Chapter Sixteen:
The Communism Behind Environmentalism (Part I)
Table of Contents
Introduction
1. The Communist Roots of Environmentalism
a. The Three Stages of Environmentalism
b. Environmentalism and Marxism: The Same Roots
c. Ecological Marxism
d. Ecological Socialism
e. Green Politics: Green Is the New Red
f. Eco-Terrorism
g. Greenpeace: Not a Peaceful Story
The Myth of Consensus on Climate Change
a. A Brief History of ‘Consensus’ in Climate Science
b. Establishing Dogma in the Scientific Community
References
Introduction
The earth is the living environment of mankind, providing food, resources, and conditions for development. It has allowed humanity to prosper for thousands of years.
Humanity interacts closely with the natural environment. Both traditional Chinese and Western culture emphasize the benign symbiotic relationship between man and nature. As the ancient Chinese philosopher Dong Zhongshu writes in Luxuriant Dew of the Spring and Autumn Annals, “Everything on earth was created for the benefit of man.” [1] The meaning is that the purpose of the Creator was to offer conditions for humanity to live, and all things on earth may be used by man. At the same time, people must follow the principles of heaven and earth in their lives, and thus use everything in moderation and proactively maintain and safeguard the natural environment in which human beings are to live.
Western traditional culture states that the Creator provides the natural environment for human beings and asks them to manage it. Thus, man should cherish and make good use of the natural environment. In the philosophy of traditional Chinese culture, there is a balance between everything, as well as the imperative to avoid harm. The Confucian Doctrine of the Mean states: “It is this same system of laws by which all created things are produced and develop themselves each in its order and system without injuring one another; that the operations of Nature take their course without conflict or confusion. …” [2]
The Chinese ancients valued protection of the environment. According to historical records, at the time of Yu the Great: “In the three months of the spring, people didn’t take axes to the forest so the forest could flourish. In the three months of the summer, people didn’t put nets to rivers so fishes could breed.” [3]
Zengzi, a Confucian scholar, wrote: “Wood could only be cut down in the right seasons and animals only slaughtered at the right time.” [4] These show the traditional Chinese idea of moderation in all things and of cherishing and protecting the natural environment.
After the industrial revolution, industrial pollution caused severe ecological damage, and Western societies began to become aware of the issue. After environmental protection laws and standards were implemented, pollution was effectively treated, and the environment greatly improved. In the process, public awareness of environmental protection grew enormously, and it was widely acknowledged that environmental protection is a proper goal.
We must distinguish between several ideas: environmental protection, environmental movements, and environmentalism. Environmental protection, as the name indicates, is the protection of the environment. Since the beginning of human civilization, people have understood the need to protect the environment, and this had nothing to do with any particular political ideology.
The environmental movement is a social and political movement for environmental issues. Its primary goal is to change environmental policies and public thinking and habits through mass movements, media influence, and political agitation. Environmentalism is a philosophy and ideology emphasizing the need for protecting the environment and the harmonious coexistence between human society and the natural ecology. The motivations behind environmental protection and environmentalism are not the same as communism — but communists excel at hijacking mass movements and manipulating them to their advantage. Thus we see that from the beginning of modern environmentalism, communists have systematically gone about co-opting the movement.
The issues surrounding environmentalism today are extremely complex: The movement has used sensational rhetoric and people’s genuine desire to protect the environment to create a global political movement. Many participants are well-meaning, have a sense of justice, and truly care about the future of mankind.
However, what many don’t recognize is how communists use environmentalism to claim a moral high ground to promote their own agenda. This is how environmental protection becomes highly politicized, made extreme, and even turned into a pseudo religion — but one without traditional moral foundations. Misleading propaganda and various mandatory political measures have become dominant, turning environmentalism into a kind of communism-lite.
This article will focus on how environmentalism as an ideology has become related to communism, and how the environmentalist movement was hijacked, manipulated, and co-opted into serving the goals of communism, as well as the impact this will bring if unchecked.
1. The Communist Roots of Environmentalism
Communism has made intricate preparations in many fields for the destruction of humanity. Originating in Europe, communism launched violent revolutions and seized power in the two great powers of the East — Russia and China. The communist camp and Western society entered into a long confrontation in the Cold War. After the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Eastern European communist bloc, communists began sowing their factors in both Eastern and Western societies and also sought to establish a tightly controlled global government.
In order to achieve this goal, communism must create or use an “enemy” that threatens all mankind and intimidates the public around the world into handing over both individual liberty and state sovereignty. Creating a global panic about looming environmental and ecological disasters almost appears an inevitable route to achieving this goal.
a. The Three Stages of Environmentalism
The formation and development of the environmental movement is inextricably linked to communism. Specifically, its development has gone through three stages. The first stage is the theoretical gestation period, which can be counted from the publication of the Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels in 1848 to the first Earth Day in 1970.
At the beginning of this stage, Marx and his disciples did not regard environmentalism as the focus of their theoretical discourse, but Marxist atheism and materialism were naturally consistent with the main tendency of environmentalism. Marx declared that capitalism is opposed to nature (that is, the environment). Marx’s disciples devised the term “ecosystem,” and quietly included environmentalism in certain subjects where it was set to ferment.
In the last decade of this phase, from 1960 to 1970, two best-selling books — Silent Spring (1962) and Population Bomb (1968) — appeared in the United States. Environmentalism entered the public arena under the guise of “environmental protection.”
The landmark event at the beginning of the second phase was the first Earth Day held in 1970, with the United Nations shortly after, in 1972, holding the first U.N. Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm. At this stage, a battery of organizations were rapidly formed and their activities increased. In the United States and Europe, they pushed governments with propaganda, protests, and activism under the guise of scientific research, legislation, meetings, and so on.
At the macro level, the counterculture of the 1960s functioned almost like a military parade of communist elements in the West. They took the stage by co-opting the civil rights and anti-war movements, and then quickly spread to other forms of anti-capitalist battles, including the feminist movement, the homosexual movement, and more.
After the 1970s, after the anti-Vietnam war movement ebbed, communist ideas began their process of institutionalization called “the long march through the institutions,” while also flooding into feminism and environmentalism — and this is the root cause of the upsurge in environmentalist ideology and agitation.
One of the most important forces that shouldered the banner of environmentalism in the 1970s were the hippies, the backbone of the counterculture. In fact, communism was in the process of repackaging itself under the banner of environmentalism after its failure in the Cold War, with the intent to introduce global communism under any other name.
The third phase began on the eve of the end of the Cold War. In 1988, the United Nations set up the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and the concept of global warming began to enter the political realm. [5] On the eve of the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990, an international environmental conference was held in Moscow. In his speech, the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, advocated the establishment of an international environmental monitoring system, signed a covenant to protect “unique environmental zones,” expressed support for U.N. environmental programs, and called for a follow-up conference (held in June 1992 in Brazil). [6]
Almost all Western environmentalists accepted these proposals. Global warming became the main enemy of mankind for environmentalists at this stage. Propaganda that used environmental protection as an excuse for heavy-handed policies suddenly escalated, and the number and scale of environmental laws and regulations proliferated rapidly.
[Read more in PDF]
