I have been pounding the drum for several years now warning about the “nature rights” movement that would obliterate human exceptionalism and shatter our economies.
My good friend Joseph Bottum came upon the latest such lunacy in New Mexico, and has taken to the Weekly Standard to expose where green misanthrope is leading. From, “Fracking the Constitution:“
Rivers have rights, they say down in Mora County, New Mexico—“inalienable and fundamental rights,” beyond the power of any government to touch. Aquifers, too. Wetlands, streams, ecosystems, and even “natural communities,” whatever that undefined term means:
All of them have rights to “exist and flourish.” The land itself has an “intrinsic right” to “exist without defilement.”
Isn’t it strange that the very types of activists who (overwhelmingly) support abortion, euthanasia, and other anti-human policies want to grant nature a putative right to life?
Well, not so strange. Environmentalism is growing increasingly anti-human. The Moro County ordinance follows in the footsteps of more than 30 other U.S. municipalities, Ecuador, Bolivia, and the beliefs of the Secretary General of the United Nations, Ban ki-Moon.
Not satisfied with merely elevating nature to the status of a rights-bearing person–meaning, we are just one species among the flora and fauna–the New Mexicans threatened secession if their little law was invalidated.
But the most fascinating moment in the ordinance comes in Section 11, where Mora County, New Mexico—with just under 5,000 people scattered across almost 2,000 square miles northeast of Santa Fe—threatens to secede from the United States if its anti-oil ordinance is attacked or the state and federal governments attempt “to intimidate the people of Mora County or their elected officials.”
They’re talking civil war in Mora. They’ve passed a county ordinance that explicitly contemplates taking “actions to separate the County from the other levels of government.
It’s easy to laugh at this idiocy. But that would be a mistake. Environmentalists are as much about diminishing the value of humanity these days as they are being green.