*Editor’s Note* – As I have continuously pointed out, all guest articles are the intellectual work and opinions of the author. This article contains many excellent points to consider. However, I feel it imperative to point out my own difficulty in accepting any philosophical renderings from a Jesuit trained at the Jesuit Georgetown University.
It is a known fact that many of the accusations made by the Jesuit author referenced below are, in fact, part of the existing Hegelian Dialectic – crisis, embellishment of reactions, presentation of a solution – constructed by the very Vatican institution of which any Jesuit is sworn to loyalty. Because it is known that the Vatican is behind and controls this “environmental” movement and the “ecological theory” discussed in this article, it becomes difficult to accept at face value the philosophical embellishments of this problem in which the end game is to construct a solution, which includes obtaining the power presented as a negative political object below.
Perhaps the real takeaway from this is that if you want to do something to stop this “ecological theory” or “Heresy Destroying Western Civilization” then we need to go back to the roots of where it all began, understand the evil that exists there, and refuse to be a part of it.
But that will never happen. It is too big and too powerful and thus, as this article states, man’s purpose becomes service to the Cosmos.
Article by James Beers:
Civilization, n. 1. An advanced state of human society, in which a high level of art, science, religion and government has been reached.
Civilized, adj. 1. Having an advanced culture, society, etc.
Civilize, v.t. 1. To make civil; bring out of a savage state; elevate in social and individual life; enlighten; refine.
Civil, adj. 1. Of or consisting of citizens: civil life, civil society, civil law. 2. Of citizens in their ordinary capacity, or the ordinary life and affairs of citizens. 3. Of the citizen as an individual, Civil Liberty.
Heresy, n. 1. Opinion or doctrine at variance with orthodox or accepted doctrine. 2. The maintaining of such an opinion or doctrine.
Europe and North America are often described as “Advanced”, “First World” or “Western” Civilization. They think of themselves as “Leaders” in everything from UN/One-World Government movements to seeing and striving toward a future where science and a handful of very “enlightened” individuals will organize and rule the rest of us. Their hubris in this regard knows no bounds.
Over the past century, and particularly in the last 50 years, social turbulence throughout Western Civilization has spread to every corner of society. Rural communities, natural resource management and use, and wild plants and animals (my own areas of interest) have experienced a growing and dramatic societal reversal of centuries-old norms and values. Government politicians and bureaucrats in league with numberless, wealthy Non-Government Organizations purporting to “represent’ and advocate for everything from deadly animals that kill people and imagined animal and plant communities to replace human-settled landscapes; to civil laws stripping individual citizens of their liberties and rights in the name of “native” (actually “preferred”) animals and plants. Every manifestation of maintaining or further advancing the “civilizing” of human communities’ welfare and beneficial traditions, utilizing science and historic experience, from tree-cutting, hunting, animal husbandry, fishing and energy development to power generation, national defense, policing, immigration, incarceration, and education is either under attack or has been so restricted or eliminated as to be forgotten and unrecognizable in another decade.
In a very real sense, our civilized society is like our lifetime savings. If we fail to protect it both physically and value-wise; we and our children not only become poor, we lose all ability to control our own destinies. Unless we remove the robbers that stole our civilization or prevent the inflation of our rights by government decrees that make them worthless; we cannot work to replace our rights and traditions or their value because they will simply disappear again. Our civilized society depends on many things from just laws to agreements among ourselves on common values and virtues. When laws are passed (think Endangered Species Act, Race and Sex Preferences and Gun Possession and Travel Restrictions) that pervert our Constitutional guarantees and change our cultural, historic and traditional norms from religious practices to the education of our children and how we live our lives: the forces driving such change can fairly be described as heretical attacks, or a heresy, aimed at our civilization and our individual civil liberties.
This heresy and its quasi-religious make-up came to my attention recently in a Wall Street Journal titled Back to Nature. The author opined about “restoring” the “countryside” by converting government lands and land bought by wealthy sponsors and Non-Government Organizations “back to its savage state”. The “movement” is named “rewilding” and it claims millions of acres from Kenya and Britain to Los Angeles, Wisconsin and Montana. All manner of “Conservation Projects” welcome select, paying visitors to “Wolves and Wine Pairings” in Sweden, Italy and Portugal to a Kenyan “Retreat” complete with “lectures from an expert on ‘hands-on healing’”. A Wisconsin Wilderness offers “one to four-month training to be a ‘forest monk’” “all the while inviting their own spiritual awakening”, and all for only “$10,000 per person”.
In addition to all this quasi-religious justification, I noted the recent releases and “scientific” twaddle about the latest wild animal being introduced into the settled landscapes of The Lower 48 States– the buffalo. There were many very good reasons that free-roaming buffalo were eliminated on the Great Plains at great effort and expense 150+ years ago. Total incompatibility with farming, grazing livestock, homes, roads, towns are but a few. The recent myths about killing buffalo to starve Native people or for Sport hunting are merely propaganda about an ancillary effect meant to engender sympathy and support for the reintroduction of buffalo and “savage” landscapes while vilifying hunting and hunters, merely one of many means that effected the elimination of buffalo.
