The Prophet of Green Eugenics:
KAARLO PENTTI LINKOLA
(Deep-Ecologist & Radical Conservationist)
By
Hendrik Möbus
The end is nigh, now more than ever. The year 2019 was all about the “climate crisis”, in Western Europe at the very least. Every Friday, in any major city of Western Europe, you could see a pilgrimage of schoolchildren gathering and solemnly listening to a young female preacher from Sweden, who’s proclaiming the inevitable destruction of life on earth unless everyone in Europe and North America atones for their ecological transgressions and vows to de-carbonize the Western civilization instantly. The „Fridays for Future“-movement, along with the more radical offshoots like „Extinction Rebellion“, have caused a considerable media frenzy yielding political clout by the so-called Green Party and leftist political players in the national parliaments as well as the European Union. With the elections for the European Parliament in May 2019, the apocalyptic narrative concocted by “Fridays for Future” was believed to be decisive for victory or defeat at the ballot box. The Green Party and their leftist associates promised to make ecology their top priority and that helped them get many votes accordingly, whereas the other political parties were punished at the polls for sitting on their hands instead of saving the world, or worse, that they have been ignorant and doubted the climate change all along. Conservative lawmakers are indeed sceptic of the fancy idea that by reducing CO2-Emission in one single nation we could have any impact whatsoever on the world climate. Why impairing domestic economy, with entire industries shutting down and unemployment skyrocketing, when it won’t make any difference to the world climate? However, for the many new adepts of so-called “deep ecology”, our departure from fossil energy is long overdue. They predict a point of no return, with global warming exceeding 2 degree Celsius from here on, when the eco-system of the entire planet will collapse and the extinction of life on earth becomes a real scenario.
Well, with life on earth being as old as 3 billion years, there has never been a stable world climate that wouldn’t have changed profoundly at some point. We know of many periods of global warming and cooling but still, life prevails because it adapts and evolves. I have no doubt that there will be life on earth until the sun expands and makes earth inhabitable, but if this life will always include the human species remains to be seen.
In the Glare of the Burning Rainforest
Leftist political parties have become the patrons and cheerleaders of the new Green grassroots movement, willingly subscribing to the narrative of man-made climate change. Their political opponents rather support the climate change-skeptics among the academics, who don’t question that there is any climate change – because that is what climate did and keeps doing, it changes - but that this change is actually and exclusively man-made. In their opinion, which does have scientific merits indeed, humankind can’t be the prime cause of climate change, because empirical data shows periodic ups and downs of median temperatures in the course of human history, also at a time when men were few and there was no technology to speak of. Hence the global warming of the last decades could perfectly be a natural phenomenon unrelated to any human activity. Be that as it may, but this opinion is anything but popular nowadays. If you deny man-made climate change, then in the eyes of the “Fridays for Future”-disciples you commit heresy that will render you unworthy of participation on political debate.
We must not live in denial, I say. The world climate does change, indeed, and the adverse side-effects of global warming can be experienced in everyone’s daily life already. I have no doubts that there is a human factor to climate change, but it’d be wrong to point a finger at the Western man and hold his industrial society accountable. Quite to the contrary, Western engineering and technological progress made our countries so much greener and cleaner in the last 50 years or so, a fact that is best observed by comparing Europe to any backward place on earth. It is also an empiric matter of fact that in Europe, many species of flora and fauna are prospering instead of perishing. If there’s something in our own countries that is adversely affecting the eco-system, then it surely is neither our industry and technology nor our traffic and infrastructure, but our mechanized agriculture and factory farming which no longer serve self-sufficiency. The food thereby produced is not needed by us but required to increase the world food supply. Not so long ago the images of rainforest fires made the news in Europe and it was understood that the forest burns for the sake of growing soy, a vegetable that is used as animal feed in our factory farming. What was not equally acknowledged is the fact that the meat coming from the same animal farms goes into export to many countries all over the world. How can we deplore the blazing destruction of the Amazon rainforest but stay oblivious to the numberless people craving for the food coming from the ashes of the forest fires? If there’d be fewer people on earth, then factory farming would most likely not exist and the rainforest would not have to burn, either.
