Terrorising Our Kids for Gaia
Fear-mongering about the environment is not new. And using our classrooms to terrorise our kids about supposed environmental catastrophes is not new either. The people doing the terrorising may have good intentions, but they often have hidden agendas as well.
Back in the 80s, for example, when the Cold War was still raging, our classrooms were often used by radical social engineers to convince our school children that a nuclear winter was just around the corner. In the name of “peace studies,” our kids received steady doses of anti-war, anti-nuclear and anti-Western propaganda.
Indeed, things got so bad that Herbert London penned a book in 1984 entitled, Why Are They Lying To Our Children? In this volume London documented how our educational institutions – from kindergarten to graduate school – were painting a bleak and misleading picture of the future.
Schools were full of gloom and doom warnings about environmental disaster and the need to limit economic growth. There were dire prophecies about over-population, worldwide famine, and irreparable pollution. Coupled with this scare campaign was a strong anti-technology, anti-growth, anti-business and anti-capitalism ideology.
Today things are no different. Sure, the actual peril may have changed (thirty years ago we were being warned about global cooling, while today it is global warming), but the anti-Western agenda is still firmly in place. And our kids are still being assaulted with fear-mongering to get them to comply with the radical agendas.
An appalling example of this can be found on our tax-payer funded ABC. On the ABC website is something called Planet Slayer, which is designed for young children. Planet Slayer helps kids calculate their carbon footprint, warning them of how long before their emissions will kill Gaia. But it is not just how long planet earth has, but how long our kids have, before they die: “Use our greenhouse calculator to find out when you should die!” it proudly urges our kids.
How’s that for shaking up our kids? Hey, let’s just strike a little fear and terror into their little hearts and minds – after all, we gotta save the planet, don’t we? Who cares how many little kids have to be terrorised along the way.
But the ABC thinks it’s really cool. According to press accounts, “ABC managing director Mark Scott said the site had been developed to ‘appeal to children and it’s been done in an irreverent way . . . to make it engaging’.” But not everyone thinks it is such a brilliant idea. Child psychologists, for example, have blasted the site.
Child psychologist Dr Michael Carr-Gregg said parents should ensure their children “avoid the site at all costs. It is absolutely ridiculous and clearly inappropriate. You have to ask yourself, ‘What would be the purpose of inducing such a high level of guilt on kids?’ This site has the potential to do significant damage to vulnerable children.”
And some politicians are not too thrilled about the concept either. “Victorian Liberal Senator Mitch Fifield asked if it was appropriate for a website meant for children to depict average Australians as ‘massive, overweight, ugly pigs, oozing slime from their mouths, and then to have these pigs blow up in a mass of blood and guts’.”
But it seems that anything goes for our environmental jihadists. If terrorising kids is what it takes, then so be it. But such green extremism is par for the course. The radical greens have always felt that their cause is too important to let minor things like the well-being of children get in the way.
Indeed, minor things like people also must be sacrificed for the greater good of Gaia. Consider the new book by Gaia prophet James Lovelock, The Revenge of Gaia. In the book he argues that our “primary obligation is to the living Earth. Humankind comes second”. And he proposes some pretty draconian steps to rescue Gaia.
In a scathing review of this book, Professor Anne Barbeau Gardiner examines the culture of death philosophy that is so much a part of Gaia theory and deep ecology. Her review is well worth reading. But here I just reprint one of her closing paragraphs:
“Gaia Theory and Deep Ecology are two handmaids of the Culture of Death. Their precursor was the eugenics movement of a century ago that imposed birth control and forced sterilization on the supposedly ‘unfit.’ Today an artificially created panic about ecological catastrophe, derived from Gaia Theory and Deep Ecology, lies behind a seemingly unstoppable movement for sterile sex by way of birth control, sterilization, chemical and surgical abortions, homosexuality, and the infanticide of newborns (called ‘infant euthanasia’). Deep ecologists and Gaia theorists try to terrify us with environmental degradation in order to pursue their main program – population control. For even when their prophecies of doom prove to be false or exaggerated, these zealots immediately point to another imminent disaster and call for man to reduce his numbers.”
Gloom and doom fear-mongering, aimed even at very young children, is part of the radical environmentalists’ agenda of getting us to refashion the world in their image. In the name of saving the planet, they are quite happy to terrorise our children and kill off big hunks of our population.
Anne Barbeau Gardiner is right to conclude, “History shows that none are more fanatical than those on the march to Utopia. The Gaia theorists and the Deep Ecology zealots are certainly marching lockstep right now toward their imagined paradise. The mirage they have in view is one with so few people left on the planet that their great goal will finally be achieved – the total ‘noninterference’ of man with the wilderness of the Earth. What a dismal, misanthropic idea of paradise!”
http://www.abc.net.au/science/planetslayer/
http://www.newoxfordreview.org/reviews.jsp?did=0608-gardiner
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Wow that is disturbing. I know awareness is important, but I can see your point at the same time Bill. I’m never one to say ‘they are just kids,’: kids have great minds and can sometimes get very excited to tackle a challenge and to help. At the same time this sounds extremely close to guilt tripping, rather than just being informative. I dont see why anyone would want to guilt trip a child about global warming, I would assume that this is just teaching but with poor consideration of the method. I personally would prefer to teach children about ways one can help keep the world clean, rather than letting the focus become ‘the world is doomed and you are a part of it.’
Mind you I’m no expert on this subject, I’m also interested to hear what others think. This subject has really taken my interest, I look forward to hearing more on this.
Matthew Law
John Maddox (Editor Emeritus of Nature magazine) wrote a book back in the 1970’s called The Doomsday Syndrome in which he took aim that just this sort of apocalyptic tea-leaf reading. Back then it was fears of a global ice age, now its global warming. Back then it was fears of running out of natural resources such as oil (now we actually have more known oil reserves than we had back then).
