Eco-terrorism is a manifestation of the human-baiting in modern culture, contends Brendan O'Neill
IN earlier eras, from biblical times to the dawn of the Enlightenment, Earth was seen as the property of man, something we should conquer and tame and use to our advantage. Mankind should have "dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and every other living thing that moves on the Earth", said God in the book of Genesis. Even more forthrightly, a follower of the great scientific thinker Francis Bacon (1561-1626) said man should "put nature on the rack" and extract its secrets.
Today, by contrast, man is seen not as the owner of Earth but as a pox on it. We're an alien presence, an infestation, a malady that has made the planet terminally ill. Indeed, some now argue that Earth needs to be "liberated" from human beings, set free from our toxic presence so that it can revert to being a wild, unspoiled ball of water and gas hurtling happily through space.
That is the implication behind the name of a campaign group that popped up in Melbourne recently. The Earth Liberation Front secretly visited the home of Graeme York, boss of the Hazelwood Power Station in Victoria, and hand-delivered what has been described as a menacing letter. It threatened to harm York's property if he didn't stop polluting the planet by producing all that pesky electricity.
The ELF is an eccentric, misanthropic gang. It was founded in Brighton, England, in the early 1990s, as a sister organisation to the Animal Liberation Front, and has since gone global, carrying out an estimated 17 guerilla attacks across the world. In 2001 the FBI classified it as the main domestic terror threat in the US. Where the ALF only wanted to liberate rabbits and rats from humanity's evil grip, ELF ominously thinks the planet itself should be freed from our reign of terror, and perhaps emptied of humans altogether.
It is tempting to write off the ELF as a small, crazed group of dreadlock-sporting crusties that spout the kind of eco-nonsense most of us find offensive. Tempting, but wrong. In truth, the idea that humans are a fundamentally destructive presence on Earth, a carbuncle or itchy sore, is now widespread, even respectable and fashionable. The ELF can be seen as a crude physical manifestation of the humanity-baiting that informs much of mainstream environmentalism and contemporary thought.
John Gray, one of Britain's most respected intellectuals and until recently the professor of European thought at the London School of Economics, says humanity is a "plague on the planet". He echoes James Lovelock, the Gaia-inventing granddaddy of modern environmentalism, who thinks we have become a disease: "Humans on Earth behave in some ways like a pathogenic organism, or like the cells of a tumour or neoplasm. The human species is now so numerous as to constitute a serious planetary malady." From this warped point of view, it makes perfect sense to "liberate" Earth from humanity, in the same way a surgeon "liberates" a person's body from a cancerous growth.
Many now believe that natural disasters or the emergence of new diseases are attempts by Gaia to rid "herself" of the human virus.
The American novelist Kurt Vonnegut, hero to disaffected youth, said shortly before his death in 2007: "I think the Earth's immune system is trying to get rid of us. And it's high time it did."
In the 80s, Earth First! -- then a rather trendy environmentalist outfit, which later spawned the ELF -- said "the possible benefits of (AIDS) to the environment are staggering: just as the plague contributed to the demise of feudalism, AIDS has the potential to end industrialism." This view of humans as a pox has trickled down into popular culture. In the hugely popular Matrix films, one of the sinister agents sent to infiltrate humanity says: "Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You are a plague and we are the cure." Now the ELF fancies itself as the cure.
Even today's less hysterical and officially endorsed environmentalist campaigns treat the human presence on Earth as something shameful and dirty. Terms like "human footprint" and "human impact", used everywhere from school classrooms to newspaper reports, suggest that humans have an ultimately corrosive relationship with the poor beleaguered Earth.
Indeed, it is striking that the ELF chose to focus on the problem of electricity generation in its threatening letter to York, just months after this year's UN-endorsed Earth Hour, when 1 billion people across the world were encouraged to turn out their lights for one hour. The Sydney Opera House turned its lights down; cities around the world fell into a voluntary darkness. This sent the powerful message that humans have interfered too much with the planet and that buzzing cities, lit-up buildings and light itself are things we should be ashamed of.
The ELF took this mainstream message to its logical guerilla conclusion when it threatened one of the men responsible for generating electricity.
The threat of the ELF should be taken seriously by law enforcement agencies, but in order to really challenge such groups we will have to take up the misanthropy of modern society. Humans have not destroyed the planet; we have humanised it, turning what without us would be another pointless planet orbiting the sun into a place of abundance, community, exploration. We don't need to rein in the "human footprint" but rather stamp it even more indelibly on our planet, and in the future, on other planets too.
Brendan O'Neill is the editor of Spiked Online.
