The Epoch Times is serializing a translation from the Chinese of a new book, How the Specter of Communism Is Ruling Our World, by the…
The Epoch Times is serializing a translation from the Chinese of a new book, How the Specter of Communism Is Ruling Our World, by the editorial team of the Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party.
Introduction
1. The Communist Roots of Environmentalism
a. The Three Stages of Environmentalism
b. Environmentalism and Marxism: The Same Roots
c. Ecological Marxism
d. Ecological Socialism
e. Green Politics: Green Is the New Red
f. Eco-Terrorism
g. Greenpeace: Not a Peaceful Story
The Myth of Consensus on Climate Change
a. A Brief History of ‘Consensus’ in Climate Science
b. Establishing Dogma in the Scientific Community
References
The earth is the living environment of mankind, providing food, resources, and conditions for development. It has allowed humanity to prosper for thousands of years.
Humanity interacts closely with the natural environment. Both traditional Chinese and Western culture emphasize the benign symbiotic relationship between man and nature. As the ancient Chinese philosopher Dong Zhongshu writes in Luxuriant Dew of the Spring and Autumn Annals, “Everything on earth was created for the benefit of man.” [1] The meaning is that the purpose of the Creator was to offer conditions for humanity to live, and all things on earth may be used by man. At the same time, people must follow the principles of heaven and earth in their lives, and thus use everything in moderation and proactively maintain and safeguard the natural environment in which human beings are to live.
Western traditional culture states that the Creator provides the natural environment for human beings and asks them to manage it. Thus, man should cherish and make good use of the natural environment. In the philosophy of traditional Chinese culture, there is a balance between everything, as well as the imperative to avoid harm. The Confucian Doctrine of the Mean states: “It is this same system of laws by which all created things are produced and develop themselves each in its order and system without injuring one another; that the operations of Nature take their course without conflict or confusion.…” [2]
The Chinese ancients valued protection of the environment. According to historical records, at the time of Yu the Great: “In the three months of the spring, people didn’t take axes to the forest so the forest could flourish. In the three months of the summer, people didn’t put nets to rivers so fishes could breed.” [3]
Zengzi, a Confucian scholar, wrote: “Wood could only be cut down in the right seasons and animals only slaughtered at the right time.” [4]These show the traditional Chinese idea of moderation in all things and of cherishing and protecting the natural environment.
After the industrial revolution, industrial pollution caused severe ecological damage, and Western societies began to become aware of the issue. After environmental protection laws and standards were implemented, pollution was effectively treated, and the environment greatly improved. In the process, public awareness of environmental protection grew enormously, and it was widely acknowledged that environmental protection is a proper goal.
We must distinguish between several ideas: environmental protection, environmental movements, and environmentalism. Environmental protection, as the name indicates, is the protection of the environment. Since the beginning of human civilization, people have understood the need to protect the environment, and this had nothing to do with any particular political ideology.
The environmental movement is a social and political movement for environmental issues. Its primary goal is to change environmental policies and public thinking and habits through mass movements, media influence, and political agitation. Environmentalism is a philosophy and ideology emphasizing the need for protecting the environment and the harmonious coexistence between human society and the natural ecology. The motivations behind environmental protection and environmentalism are not the same as communism — but communists excel at hijacking mass movements and manipulating them to their advantage. Thus we see that from the beginning of modern environmentalism, communists have systematically gone about co-opting the movement.
The issues surrounding environmentalism today are extremely complex: The movement has used sensational rhetoric and people’s genuine desire to protect the environment to create a global political movement. Many participants are well-meaning, have a sense of justice, and truly care about the future of mankind.
However, what many don’t recognize is how communists use environmentalism to claim a moral high ground to promote their own agenda. This is how environmental protection becomes highly politicized, made extreme, and even turned into a pseudo religion — but one without traditional moral foundations. Misleading propaganda and various mandatory political measures have become dominant, turning environmentalism into a kind of communism-lite.
This article will focus on how environmentalism as an ideology has become related to communism, and how the environmentalist movement was hijacked, manipulated, and co-opted into serving the goals of communism, as well as the impact this will bring if unchecked.
Communism has made intricate preparations in many fields for the destruction of humanity. Originating in Europe, communism launched violent revolutions and seized power in the two great powers of the East — Russia and China. The communist camp and Western society entered into a long confrontation in the Cold War. After the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Eastern European communist bloc, communists began sowing their factors in both Eastern and Western societies and also sought to establish a tightly controlled global government.
In order to achieve this goal, communism must create or use an “enemy” that threatens all mankind and intimidates the public around the world into handing over both individual liberty and state sovereignty. Creating a global panic about looming environmental and ecological disasters almost appears an inevitable route to achieving this goal.
The formation and development of the environmental movement is inextricably linked to communism. Specifically, its development has gone through three stages. The first stage is the theoretical gestation period, which can be counted from the publication of the Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels in 1848 to the first Earth Day in 1970.