Environmentalism is not a leftist agenda
The political Left is not, and never was, genuinely concerned with environmentalism. There never was, or is, a leftist regime that addressed animal rights or nature protection. In the socialist countries with a state-owned industry, pollution of air and water by industrial poisons was commonplace. You were not supposed to talk about any of that lest you’d become an enemy of the state. The political Left stays ignorant of ecology to this day, because their core ideology is anthropinism. They support “Fridays for Future” for no reason other but to inject criticism of the political and economic system into this movement. The Green Party, in Germany at least, was originally founded by conservationists in the tradition of the early 20th century-youth movements, many of which wished to restore – quite an idealistic and romantic notion, no doubt – a harmony of man and nature whereas their leftist counterparts were busy toppling the old order in favor of a new world for a new man. The Green Party has come a long way of internal struggling and purging until it eventually emerged as another leftist political party. Although the Green Party would still speak of animal rights, renewable energy and nature protection, their political agenda is now the very same identity politics that you can find anywhere on the political Left these days. Hence the Green Party too advocates “open borders” and “refugees welcome”. This political party is now obsessed with their definition of “climate refugees”. That’s the migrant coming from a country devastated by climate change, and we have the duty to welcome him because it’s our industrial society responsible for melting ice and rising waters. Unsurprisingly, this narrative of Western man wreaking havoc on the climate of faraway countries is the new sequel to the old story of Western man colonizing and exploiting Africa, and equally backward places, for the last 500 years. The “White guilt”-complex is so deeply entrenched in Western culture that the kids and teenagers joining “Fridays for Future” just can’t wait to atone for the sins of their fathers. As always with a narrative concocted by leftist ideologues and demagogues, this is a hoax designed to seize political power, and nothing else.
No noble savage anywhere
There never was any age in human history when man did not interfere in the eco-system for the sake of advancing technological progress, and thus, raising his living standard. After the Stone Age, when man had the means and tools to start agriculture and abandon the life of nomads, his interference in the environment started to show: Man has cut down the forests to have space for cultivating crops and cattle; man built dwellings made of wood and stone; man decimated predators and domesticated other animals whenever they suited his needs. Do you believe that anywhere in Europe – save for a few remote areas always void of human habitation – is a place that wasn’t cultivated by man at some point in history? The forests we have in Germany, for instance: Almost all of them are man-made in one way or another. Man began cutting down the forests in the middle ages, just to see them grow back during the prolonged periods of war and pestilence, and then he went to cut them down all over again. When he started with forestry in earnest, he planted trees that would grow fast and yield a good timber harvest. That’s why there are so many monocultural forests in Germany. Or look at Iceland, for instance - we know it as a place void of trees but prior to the arrival of the first settlers from Norway, almost half of this island was covered by forests and it took man only two centuries to turn Iceland into the barren landscape we can see ever since. Yet man survived and life persisted. Man has interfered with the eco-system long before the advent of the Industrial Age, because his survival depends on taming the wild and unpredictable forces of nature.
The indigenous peoples so much admired for their presumably “harmonious co-existence” with nature? Well, they just lacked the means and tools to advance beyond that primal existence of hunters and gatherers. Once they too learned how to manipulate the environment to their own benefit, they never hesitated to replace the flintstone with iron and the arrow with the bullet. The age of blissful innocence can only exist when there is no man, at all. However, nature can and does adapt to the ways of man. And man can and does become mindful of the fragile eco-system that he still struggles to comprehend, but that he understands is the only sphere of life anywhere in the vast cosmos known to us. We in the Western World have come a long way from the mindless exploitation of nature to the point when we care so much for the environment that now we have legislation protecting wildlife, regulating forestry, and penalizing animal abuse. Never in human history has any high civilization been more considerate of ecological issues than modern industrial society. And do you know what without a doubt must be considered the most profound contribution to our green conscience and consciousness? Why, it’s the declining birthrate in Western countries, of course!
