July 5, 2002

By John Orendt John HI-LP@despammed.com  The Hawaii Reporter 111 Hekili Street, Suite A, #240 Kailua, Hawaii 96734 U.S.A. 808-864-0621 Fax: 808-637-1248 To submit a Letter to the Editor: Malia@Hawaiireporter.com

I heard on the radio [that] the Greenies have been receiving a lot of abusive telephone calls. They are being blamed for the destruction of life and property caused by the fires.

The locals usually prevent big fires in the dry season by burning off the land periodically before the dry season. This creates natural fire breaks, which prevents uncontrollable big fires during the dry season. If you include the aboriginal people, they have been burning off for over 10,000 years.

In the spring time a friend of mine named Jack, who owns a property, had pruned and collected the dead wood from his property into a huge pile in a clearing. He contacted his friend Mike of the local fire department and asked him to organize the squad for a practice fire. Mike informed Jack that due to new laws pushed through by the Greenies it would be illegal to burn the pile of wood and that he should bury it. It seems that property owners can't be trusted to control a fire they start on their own land.

Jack told me that about two weeks later lightning had hit the pile of wood and it burned up. Wasn't it lucky that a naturally occurring fire didn't spread.

So far the uncontrolled fires in the western U.S. have consumed a land area over a million acres, destroying not only wildlife habitat, but, in addition over 133 families have lost their homes At its height, the blaze forced 30,000 people to flee their homes. Many residents have returned -- some to find their homes destroyed. But firefighters managed to save thousands of residences.

The Greenies through political power (policemen's guns against a largely unarmed public) have prevented land owners from burning off their own land. The situation is even worse on public land. (Virtually no public land being burned off.)

The Greenies justification for this stupidity is burning off will reduce wildlife habitat -- which it does only temporarily. The Greenies don't seem to be concerned with wildlife habitat being destroyed by the huge fires currently blazing out of control.

I don't blame the Greenies for the fires. I blame them for the loss of lives and property. The Greenies, through the use of force-backed law, prevented or made it more difficult for private individuals and government to take steps to protect lives and property. The doctrine of intrinsic value is why the Greenies do what they do.

Greenies hold that nature has intrinsic value, which means nature has value independent of its relationship with man or even the existence of man.

The concept of value presupposes the attribute of reason. Only man has the attribute of reason. Therefore, all things can only have value relative to man.

Some people do not see the logic of the above statement. It makes sense if your ethics are the same as mine.

Ethics asks the question: What is good? My answer: That which promotes and/or enhances individual human life is good. The life of man is an end in itself and not a means to an end. Man has an inalienable right to his own life. From this right it can be deduced that man has a right to property produced by himself.

Once again, Greenies hold that nature has intrinsic value, which means nature has value independent of its relationship with man or even the existence of man.

Man's life as the standard of value implies that all things can only have value relative to man. This is the concept that the doctrine of intrinsic value seeks to destroy.

Greenies answer on ethics would be: Nature untouched by man is good.

This answer can be arrived at using inductive logic. You start with a lot of policies that the Greenies advocate and see that they are consistent with the above ethic as a premise. For even more concrete proof of this see the references.

Let us not forget that nature untouched by man is a jungle: jungle n. 1. wild land overgrown with dense vegetation, esp. in the tropics. 2. a scene of violence or ruthless competition.

The doctrine of intrinsic value inexorably implies a desire to destroy man and his works because it implies a perception of man as the systematic destroyer of the good (nature untouched by man), and thus as the systematic doer of evil. Man is the rational being. It is the application of his reason in the form of science, technology, and an industrial civilization that enables him to act on nature on the enormous scale on which he now does. Thus, it is his possession and use of reason -- manifested in his science and technology -- for which he is hated. The doctrine of intrinsic value is itself only a rationalization for a pre-existing hatred of man.

As further illustration of the evil state of mind of Greenies are these two quotes:

"We have wished, we ecofreaks, for a disaster or for a social change to come and bomb us into Stone Age, where we might live like Indians in our valley, with our localism, our appropriate technology, our gardens, our homemade religion -- guilt-free at last!"- Stewart Brand (writing in the Whole Earth Catalogue)

"If you want to live in the stone age that's your right. Don't use force to drag me down with you." -Prince Philip of the United Kingdom, leader of the World Wildlife Fund, stated that, were he to be reincarnated, he would wish to return as a "killer virus to lower human population levels."

The evil blatantly admits its hatred of man.

Evil, such as the doctrine of intrinsic value, needs the cooperation of the good to disguise its nature and to gain numbers and influence it could never achieve on it's own. Thus, the doctrine of intrinsic value needs to be mixed as much as possible with alleged concern for man's life and well being. In allowing themselves to participate in advancing the cause of the mixture, otherwise good people serve to promote the doctrine of intrinsic value and thus the destruction of human values.

In sum, the people need to be shown how the actual nature of the environmental movement is that of a virulent pest, consistently coming between man and the work he must do to sustain and improve his life.

If and when such an understanding develops on the part of the people, it will be possible to accomplish the appropriate remedy. This would include the repeal of every law and regulation in any way tainted by the doctrine of intrinsic value.

The real life result of this evil doctrine is fires raging out of control destroying human life and property.

This argument is based in part on excerpts from "The Toxicity of Environmentalism" by George Reisman.

John Orendt is a Vice Chair of the Libertarian Party of Hawaii, webmaster http://www.hi.lp.org and newsletter editor. He is often at the state Legislature testifying on issues key to liberty, privacy and the free market. He owns his own computer consultant business.

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