At the beginning of this stage, Marx and his disciples did not regard environmentalism as the focus of their theoretical discourse, but Marxist atheism and materialism were naturally consistent with the main tendency of environmentalism. Marx declared that capitalism is opposed to nature (that is, the environment). Marx’s disciples devised the term “ecosystem,” and quietly included environmentalism in certain subjects where it was set to ferment.
In the last decade of this phase, from 1960 to 1970, two best-selling books — Silent Spring (1962) and Population Bomb (1968) — appeared in the United States. Environmentalism entered the public arena under the guise of “environmental protection.”
The landmark event at the beginning of the second phase was the first Earth Day held in 1970, with the United Nations shortly after, in 1972, holding the first U. N. Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm. At this stage, a battery of organizations were rapidly formed and their activities increased. In the United States and Europe, they pushed governments with propaganda, protests, and activism under the guise of scientific research, legislation, meetings, and so on.
At the macro level, the counterculture of the 1960s functioned almost like a military parade of communist elements in the West. They took the stage by co-opting the civil rights and anti-war movements, and then quickly spread to other forms of anti-capitalist battles, including the feminist movement, the homosexual movement, and more.
After the 1970s, after the anti-Vietnam war movement ebbed, communist ideas began their process of institutionalization called “the long march through the institutions,” while also flooding into feminism and environmentalism — and this is the root cause of the upsurge in environmentalist ideology and agitation.
One of the most important forces that shouldered the banner of environmentalism in the 1970s were the hippies, the backbone of the counterculture. In fact, communism was in the process of repackaging itself under the banner of environmentalism after its failure in the Cold War, with the intent to introduce global communism under any other name.
The third phase began on the eve of the end of the Cold War. In 1988, the United Nations set up the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and the concept of global warming began to enter the political realm. [5] On the eve of the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990, an international environmental conference was held in Moscow. In his speech, the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, advocated the establishment of an international environmental monitoring system, signed a covenant to protect “unique environmental zones,” expressed support for U. N. environmental programs, and called for a follow-up conference (held in June 1992 in Brazil). [6]
Almost all Western environmentalists accepted these proposals. Global warming became the main enemy of mankind for environmentalists at this stage. Propaganda that used environmental protection as an excuse for heavy-handed policies suddenly escalated, and the number and scale of environmental laws and regulations proliferated rapidly.
Environmentalism has become the main tool for restricting the freedom of citizens around the world, depriving nations of sovereignty, and limiting and fighting against the free societies of the West. The result was that after the end of the Cold War, the former communists of the Soviet Union, as well as the communists and their fellow travelers in the West, all started afresh to join the environmental protection movement. Environmentalism emerged as a force on the world stage and increasingly began to take on a communist color.
In the understanding of believers in orthodox religions of both the East and West, human beings were created by God in his own image, and human life is thus endowed with a higher value, purpose, and dignity than other forms of life on earth. Likewise, the natural environment is created by God. Man has the obligation to care for nature; though simultaneously nature exists for man — not vice versa.
In the eyes of atheists and materialists, however, human life has no such special quality. Engels writes in one of his essays: “Life is the mode of existence of protein bodies. …” [7]In this view, human life is a no more than a unique configuration of proteins, not different in any essential manner from animals or plants — thus it is only logical that humans may be deprived of freedom, and even their lives, in the name of protecting nature.
In 1862, in a book on organic chemistry, German chemist Justus von Liebig, Marx’s colleague, criticized British farmers for using imported bird droppings as a fertilizer. British agriculture had benefited from bird manure, an efficient fertilizer, and crop yields had significantly increased. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the British had ample high-quality food sources. The bird droppings business had benefited businessmen in various countries, the British farmers, and the British public.
Why did Justus von Liebig want to condemn this practice? His moral indignation was due to four reasons. First, the process of collecting bird droppings damages nature; second, merchants exploit workers with low wages; third, high yields of food stimulate population growth, which in turn requires more food, exceeding what nature can supply; and fourth, more people and livestock mean more manure and garbage. [8]
At the time, while writing Das Kapital, Marx carefully studied Justus von Liebig’s work. He praised it for having “developed from the point of view of natural science, the negative, i.e., destructive, side of modern agriculture.” [9] Like Justus von Liebig, Marx regarded any effort in creating wealth by using natural resources as a vicious cycle, with the conclusion that “a rational agriculture is incompatible with the capitalist system.” [10]
After Lenin and his Bolshevik Party launched a coup in Russia, they quickly promulgated the “Decree on Land” and the “Decree on Forests” to nationalize land, forest, water, mineral, animal, and plant resources, and prevent the public from using them without authorization. [11]
American meteorologist and writer Brian Sussman writes in his book Eco-Tyranny: How the Left’s Green Agenda Will Dismantle America that Marx and Lenin’s ideas are highly consistent with those of today’s environmentalists. In their view, no one has the right to profit from natural resources: “Whether it’s saving the forests, whales, snails, or the climate, it all comes back to a deep-rooted belief that the quest for such profit is immoral and will ultimately destroy the planet unless ground to a halt.” [12]
This global environmental movement has involved a large number of thinkers, politicians, scientists, social activists, and media personalities. This text does not have sufficient space to enumerate their thoughts, speeches, and actions in full, but one figure cannot be ignored. This is the founder of the United Nations Environment Program, Maurice Strong. Strong, a Canadian, also organized the 1972 U. N. Conference on the Human Environment as well as the 1992 U. N. Conference on Environment and Development. Strong is the nephew of Anna Louise Strong, a well-known pro-communist journalist who settled in China. Maurice Strong, who was deeply influenced by his aunt, described himself as “a socialist in ideology and a capitalist in methodology.” [13]
Maurice Strong has come to occupy an important place in the global environmental movement. “He shares the views of the most radical environmentalist street protester, but instead of shouting himself hoarse at a police barricade at a global conference, he’s the secretary general inside, wielding the gavel.”14]
The views espoused by the United Nations Environment Agency led by Strong appear almost identical to Marxism: “Private land ownership is a principal instrument of accumulating wealth and therefore contributes to social injustice. Public control of land use is therefore indispensable.” [15]Maurice Strong chose to settle down in Beijing after retirement and died in 2015.