Quality vs. Quantity
I am aware that in our movement, the declining birthrate of Western women keeps setting off alarm bells. We uphold the traditional family image of the father, the mother and their many children; and yet we can’t deny that the reality in our countries looks so differently. Our movement feels very concerned about the demographic decline in Europe, and family values are promoted, with much ardor at that, as integral part of our political agenda. We are observant of the alien cultures where the women do have a much higher birthrate now as before, and it is our conclusion that their offspring could replace ours in a not so distant future. Although I am sympathetic to such sentiments, I believe we must not engage in a demographic arms race with any other race or nation in the world. Our Western civilization, with the high degree of industrialization, mechanization, and digitalization, requires few but highly trained workforce. Quality trumps quantity, as usual. That can be said about mechanized warfare too, by the way. One argument made for a higher birthrate is the fear that we could become defenseless if we have less men fit for military service. But if manpower would be so decisive in a modern-day war, then I wonder why the Arabs, for instance, can’t drive the Jews from Israel back into the sea even though they are outnumbering them easily. They can’t, because their enemy keeps the military supremacy using advanced weaponry not available to anyone else. Israel, just like South Africa before, perfectly proves that an ethnic minority can deter another ethnic majority with just the right show of force. But even though we must never become a powerless minority in our own countries, we still don’t need an inflated population in Europe anymore.
Once upon a time, the nomadic and tribal society always struggled to survive. Any newborn would make this society less vulnerable to extinction. During the middle ages in Europe, the population started to outpace the food production and new ways to deal with excess offspring had to be found; the girls could be married off but the boys, other than the firstborn that is, could either be delivered to one of the many Christian monasteries or sent away to the colonies. In other cultures where that was not possible, as it is known from the isolated Maya and Aztec civilizations of Central America for instance, the religious rite of human sacrifice was introduced. The sacrifice of infants and virgin girls would cull the population to never grow beyond the limits of food production.
Now that we live in the industrial civilization, we have much more sophisticated means of population control at our disposal. Why would we need a growing population, anyway? Western man got a much longer life expectancy compared to previous generations, while at the same time artificial intelligence, automation and robotization make life management so much easier than ever before. Those in favor of mass immigration keep saying that we need to import workforce to our countries lest our declining and aging society will experience a setback to our high living standard, but this is a moot argument considering the rapid pace at which artificial intelligence and robots occupy the jobs formerly done by humans. The migrants, almost all of them illegal aliens, coming from Africa and the Middle East to Europe are not fit to contribute to our economy, because many have zero school education to the point they can’t read and write, either. They end up as the dregs of society, and that’s exactly what they shall be according to leftist demagogues. Their agenda of re-distributing the wealth of a nation can’t have the desired effect if there’s no one in society who is poor and feels disadvantaged. Behind the slogans of “open borders”, “no nations” and “refugees welcome” is the age-old Marxist vision of the leftist rabble-rouser stirring up social unrest until the Lumpenproletariat takes to the streets and chases the powers-that-be away for a leftist regime taking over.
Battle of the Youth Bulge
We live in wealthy nations that are immensely attractive to people living in far less fortunate conditions, especially in Africa with tribal societies engulfed in endless civil war and smothered by cancerous corruption. However, the migration of millions of them, on their way up North, is caused neither by economics nor by the climate change in the first place. The so-called youth bulge puts an increasing pressure on the population of countries in Africa and the Middle East. Empirical academic research has linked an excess in young adult male population with a rise of social unrest, war and terrorism in the affected societies. A large population of adolescents entering labor force and electorate strains at the seams of the economy and polity, which were designed for smaller populations. If the society can’t cope with this challenge quick enough, by providing new opportunities of employment and political participation, then the youth bulge will likely upset the social and political order. This is exactly what happened in the so-called “Arab Spring” across North Africa and the Middle East, since 2011, because in this region we have countries with 50% and more of the population being younger than 30 years old. Left without any perspective in their homelands, this generation not only went to war turning their countries into failed states, but they also started migrating to Europe, in a kind of reverse colonialism.
Centuries ago, the Europeans turned South, exporting their own youth bulge to remote countries and continents, but now we can experience first-hand how history repeats itself under different conditions. Considering how the youth bulge in North as well as sub-Saharan Africa keeps growing at a fast pace and with no end in sight, migration to Europe is unlikely to stop unless we’d have a closed border turning the continent into a fortress.
