Although environmentalists sometimes couch their policies in terms of improving the world for human benefit—if they didn’t they wouldn’t get much cultural or political traction—fundamentally the environmentalist movement regards humankind as a blight on the earth whose productive activities are inherently immoral.
To take just two of innumerable examples, David Attenborough calls for human population control on the grounds that humans “are a plague on the Earth,” while David Graber openly condemns placing human happiness and fecundity above “a wild and healthy planet” and hopes “for the right virus to come along” to solve the “problem.”
Most recently, the Guardian reports a “plan to engineer a shorter, smaller human race to cope with climate change.” No, this is not an Onion story. The idea comes from a 2012 paper published by the journal Ethics, Policy & Environment, “Human Engineering and Climate Change.” The paper’s authors are S. Matthew Liao, a bioethics professor at New York University, and Rebecca Roache and Anders Sandberg from the University of Oxford.
The paper suggests the following possibilities for human engineering: . . .
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