There is a culture of fear-mongering that is apparent in the popular media. Everything seems to get senationalised and blown out of all proportion. Extrapolations which go way beyond the available evidence become the norm … and when the fears are not realised, the retractions are either not published at all, or buried in a single paragraph on page 25.
Cynical? You bet I am. Maddox points out that whilst everyone is fretting about what might happen, things that really are happening right now, today, are being ignored (or worse, knowledge is being actively supressed).
So while real people are starving to death due to droughts/famine … we in the West are converting corn to ethanol for use as bio fuel in the hope of staving off human-induced global warming … tragic, given that increased CO2 levels and warmer temperatures will increase crop yields and reduce the total number of human deaths (cold kills more people each year than heat does).
Steve Frost, Melbourne, Australia
Matthew, there’s plenty to hear on the earth worship subject, especially in the idolotrous natures clearly illustrated in the Old Testament.
I think you first need to check some presuppositions. Firstly, what is it important to be “aware” of? (The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom). Secondly, is a ‘guilt trip’ by nature wrong? Shouldn’t there be guilt if there has been wrong? Thirdly, you assume that people, and teachers in particular, are neutral. I may be neatral in regards to instructing someone that 2 + 2 = 4, but am neutral in little else.
Presently, the very premise of most of contemporary thought requires challenge from the biblical world view. Sincere people are content to terrorise the minds of our children because they fail to challenge the basic premise of carbon as the enemy.
When I accelerate in my car I sometimes tell my kids that I am feeding the plants. Am I neglectful of my stewardship responsibilities or am I mocking gaia whilst reinforcing the known understanding that plants breathe CO2?
I hope that your “interest” is a desire for truth, because it can be found.
Jeremy Peet
Bill, I don’t know if you played the game or not, but the end is quite disturbing. After answering all of the questions, when you press the skull-and-crossbones to see at what age you should die, the pig explodes in blood and guts. This is followed by a message saying “You should die at age …”.
That is, of course, unless your CO2 emmissions are so ridiculously low that the pig floats upwards instead of exploding, and the message says “You can live forever!”
How many kids are going to do this and get the message of death that they are worthless unless they can match some almost unattainable standard that somebody else has devised? Sounds like a new form of phariseeism.
And how many will remember the gory image of the exploding pig, and be affected for years remembering the supposed age at which they “should” die?
This gives us a disturbing picture of where things are at if there are even more than a minority of people who think this kind of treatment and abuse of kids is OK. And that’s what it is – abuse. A child is not mature enough to critically analyse everything they take in, and to tell them when they “should” die is just inexcusable.
And yet the same people would probably scream and howl at the thought of parents physically punishing their children at an early age in order to set appropriate boundaries for them. They would claim this to be child-abuse, even though the physical pain subsides in seconds, and the child is left able to mentally learn something from the experience. Compare this with the abusive emotional pain that others inflict on children which lasts for years, leaving the child unable to learn anything useful through the fog and haze of worthlessness that they experience. This game you have brought to our attention is such an example. It sickens me, and I hope it does the same for most other people.
Regards,
Mathew Markey
“When I accelerate in my car I sometimes tell my kids that I am feeding the plants.”
That’s a good one. I’ll think about using it with my kids 🙂
But isn’t car exhaust Carbon Monoxide and therefore useless to plants?
Duane Proud
Thanks Stephen
Yes there were a number of good books written back then, including the 1972 volume by Maddox, warning about the gloom and doom merchants, and the heavy toll they would exact. Unfortunately these warnings largely went unheeded then, and now things have only gotten worse.
Bill Muehlenberg, CultureWatch
Duane: cars pump out mostly CO2 (and H2O). CO and soot are the result of incomplete combustion, which is worse when the fuel-air mixture is too rich. Unfortunately, it doesn’t take much CO to bind hemoglobin irreversibly, which is why ventilation is so important.
PS: your statement of faith looks familiar 😉
Jonathan Sarfati, Brisbane
LOL. Thanks Jonathan.
You think I should be clearer about the the original source of my Statement of Faith (SoF)? I mean, I agree with all of it, so it is in essence my SoF. But I obviously did not pen the original.
Thanks for the info about the CO2. So what happens if you pump water into the exhaust with the car running? I’ve heard that is suicide technique that causes CO poisoning to the occupant(s).
Duane Proud
Duane
You’re welcome to believe the same things as anyone else, so no problem 🙂
I have to admit that I’m not an expert on suicide techniques. The CO poisoning would be particularly severe with a car that just started because of the richer fuel mixture.
Jonathan Sarfati, Brisbane
thanks Jeremy, you make some interesting points. I will take them on board and do some more ready for myself 🙂
Matthew Law
John Howard made a huge error of omission when he didn’t privatise the Atheistic Bolsheviks’ Collective.
Jonathan Sarfati, Brisbane
As an Agnostic and a defender of a secular society. I happen to agree with Bill here that it is wrong for children to be indoctrinated by our public institutions in this deep green stuff, which is frankly a religion revolved around the idea of a vengeful gaia.
Tristan Jones
Thanks for another informative article Bill. It’s come to the point where my husband and I have decided not to have the internet in our home for fear of what our children may be exposed to. I thought it was popularly believed that Christians are the wicked indoctrinators. This confuses me when I consider that every second t.v ad has a highly exaggerated environmental message. We live in the centre of the dairy/beef farming area in Vic and we are getting ad’s on tv telling us to ‘GO VEG’ for the noble environmental cause!!???? Go figure, while farmers are already struggling due to the drought.
Catherine Dodd