Malthusian limits of Population Growth
Time and again we are reminded of the dwindling non-renewable resources exploited by industrial civilization and how that will rather sooner than later jeopardize the survival of mankind, but it’s kind of weird how overpopulation is almost never an issue in the political and medial debate about “The Limits of Growth”. If addressed by anyone at all, then in a rather dismissive manner: If more people on earth could enjoy the Western way of life, then their birthrate would drop by default. Hence it is predicted by the United Nations that after the year 2100, the human population growth – then believed to be exceeding 11 billion by conservative estimates – will peak and start levelling off subsequently, with less humans born in every coming generation. Until then, we are said to be well-equipped to feed an ever-growing human population by the means of industrial agriculture and factory farming. Just a few months ago, in July 2019, it was reported that European Union agri-food exports reached €13.07 billion. In a market economy, there will be a supply for as long as there is a demand. Exporting food to the Third World promises profit, and with more food readily available at the world market the global population can keep growing. Hence I am not that confident about the official prediction of so-called United Nations-“experts” concerning the growth of mankind in future. What if they are wrong? After the year 2100, mankind will know but then it could be far too late to do anything about it. Should we not be mindful and try to manage the growth of human population right here and now? We put so much effort in keeping global temperature from rising more than 2 degree Celsius, but what is being done about keeping human population growth under control?
The notion of overpopulation spelling the doom for civilization is anything but new. It was in 1798 when Thomas Malthus wrote about it in his “Essay on the Principle of Population”. His core theory was suggesting that man must be mindful of preventive population check, because if population growth remains uncontrolled, then “sickly seasons, epidemics, pestilence, and plague advance in terrific array, and sweep off their thousands and tens of thousands. Should success be still incomplete, gigantic inevitable famine stalks in the rear, and with one mighty blow levels the population with the food of the world”. This is known as the “Malthusian spectre” haunting mankind; when population growth outpaces agricultural production. It was later said that history proved Malthus wrong, because mechanized agriculture combined with industrial fertilizers produced a dramatic increase in productivity of agriculture, thus expanding the world’s food supply while lowering food prices. It is further predicted that world food production will be in excess of the needs of the human population by the year 2030. Man managed to outwit the constraints of natural growth, because he kept inventing and developing new technologies that made him far less vulnerable to the hazards of nature threatening his very survival. However, it is not true that Malthus’ warning could be dismissed so easily. In modern times, the two most densely populated countries are China and India. In both countries it was understood that without checks and balances put on the demographic growth, their ascent from pre-industrial agricultural backward nations to economic powerhouses of industrial society would simply be impossible. A starving and dying population can’t work in the industry, obviously. China adopted a strict one child-policy early on, which was partially revoked only now, whereas India offered incentives for men and women to get sterilized at special clinics. In both nations it was understood that children can be something else but a blessing for their family; if there are too many of them, they can also become a burden on society. Without their efforts on keeping their population growth in check, it would be quite unlikely that China and India made a major leap, in less than 50 years, from being underdeveloped countries to become serious competitors to Europe and the United States of America. They were mindful of Malthus’ warning, and rightly so.
Igniting the Population Bomb
Fifty years ago, in 1968, Stanford University Professor Paul R. Ehrlich and his wife published the best-selling book “The Population Bomb”. They described a not-so-distant future in which growing human population places escalating strains on all aspects of the natural world. Global famine is inevitable, causing hundreds of millions of people to starve to death. Although the predictions made in “The Population Bomb” did not come to pass, the Ehrlichs’ maintain that their general argument remains intact. Indeed, it should be hard to deny that the unchecked growth of human population could proceed without any repercussions on earths’ eco-system. The so-called “ecological footprint” of man is not only about consumption but about waste disposal too. In Western
countries we go the extra mile to cope with the waste that’s related to our consumer behavior, but in less developed countries you have waste littering the landscape and contaminating the waters. Another part of the “ecological footprint” is the mass-consumption of agricultural and farming products. In the West we are eating too much meat, indeed, but globally, too many people eat just too much of anything. If the climate change is indeed man-made, then without a doubt the environmental side-effects of mechanized agriculture and factory farming, which we would neither need nor have in this magnitude if it wasn’t for the incessantly growing world population, have to do with it. If we talk of CO2-emissions contributing to global warming, then we must consider the millions of livestock bred and raised and slaughtered to feed mankind. It remains a mystery to me how anyone can call for a boycott of factory farming without addressing the problem of global overpopulation at the same time. The population bomb will go off as soon as there will be significantly less instead of more exports of agricultural and farming products, from Europe and North America to the rest of the world.
