free with the liberty our founding fathers envisioned.
The Founding Fathers did not envision anarchy. A more limited government than we currently have, especially at the Federal level, but not absolute freedom from all social responsibilty. Roads, schools, police and fire protection are necessary to any society. These have traditionally been provided locally, and paid for by property tax. (Governments do not have their own money, they collect taxes to pay for the services they provide.)
How do you foresee these services being paid for- voluntary donations?
Our founding fathers didn’t institute property taxes. For those things you mention that we need to pay for, there needs to be a form of taxation that doesn’t TOTALLY make a mockery out of our right to own property. As I said, you really don’t own that house you spent 30 years paying off, you merely purchased the right to lease it from the government.
I favor a consumption tax of some sort as opposed to any form of taxation on production or property ownership. Something like the fair tax.
I’ve been pointing this out for years to anyone who would listen.
But, alas, I’m a kook.
Your point seems to be that one never gets anywhere because the government can still take it back on a whim, using brute force (as that is really their only power over you.) All you’ve worked for, all you’ve done. Heck, they can do it now because you call some kid a jerk and he kills himself. You are truly at their mercy.
Now let’s take it one step further: how is this different from slavery, if nothing is ever really yours, and you are not allowed to disagree with the government in any meaningful way?
The basic principle of American government, as founded, is that we wanted and required the least government consistent with good order. Those men knew that the more government interfered, the worse off we would be.
In order to find the proper balance, they based government power on the consent of the governed. Anything beyond the merest defense and order was to be optional. In other words, one could choose to opt out of things one didn’t care to participate in, as long as the country wasn’t in mortal peril. Sometimes, even then. A man at his home, after he paid for it, could forage or farm and thereby survive without government, unless Goths came along, which hardly ever happens anymore. Luckily, the IRS have taken over their former role. Lucky us.
Thus, the draft riots during the Civil War. Even Great Britain didn’t have conscription until WWI (and rioting occurred there, as well. One might be tricked into the British Army, but one had to JOIN (taking the King’s shilling)). WE started it in the Civil War, because we needed meat. For the guns.
Paying taxes for the roads has never been a serious issue. Paying taxes so Moochelle and her brats, along with the douchebag-in-chief, can fly around pretending they’re royalty while screwing the country blind does not come under “mortal danger to the Republic”!
Stop buying this “roads and bridges” BS. That’s one thing we’re not spending two cents on, except to grease Union voters and government workers. One trillion per year deficit=one trillion per year welfare. A happy coincidence, NO? The bridges and roads are falling down, yet these scum lie about, good for nothing. We are charging a trillion dollars a year to our imaginary uncle, with no plan to pay it back. So they can par-tee!
Slaves used to work and not get paid. Welfare queens get paid to do no work. Some effin’ slaves. They sell crack and run scams in their spare time, which is all they have. You and I pay for it, one way or another. Even if they have to beat it out of us.
Anarchy is looking better and better.
“Roads, schools, police and fire protection are necessary to any society”
But who says the government must supply these and without being held to a reasonable standard of performance and efficiency? Roads and schools can be paid for by use fees. Police and fire protection if spread evenly and fairly over a population should never cost so much that a citizen cannot afford to keep his/her own property. There are better and fairer ways to run a society.
I would like the hordes of urban intellectuals, who pungle up annual billions to fund ‘environmental’ NGOs, to try running an ordinary farm for a year, and see if the decisions you must make, in providing your compatriots with enough to eat, don’t bring you to or across the line of environmental felonies.
Even normal maintenance becomes a nightmare. Repairing an essential item, which was legal when your parents built it, now becomes an anguishing debate: do you invest thousands of dollars and months or years of time in a hostile permitting process which might well result in denial, or do you simply grind your teeth and do the job clandestinely, knowing full well that fines or confiscations or jail time are a likely future if your work is discovered?
Urban imperialism has been accurately described as the treating of rural land as conquered territory by said urban intellectuals – who are generations removed from the practical aspects of their groceries.
Where’s the NGO for agricultural common sense?
I remember reading not long ago (a year or two) of a speech at the University of Texas where the speaker, whom I believe is a professor at said university, maintained that the world is overpopulated and 90% of the population needs to be removed. That’s right — 90%. He was wildly cheered by the audience, according to the report.
Several points worth making here: (1) I’ll bet that neither the speaker nor the wildly cheering audience plan on being part of the 90%; (2) This is the ultimate goal of the radical environmental, or Eco-Fascist, movement; (3)This movement is pretty much in lock step with the Progressive movement as constituted today.
Be scared. Be very scared.
The struggle for dominance by the city over the country goes back to the beginnings of the republic. That was Jefferson’s beef with Hamilton. That was what the Civil War was about. It is always about a transfer of wealth from the minority in the countryside to the majority in the city and the only defense is the right to property, that is, the liberty to do with your body, your mind, and your property as you will.
The deep “intellectual” roots of all eco-fascist are found in this movement:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-primitivism
If anyone wishes to trace the origins, as well as the endgame, of these eco-thugs, (s)he must understand the dark ideological premises these morons draw their hardcore environmental militancy.