Natalie Grant Wraga, a late expert on the Soviet Union, conducted an in-depth study on the issue and wrote: “Protection of the environment may be used as a pretext to adopt a series of measures designed to undermine the industrial base of developed nations. It may also serve to introduce malaise by lowering their standard of living and implanting communist values.” [16] In fact, environmentalism does not originate only from the former communist bloc. It goes deeper and relates to the overall goal of communism to undermine the cause of freedom around the world.
At the juncture of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, British scientists Ray Lankester and Arthur Tansley developed the idea of the ecology and the ecosystem. Both were Fabian Socialists, a variation of Marxism. Lankester was a zoologist and at a relatively young age, became a friend to an aging Marx. When Marx was in his senior years, Lankester frequented Marx’s house and was among the few who attended Marx’s funeral. Lankester once wrote to Marx saying that he was studying Das Kapital “with the greatest pleasure and profit.” [17]
Tansley was the most important figure in ecology and botany during that period in England, and as the first chairman of the British Ecological Society, he was the inventor of the term “ecosystem.” While attending the University of London, Tansley was deeply influenced by Lankester. [18]
The originating links between ecological ideas and Marxism appear to emerge in this connection between Lankester, Tansley, and Marxism — though of course ecology and environmentalism are not the same thing. Ecology is about the relationship between living things and the environment, while environmentalism is concerned with ecological disasters. Ecology, however, is closely related to environmentalism because it provides the theoretical basis for defining ecological disasters. Ecological Marxism, which was derived from ecology, is a further step away from these ideas.
Ecological Marxism adds the concept of ecological crises as an augmentation to Marxian arguments about the economic crisis of capitalism. It seeks to expand the supposed conflict between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat by adding an inherent conflict between production and the environment. This is the theory of double crisis or double conflict. In Marxist theory, the basic conflict of capitalism is between productive forces and the relations of production, which is called the primary conflict. The secondary conflict happens between the environment of production (the ecosystem) and the productive forces and relations of production together. In this theory, the primary conflict leads to economic crisis, while the secondary conflict leads to ecological crisis. [19]
The century-long development of capitalism proved Marxism wrong after the failed prediction that capitalism would collapse due to economic crisis. On the contrary, capitalism continues to prosper. In response, the notion of ecological crises became a tool of communism as leftist scholars discovered that Marxism could be a theoretical basis for environmentalism, thus radicalizing the environmentalist movement and worldview.
As its name suggests, ecological socialism is an ideology combining ecology and socialism. Critics have called it a “watermelon” — green on the outside and red on the inside — for adding typical socialist demands, such as “social justice,” to ecological concerns in an apparent attempt to advance socialist ideology by new means.
A good illustration of ecological socialism is An Ecosocialist Manifesto, published by Joel Kovel and Michael Lowy in 2001. Kovel was unsuccessful in his campaign to become the U. S. presidential candidate from the Green Party. Lowy is a member of the Trotskyist Fourth International. The Manifesto states that capitalism cannot resolve the ecological crisis and will be replaced by ecological socialism. They do not view ecological socialism as a branch of socialism, but rather as the new name of socialism in the new era. [20]
In 2002, Kovel published a book titled The Enemy of Nature: The End of Capitalism or the End of the World? The book detailed the theory of ecological socialism, harshly criticized capitalism, and suggested a change to the current situation with radical new directions. [21]
When environmentalism enters politics, green politics, or ecopolitics, is born. The Green Party established in many countries around the world is a result of green politics, which typically extends beyond environmental protection to social justice, feminism, anti-war activism, and pacifism. Global Greens, for instance, is an international organization associated with the Green Party, and its 2001 charter is heavily inflected with Marxist ideology, including a heavy emphasis on a supposed equality between man and animals.