The Fisherman-Prophet
The “The Population Bomb” received much criticism from the political Left, which insisted that the real issue was one of distribution of resources rather than of overpopulation. They worried that Ehrlich’s work could be used to justify genocide, oppression of minorities or even a return to eugenics. At this point, the Finnish philosopher Kaarlo Pentti Linkola enters the picture. Linkola is a Finnish ornithologist and conservationist. He was born in Helsinki in 1932; his father was rector of the university of Helsinki and his grandfather was chancellor there too. Linkola never aspired to an academic career of his own, though. He donated much of his family inheritance to the Finnish Natural Heritage Foundation, an NGO created by him to preserve the forest for the Finnish society. Linkola lives in a wooden cabin in rural Finland, where he spends his time as fisherman but every now and then, he is writing letters and essays outlining his philosophy on life and earth. Almost a dozen books with his writings were published in Finnish, but there is one English compilation of some of his articles that introduced him to a worldwide audience.
It is safe to say that his writings would go unnoticed if Linkola would keep talking about birds instead of humans.
According to Linkola, man must return and be confined to a much smaller place in the eco-system. To this end, human population must be reduced. Capitalism and free market economy, with its pursuit of unceasing economic growth replacing subsistence economy, must end. Not only the fossil but any energy, whether it’s coming from fossil fuel or renewable sources, must not be generated or used anymore. The democracy as well as civil liberties, must be abolished and man shall be governed by an autocratic regime with the best of natures’ interests at heart. Any human society and civilization must be based on the environmental balance; thus, the world view of man must undergo a transition from anthropinism to eco-centrism. Linkola does not believe that man, guided by the ethics of humanism and liberalism, could hope to avoid his extinction, because he will always prioritize human needs and wants over all else. It is our misplaced empathy for fellow humans that will be our undoing, because we wish to save everyone even though this means all life on earth must perish.
Sacrifice the Many to Save the Few
Unlike others who too consider human overpopulation as the greatest peril for mankind and the world, Linkola understands that nothing can be done or accomplished unless we challenge the notion that all human life is sacrosanct. Our healthcare is designed to prevent diseases, to cure illness, and to prolong life at all costs. In our society, it is a punishable offense to deny first aid to someone who’s injured or potentially dying. As soon as we see and hear in the news that there’s a famine somewhere in the world, we will go there distributing food aid among those starving. To Linkola, this is anathema: “If in some part of the world it is not possible to produce enough food for the whole population and there are people starving, there should be no food brought to them, doing that is extremely wrong, they should of course starve to death”, he said. In his opinion, we keep digging our own grave if we keep reproducing at the current global birth rate, but on top of that, if we keep people from dying even though that is natures’ way of shrinking the population back to a size when it can be self-sufficient. The more people in overpopulated countries perish, the better for our survival as global species.
His many critics consider him cruel and cynical, a misanthrope in disguise of the environmentalist. They say that Linkola abhors mankind and has no love for human life, but that would be a flawed assessment in my opinion. Linkola writes in the best tradition of apocalypticism; he doesn’t hate his fellow man but he is - to the point of having become a fatalist himself - outright despaired at man who keeps adding to the burden of human overpopulation without ever ceasing or, at least, considering the final consequence of his doing. Like any other prophet coming before him, Linkola contemplates the future where he can see the demise of humanity at our
own hands, and he keeps warning us to don’t walk into this direction where, at the end, all life on earth will perish at our hands. As it happened with the other prophets from times of yore, his words go largely unheard and unread. If Linkola would not be concerned about the fate of mankind, then he couldn’t care less and keep silently living his secluded life as fisherman in rural Finland. Instead, he keeps pondering the question of what man ought to do at death’s door. He asks: “What to do, when a ship carrying a hundred passengers suddenly capsizes and there is only one lifeboat? When the lifeboat is full, those who hate life will try to load it with more people and sink the lot. Those who love and respect life will take the ship's axe and sever the extra hands that cling to the sides.” That is Linkolas’ philosophy in a nutshell: Sacrifice the many to save the few. But this philosophy can’t go together with the idea of universal human rights and the equal value of each human life. Linkola admits as much when he says “I think that it is clear that the worth of an individual is smaller when there are a lot of humans, than when there are few humans. Actually, the value of the human is negative as long as there are too many people.” To Linkola, human life cannot have any worth different from the worth of life itself. “Life as such is a value”, he says. “Not only human life, all nature meaning animals and plants and fungi.” Whereas the eco-system void of humans will regenerate until the end of time, it is man who upsets and ultimately destroys the eco-system and thus, the foundation not only for his own survival but for all life on earth.
