Stumps where majestic trees once stood. This is the vision of invasion biology and they hope to do the same to almost half a million trees in the San Francisco Bay Area alone, asking the Obama Administration to foot the bill to the tune of $5.9 million. And while they close libraries and other public services, they are pledging another $1.4 million of taxpayer dollars to the eradication effort.
My latest article in the Huffington Post is called “Biological Xenophobia: The Environmental Movement’s War on Nature.”
I wrote the piece in the hopes of reaching people who mindlessly embrace killing based on the philosophy of invasion biology. I had hoped to make people stop and think about what, exactly, it is they are embracing when they support it. Not surprisingly, my piece didn’t give some of the most ardent supporters pause for thought. It didn’t seem to touch them as it should have because invasion biology walls off the heart.
Indeed, if I could have told some of the commenters however many years ago it was before they were indoctrinated into the philosophy of invasion biology that they would read an article about the willful destruction and poisoning of hundreds of thousands of healthy trees and wildlife and support it, I bet they wouldn’t have believed it. It is not the loving, compassionate, logical or environmentally sound position. But, as Rogers and Hammerstein once wrote, you have to be carefully taught to hate. And it appears they have been.
Migration happens. And there is not a single time or place in the history of life on Earth where the invasion biologist could find the stasis they seek. That is not how life on Earth works. It never has, and it never will. And yet in seeking homeostasis, invasion biologists, those who falsely claim to speak for the Earth, paradoxically embrace horrific means of destruction that they should in fact exist to oppose.
Of course, this view is also selective, based on decidedly unscientific and narrow commercial or aesthetic prejudices. While they call for the slaughter of cats and Eucalyptus trees, while they call for the poisoning of lakes and wildlife corridors, they hypocritically ignore the tomato, the watermelon, the apple, and the person staring back at them in the mirror, all of them as “non-native” by their own arbitrary and selective philosophy as those plants and animals they seek to exterminate. In other words, it only includes those species they do not like. Why?
In their self-serving philosophy, they are given carte blanche to scapegoat, vilify and kill plants and animals for the environmental destruction caused by one species and one species alone: humans. Invasion biologists are environmental bigots, and they give voice to the darkest impulses of human nature – a disdain for the foreign and a reverence for the native. In fact, they elevate it to a core value.
Slaughter and death are not the tools we need to “preserve” life. In fact, by its very terms, it is not only ethically bankrupt, it is an irreconcilable contradiction. Please add your voice to the comments page of the Huffington Post by clicking here. Right now, it seems the inmates are running the asylum and they need to hear that rational people do not share their hate mongering.
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Here is my story: www.nathanwinograd.com/?p=11902
And this is my vision: http://vimeo.com/48445902