Malthusian Terrorist Product of a Green Climate of Hate?

The good news is that yesterday's Malthusian terror attack on the Discovery Channel headquarters ended with only the death of the perpetrator, James Jay Lee. But what motivated this assault?

It's long been a trope of the Left that the "rightwing" rhetoric is inciting unstable people to violence. Maybe. But surely, in this case, there can be little doubt that environmentalist rhetoric inspired this act of violence. We don't know, but did Lee come across such rhetoric as that deployed by environmentalist radical Paul Watson, founder and president of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, who unapologetically refers to humanity as the "AIDS of the Earth"? Watson has lots more to say:

Humans are presently acting upon this body in the same manner as an invasive virus with the result that we are eroding the ecological immune system.

A virus kills its host and that is exactly what we are doing with our planet's life support system. We are killing our host the planet Earth.

I was once severely criticized for describing human beings as being the "AIDS of the Earth." I make no apologies for that statement. Our viral like behaviour can be terminal both to the present biosphere and ourselves. We are both the pathogen and the vector. But we also have the capability of being the anti-virus if only we can recognize the symptoms and address the disease with effective measures of control.

So what's Watson's goal?

We need to radically and intelligently reduce human populations to fewer than one billion….

Who should have children? Those who are responsible and completely dedicated to the responsibility which is actually a very small percentage of humans….

The result of "re-wilding the planet" would be:

We should not be living in human communities that enclose tiny preserved ecosystems within them. Human communities should be maintained in small population enclaves within linked wilderness ecosystems. No human community should be larger than 20,000 people and separated from other communities by wilderness areas. Communication systems can link the communities.

In other words, people should be placed in parks within ecosystems instead of parks placed in human communities. We need vast areas of the planet where humans do not live at all and where other species are free to evolve without human interference….

All consumption should be local. No food products need to be transported over hundreds of miles to market. All commercial fishing should be abolished. If local communities need to fish the fish should be caught individually by hand.

Watson ends with this rather chilling prescription:

Curing a body of cancer requires radical and invasive therapy, and therefore, curing the biosphere of the human virus will also require a radical and invasive approach.

Ecoterrorist James Lee didn't need a tinfoil hat to tune in to incendiary anti-human screeds. He could easily find them being promoted by prominent environmentalist leaders.

And here's a delicious bit of irony for you: The Discovery Channel's Animal Planet broadcasts Whale Wars which is a series valorizing none other than Paul Watson.