Green Shirts of Eco-Fascism
Nature cannot stop humans on their suicide mission to end life on earth, Linkola understands, but man can. To this end, he envisions a stern dictatorship based on “discipline, forbiddance, force and oppression”. Linkola is not a politician, but his advocacy of authoritarian rule for the sake of taking any liberty away from man has earned him the reputation of being a “fascist”. Although Linkola was indeed showing sympathy for the totalitarian regimes in world history, he is not interested in any political ideology or utopia, at all. There’s one major aspect of totalitarianism that made Linkola consider this to be a form of government much better than any other, including democracy: In a totalitarian society, there are severe constraints on what man can do and what he must not do. If in a democracy man enjoys the liberty to destroy nature, then it needs a dictator to take this liberty away from man.
The ideal human civilization, according to Linkola, would not be the totalitarian empire. It would be a rural and agrarian society akin to the Amish people in North America: No electricity, no motorization, no modern medicine, no internet; nothing that resembles the world of the 21st century. But contrary to the Amish who are having big families, a strict one child per family quota would be imposed on this Linkolanian society. That’s the paramount political objective for any future regime, according to Linkola. Unless the human population growth is not only stopped but reversed, mankind keeps digging a global mass-grave for all life on earth: “The only problem is that there are too many people. There is nothing else, all other problems are a consequence of this”, he says. What he proposes is eugenics, of course. If there shall be no more than one child per family, then it is in the best interest of parents as well as society to have a healthy child with the best genetical disposition. Procreation would not be left to chance, anymore.
The Choice to have Zero Children
Although Linkola would certainly insist that none of his warnings have been heeded by anyone but a few of his readers, it is undeniable that Europe does indeed experience a shrinking population since a few generations. Having a large family with many children has become a mostly romantic notion. Back in the days, people have had no choice in that matter. Contraception was either unknown or forbidden, and so were abortions. Nowadays, in Western society at least, people do have a choice. Unless there’s a conscious decision to have many children, be it for idealistic or religious reasons, many couples are perfectly happy having only one child of their own – or no child, at all. They rather enjoy the amenities of a Western lifestyle promoting individualism and self-expression, and they don’t need to feel the iron heel of any eco-fascist regime for living without children of their own. We might consider their choice selfish, but the second-best thing to doing the right thing for the right reasons is doing the right thing for the wrong reasons. As I said, I am aware of our movement emphasizing the ideal of the traditional family with multiple children, but I see no harm in coming to terms with a world where this ideal does not match our reality. Why, with already 7 billion people living on earth, and their number growing exponentially, we need to consider that less may be more. The worst-case scenario for world population growth predicts a staggering number of 18 billion people living on earth in 2100. In 1800, we have had less than 2 billion people on this planet. Although such numbers certainly corroborate Linkolas’ predictions about overpopulation, his proposed solution of stripping man off his liberties does not take into account how the liberty in having a
choice on procreation did more to curb the population growth in Europe than any state policy could have accomplished in the same time.