Reminds me of DiLorenzo’s take on the “Watermelon” summit.
http://lewrockwell.com/dilorenzo/dilorenzo230.html
I am at a university with an Environmental Studies Faculty, with an Environmental Studies Program. This faculty, and its program, do not offer or require courses in biology, chemistry, physics – necessary for the study of ecology, The students learn only how to be active in politics. I had students in this program in a course I taught “Man and Nature” (no PC called “Environmental Ethics”). They wrote a complaint about the course to my department chairman, and when I asked about their objection, it was that there was “too much biology.” ( Of course, if they had not liked the course, they could have dropped it, but their aim was only to get me fired.) The leader of the gang, incidentally, did not know that flowers reproduce sexually.
So the putative “environmentalists,” according to my experience, are ignoramuses whose only goal is political power.
Once you see the moral and cultural destruction visited upon our once-fine country (and 96.6% of the population)by approximately 3.4% of the population, then you’ll realize that democracy ain’t how we roll any more.
Gallup, once again, confirmed that LGBT citizens make up 3.4%, yet they insist, nay DEMAND that we kowtow to them, and obey every sick little unjust thing they demand. THAT is why I hate them. They can shag sheep, goats, or pickle vats, as far as I care, but who in hell made you bastards in charge?
WE DID! By listening to their stupid bullshit and accepting it as fact!
Stop listening. Start fighting back. They mean you DEATH.
Don’t respond like wimp.
There just aren’t that many greenies out there, yet politicians fear them. Time we made them FEAR US!
Democracy, free enterprise, and individual rights are all very fine, but now that the survival of the planet is at stake we just can’t afford it. Time to install a global government of progressive elites to ensure that the world’s resources are distributed in a just and sustainable manner.
You know, it’s hard to satirize the eco-fascists. I thought the above would be over the top, but it comes out rather moderate compared to some of their stuff.
The ecology movement is a lot like a religion to many of its adherents, with our western high standard of living filling the role of “original sin”. If somebody came up with a safe source of fusion power that could sustain increasing standards of living indefinitely a lot of them would probably be against it. Their ultimate goal is to reduce affluent westerners to the status of third world peasants to atone for our “sins”.
Many environmentalists will even agree that their steps can not be fully realized in a democratic society. The only way to reduce emissions to the levels they desire is to slash energy consumption in a manner that would cripple our standard of living. A democracy won’t allow this because the party that promises to sweep away the regulations and restore the living standard will eventually win when the pain becomes deep enough. Every drop of oil in the ground today will eventually be extracted and burned by somebody, the only way to stop this is via an autocratic society like in China. They frequently laud China’s one child policy as a model for the world. This should tell everyone something about the kind of government they want running the world.
“If it be agaist reason, it cannot be the law”. So wrote Sir Edward Coke, a noted English jurist and sometime attorney-genera, about 400 years ago. Exactly the same comments can be made about the eco-fascits – or “Deep Greens”, as they are also called – today. Eco-fascism is first and foremost a religion which insists on the deification of mature.
The particular examples that Ms Nickson enumerated sound shocking enough. A further problem arises: how do you propagate even reasoned criticism of the received orthodoxy? In practice, no matter how obvious the facts you cite, no matter how experimentally demonstrable, far too much of the media simply will not allow it air time or nes space, unless the received orthodoxy is allowed to effectively make it of no effect.
Here in Britain I notice this. “Global warming” is asserted as an established fact, and the whipping bo is always carbon dioxide(CO2). Mo-one mentions three indisputable facts about CO2:-
1. it is denser than air(so even when it comes out of jet exhausts it sinks to groubd level;
2. It is water-soluble, and so is taken up by rain, through which it can erode limestone and chalk rocks;
3. Most inportant of all, it is taken up by green plants in photosynthesis, with oxygen as a by-product.
Those three are basic high school science, and the kids(or their parents) should raise their doubts at once. Meanwhile, what about methane(CH4)? Not only is that less dense than air, it is 20 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than CO2 is! How is it generated? By anaerobic decomposition of cellulose-based rubbish; that’s why we’re trying to do away with landfill sites, since there have been cases where the methane has oozed up through the soil, and more than one house has been blown up due to explosive mixtures of methane and air being detonated. Unfortunately, one way of dealing with this has been outlawed in England and Wales(but not Scotland). Many an old open fire had a back boiler, by which one could obtain hot water for the bath or for the radiators. It was only two years ago that I learned of this ban when I was having a new gas boiler installed – poor thermal efficiancy, he said. That’s as may be, but it was great for disposing of waste paper and cardboard, and when run on good coal, especially Welsh steam coal, the relulting asg was good for the garden and also(if there had been a freeze-up) for making the roads safe to drive on.
As she sums up, the problem is deskbound planners drawing up plans that destroy livelihoods and which show only too well that they don’t really know a thing they’re so dogmatic about.
“Eco-Fasicists.” Decades of support for green causes followed by a book of enlightenment.
Too little, too late.
Climategate Bombshell: Did U.S. Gov’t Help Hide Climate Data? By Maxim Lott Published December 16, 2011
http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2011/12/16/complicit-in-climategate-doe-under-fire/