On no issue has the evidence of my foresight and keen political instincts been more compelling than that of the environment. Come, let us count the ways:
Despite the hysterics of a few pseudo-scientists, there is no reason to believe in global
warming
Mankind is not responsible for depleting the ozone layer
The Earth’s ecosystem is not fragile, and humans are not capable of destroying it
The real enemies of the radical environmental leadership are capitalism & the American way of life
There are more acres of forest land in America today than in 1492
Less-developed cultures are not kinder to nature than technologically sophisticated civilizations. The reverse more often is true
Big-government regulation is not the best way to
protect the environment
Many environmental groups have adopted their cause with all the enthusiasm of a religious crusade, abandoning reason and accepting many faulty premises on faith
Mankind is part of nature and not necessarily the enemy.
Animals have no fundamental rights; only people do
I challenge the fundamental premise of the animal rights movement that animals are superior to human beings. [That premise] is inescapable when you examine the policies they advocate & their invariable preference for the well-being of animals, and their
disregard for humans and their livelihoods. [But] let me make it perfectly clear that my belief that animals have no fundamental rights is not equivalent to saying that human beings have no moral obligation to protect animals when they can. The animal
rights movement knew what it was doing when it deliberately adopted the label “animal rights.” The concept of “rights” is very powerful in the American political lexicon.
Animals often treat each other with no respect, and they have no redress, absent
human intervention on their behalf. Regardless of that, I believe that if people use animals to achieve their goals, they must do so responsibly, so that we don’t eliminate any species from the planet. That would be wantonly stupid and selfish.
Animal rights movement is secular humanism vs. Bible
In my opinion, at the root of the assertion that animals have rights is the belief that animals and men are equal in creation, that man evolved from apes, and that creation is an allegorical myth contained in the Bible. There is no escaping the
connection between secular humanism and animal rights activism.
The Bible teaches that God created man in His own image and that He gave him dominion over animals and nature. God did not create animals in His own image. Even if you reject the Bible as
the Word of God-even if you believe in evolution and disbelieve in creation-you must still admit that man is the only earthly creature capable of rational thought.
Human beings are the primary species on this planet. Animals and everything else are
subspecies whose position is subordinate to that of humans. Humans have a responsibility toward lower species and must treat them humanely. Humanely. Why not treat them animally? Because that would mean killing them.
When there is damage to the environment, there is no one who wants to fix it more than I do. However, I refuse to believe it is necessary to attack the American way of life or to punish the American people for simply being themselves. We don’t have to
punish progress in order to fix the environment.
The key to cleaning up the environment is unfettered free enterprise, our system of reward. The more economic growth we have, the more a prosperous people will demand a cleaner environment.
The poor have other things to worry about.
One of Rush’s Unalterable Laws is that man and the environment can live together in harmony. Capitalism is good for people AND for other living things. Take trees, for example. We have more trees in this
country today than when the Declaration of Independence was written. Today, we put out a lot of fires that used to burn areas the size of Connecticut, and private companies are planting millions of trees on their own land and carefully harvesting them.
Gaia worship is religion of secular environmentalists
The other guests [on a TV talk show] got mad because I wasn’t telling them that because they cared [about environmentalism] that they were automatically good people. It was almost as if I had attacked their religion. In a sense, I had.
Many of these
people have replaced religion with secular environmentalism. Some of them worship the earth goddess Gaia. Their gatherings take on the air of religious revival meetings.
There are two groups of people that have made environmentalism their new home:
socialists and enviro-religious fanatics. With the collapse of Marxism, environmentalism has become the new refuge of socialist thinking. And the second group are the people who believe it is a religion; that God is the earth and that God is nothing more
than the earth. Actually, it is a modern form of pantheism, where nature is divine. This group wants to preserve the earth at all costs. They want to roll us back, maybe not to the Stone Age, but at least to the horse-and-buggy era.
I once asked a long-haired maggot-infested FM-type environmentalist wacko: “Would you say the owl has evolved to a superior position over the mouse?” He answered, “Oh yeah, man, an owl can fly, he sees at night.”
So I have the environmentalist in a
corner: “So it is not the responsibility of the mouse to adapt to the potential threat of the owl?” “Oh yeah, man, but that’s nature.” Well, there you have it, I told him. If the owl can’t adapt to the superiority of humans, screw it. If a spotted owl
can’t adapt, does the earth really need that particular species so much that hardship to human beings is worth enduring in the process of saving it? Thousands of species that roamed the earth are now extinct.
Of course, we do care about owls.
Why isn’t it possible for both of us to coexist in harmony? There’s no reason to put the timber business out of commission just because of 2,200 pairs of one kind of owl [at the expense of] 30,000 jobs. That’s the wrong set of priorities.