Many people in the West are concerned about rising sea levels, but strangely it’s the same people who do not feel troubled by the prospect of world population about to triple in less than a hundred years, with no end in sight (unless we trust the experts at the United Nations, of course). Africa's share of global population is projected to grow from 16% in 2015 to 25% in 2050 and 39% by 2100. But don’t we have so much more space on this planet? Can earth not afford billions of humans more? Well, there is a simple yet profound truth about man, that he cannot just live and prosper anywhere. The vast expanses on earth still void of humans are uninhabited for a reason; because man can’t live in the sea, or the desert, or the arctic. Even the huge forested areas in South America, Africa, but also Siberia, cannot provide the basis of life for humans. You can’t grow crops or keep livestock inside a forest, period. The areas suited for human habitation are not infinite, no matter how big the world might appear. The more people on earth exist, the more resources they require and consume. If we take for granted that the climate change is nowadays man-made, then any man who is alive, who is breathing, eating and consuming, must be held accountable. Not just we who live in Europe and North America, but everyone else too.
Rollback into the Stone Age
For Linkola, but also for his fellow traveler Theodore Kaczynski, known to the world as the “UNA-bomber”, one solution to the ecological world crisis would be dismantling our modern technological and industrial civilization. Whereas Kaczynski is more concerned about the prospect of man losing his freedom to machines, Linkola considers machines a menace to nature and the eco-system. In their righteous furor, both men have much in common with machine breakers destroying the steam engine in the 19th century, because they feared to be replaced by machines at the factories of the British Empire. And as they were, Linkola too is mistaken when he dreads technology. I don’t believe that undoing the industrial revolution is a feasible, much less preferable, option to deal with climate change and eco-crisis. Even if man would plunge back into the Stone Age, living as hunters and gatherers in caves once more, his brain is hard-wired for inventing and advancing technologies that will make him more independent of the unpredictable ways of nature. At some point, he’d discover and invent everything all over again. The same can be said about reducing the world population by any means of warfare, genocide, or pandemic diseases. It would most certainly take some time, but sooner or later we’d have an overpopulation of humans on this planet, once again.
Fewer people, fewer problems
Now we come to the point where I’d like to address how we can utilize the recent climate change-hysteria to advance our own political agenda of reducing the youth bulge in Africa and the Middle East, from where our countries are threatened with mass migration. The political Left will never address the problem of global human overpopulation, because they need the migration from backward places as the powerful weapon of demographic mass destruction that will uproot Western society and destroy ethnic homogeneity in the places where we live.
It is important that we understand and agree on:
• The climate change is happening, and it is man-made insofar we already have way too many people living on a planet of finite resources and capacities.
• Overpopulation of the human species in places like Africa is the root cause for pretty much every negative impact on the eco-system; reducing the human population in countries with an upward birth-rate is the key to solve the eco-crisis worldwide.
• The population there can easily shrink by considerate family planning on a private level and population control on a state level; there are many options such as sex education, birth control, or one child-policy.
• Any foreign aid to such countries must be tied to population control; if the countries don’t comply, they will be left to their own devices.
• Agriculture and farming must be limited to domestic needs based on subsistence economy.
• Migration is not a human right. We will not allow any migration to Europe until the youth bulge in other countries is no more.
The political Left, in disguise of environmentalists, propose only one solution to the eco-crisis: That we must abandon our Western way of life; we must give up our technology, we must stop using fossil energy, we must
welcome immigrants, and we must distribute our economic wealth among the backward nations as sort of reparations for the damage caused by the climate change. If translated into real-life politics, this will no doubt end the world as we know it – also much sooner and more profoundly than any climate change could do the same, as a matter of fact. The only reason why this insanity is not questioned, challenged and dismissed in the public debate is the very absence of any public debate about climate change, at all. If we read and watch what our media keeps publishing and broadcasting to this subject, then there is man-made climate change caused by CO2-emission from using fossil energy in industrial civilization, period. It is up to us to start talking about climate change on our own terms and in our own media, reaching out to the people with the message that they must not abandon their way of life but they can help to protect the eco-system and save the world climate all the same. The solution is so simple: Less people in the world, less strain on natural resources and the eco-system.
The Nemesis of Man
Considering the magnitude of the ongoing climate change that is taking place neither locally nor regionally, but globally, it is safe to say that this process of global warming cannot be stopped even if we’d de-carbonize our entire civilization at once. No matter what the leftist Green Party proposes to do about the climate change, it will be too little too late. Or worse, it will just impair our industry and economy without yielding any positive effect on the world climate. Once the truth about this exercise in futility cannot be denied anymore, it is to be expected that we’ll witness a radicalization of the grassroots environmentalist movement. The British group “Extinction Rebellion”, for instance, is already trying to disrupt and block our vital infrastructure and it’s just a matter of time until they take one more step towards further radicalization.
As of today, the ideas of Pentti Linkola remain marginalized even among those deeply concerned about the frailty of earths’ eco-system. That’s about to change when any and all attempts at preventing the climate change, by reducing CO2-emission and de-carbonizing our industry, will fail and many more people eventually conclude that earth can’t suffer man anymore. As Nietzsche said, “when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you.” All this doomsday talk begets the Nemesis of man, because now comes the hour of the Eco-Terrorist, who will act upon the anti-humanist ethics spoken about by Linkola. But unlike the Finnish fisherman, the Eco-Terrorist will not bother to talk reason into people in the faint hope they might change their ways. He knows there is only one solution, and he will act accordingly. The Eco-Terrorist will kill indiscriminately. Every human is a legitimate target. This is not a battle fought by one group pitched against another, because in this case, the enemy is us. Regardless of age, gender, race, political opinion or religious belief: Every human life does contribute to the collapse of the eco-system, and thus, to the extinction of all life. Hence no life can be deemed sacrosanct when all life is at stake.
Yes, we can!
If we do not wish to demolish our industrial civilization, but want to spare mankind from the Malthusian spectre as well as the rise of the Eco-Terrorist, then there really is no other way but to implement a policy of population control, with incentives as well as interdictions, in the parts of the world with rising birth rates. Do you deem this impossible? Why, China and India show that population control can be done at state level. Our own nations in the West prove that family planning is possible of one’s own accord, if contraception is easily available and abortion is not outlawed. Some may say that in Africa and the Middle East, there is a strong religious sentiment making birth control impossible. While it is certainly true that Abrahamic religion promotes procreation at any cost, we must not underestimate the unspoken wish of many women, living in a culture that compels them to bearing children no matter what, to take the matter of birth control and family planning in their own hands. In many European countries we still have a Christian society, but the birth rate there is almost on par with the countries having a predominantly secular society. Give people a choice on procreation and many will do what’s in their own best interest, religious doctrine notwithstanding. Finally, most of the mankind aspires to the same high living standard that we do enjoy in the West, but it is self-evident that 7 billion people on earth can’t live in a worldwide civilization resembling ours. That is not sustainable by any stretch of imagination. Only with a much smaller population, participation on our Western civilization becomes an option to others too.
Once the human population is shrinking, we’ll come to terms with the climate change. If this process cannot be averted, as I believe, then it can be managed instead. Western engineering and technical progress are the key to that; that’s why we must not, although Linkola insists we need to, rid us of technology but to the contrary, we must pool our resources to fast-track research in renewable energy as well as safe nuclear energy, eco-friendly agriculture, clean waste disposal, and so much more to make earth a planet where human life prevails until the
end of time. If we fail to reduce the human population by political measures, then the Malthusian spectre will eventually catch up with most of mankind to do what we can’t do. There is no question about it that the climate change will adversely affect agriculture and farming in the Western countries providing a large share to the world food supply, but also the agriculture in less developed countries won’t be spared. First there will be a price increase, then food rationing becomes mandatory, followed by food riots and ultimately famines and pandemics. In nature there is no other way but mass extinction to deal with excessive population growth, but humanity does have a choice. We can secure the existence of our people and a future for our children, but we have no time to spare. There are on average about 250 babies born every minute – more than 130 million in a year. And if from here on you meet anyone talking about the climate change and what must be done about it, then speak up and say: “It’s the overpopulation, stupid!”.
Online resources:
Offline resources:
Paul R. Ehrlich “The Population Bomb”
Josef H. Reichholf “Eine kurze Naturgeschichte des letzten Jahrtausends“
Pentti Linkola „Can Life Prevail?”
Alan Weisman “The World Without Us”
Dudo Erny “Die Grünschwätzer: Evolution, Überbevölkerung und Umweltschutz“