Like Government Issue wolves and grizzly bears spreading today throughout western and upper midwestern settled landscapes of The Lower 48 States under government force: buffalo will likewise cause unbearable expenses to ranchers, farmers and other rural residents. Buffalo will multiply and roam wider and wider areas and rural people will be told to not harm them when they ruin crops and fences and gardens; when they roam into towns in winter; when they attack hunting dogs or hunters after other animals; when they (dark-coated and all 1400 lbs. of one) stand on dark roads at night as rural people drive home at night or go to work early in the morning; or when they are startled and run wildly where children and elderly resident are in harm’s way. Buffalo introductions are actually meant to do these things, and more, in ever-widening arcs and circles around these “rewilded” locations that are not fenced or inadequately fenced (very expensive) or poorly maintained to keep these rural life decimators out of civilized, settled landscapes. Why, you might ask is this being done? To, according to the article, “turn ranchland into prairie or farms into forest” is why! What they call, “spiritual rewilding” is the goal. Note that this is the opposite of the #1 definition of “civilize”, “To make civil; bring out of a savage state.” Buffalo and large predators like wolves and grizzly bears destroy civilization; and in the process return all of us eventually into a “savage state”.
When Dutch rewilders introduced “deer and Konik horses to a 12,300-acre parcel of marshland outside Amsterdam but failed to cull the herd in winter or introduce predators, the animals began to starve, and distraught citizens found themselves pitching hay over the fence”. Note the “need” for predators and the aversion to “culling”; just like the advocates for introduced GI wolves and grizzly bears in The Lower 48 States. The spreading and protection of wolves, grizzly bears and cougars with the added and continual call for an end to “culling” by anyone of any animal at any time now gets a new character in this play; buffalo herds!
Driving it all is an heretical philosophy called “spiritual” rewilding that purports to have “spiritual” roots and to train “monks” to ““turn ranchland into prairie or farms into forest”.
Quite by accident, when I read the WSJ article on Back to Nature, I was in the midst of reading a book, Docilitas,by a favorite philosopher of mine, Fr. James V. Schall, a retired Jesuit from Georgetown University (not one of my favorite Universities). He has a PhD in Political Philosophy, taught political philosophy at Georgetown University for many years until recently retiring. He is the author of numerous books and countless essays on philosophy, theology, education, morality, and other topics. His most recent book is On Islam: A Chronological Record, 2002-2018 (Ignatius Press, 2018).
I had only just read Chapter 2 of Docilitas, INTELLECTUAL RESOURCES, when this “monk”, “spiritual”, “back to its savage state”, “rewilding” business came to my attention. The opening sentence of the Chapter began, “We are familiar with the expression ‘natural resources’.” It went on from there for 8 pages to make some very apt and incisive observations about “man”, “why totalitarian theory is connected to ecological theory” and “the new ‘god’ (or sometimes ‘goddess’) who rules the ecological world.” I would like to list some quotes from Chapter 2 that I believe any American, regardless of religious background, should find beneficial in understanding the true nature of this modern heresy of “ecological theory”. The first step in opposing or supporting any such theory is to understand it. I will follow these select quotes with one last comment regarding how this environmental movement has, is and will continue to affect; like buffalo, predators, et al; a wider area and every nook and cranny of our governance and society if not reoriented into a human-friendly and rural-supported system of wild plant and animal management in Western Civilization.
Quotes from Chapter 2 of Docilitas, by Fr. James V. Schall –
“Natural Resources” refers to the myriads of things in the universe that are simply there without any added human intervention. The Epistle to the Hebrews uses the memorable expression, “things not made by human hands.”
“Man, himself, is a ‘natural resource.’”
“Whenever and wherever he appears, he is already completely what he is, (My Bolding. Jim B) though, unlike the rest of material creation, not always as he finally ought to be, which latter also depends on his own freedom, if not grace.”
“Our ‘second’ human creation, whereby we decide what we make ourselves to be, will depend on no one other than ourselves.”
“Human beings, who are evidently themselves ‘by nature’, can in turn ‘use’ what is there for their own purposes. They can also think about why they are there, something nothing else in the physical cosmos can do.”
“Probably, we can find no more obvious division of existing things than between those beings that think about things and those which are thought about”. “And because we can think about things, evidently, we can use them or relate to them to our own purposes. Most people most of the time have thought this connection of mind and things simply made sense.”
“Recent ecological theory has sought to reverse this ‘primacy of man’ relationship. The world, it is claimed, is superior to man. He does not transcend it. Instead of the cosmos being ‘for man’, we now want to instruct ourselves that man is for the cosmos. He is subordinate to it, a mere miniscule part of it. It is greater than he. The ‘health’ of the cosmos subsumes man into itself, not vice versa. Or even more graphically, man is a threat to the cosmos. Evil does not come into the world through man’s free will, as was the case in Genesis. It comes because of his very existence in the world and his exigencies.”
“This ‘higher’ status of the world to man, of course, is itself an idea that does not reside in the cosmos but in some human minds. Ecology and environmentalism as they are explained become a new faith, a new system. It is by no means obvious that the cosmos is more important than the intelligent beings within it. Even more, theories that subordinate man to the cosmos become a new politics of control. Such theories in fact are more political than they are scientific. What the world or universe can ‘support’ is itself subject to theories that purport to know what the capacity of the world is. If man is the real threat to the world, then, obviously, those who control politics in its name will control man. This is why classical totalitarian theory is connected to ecological theory.”
“Since man and his desires are said to be the cause of disorder, they can be reduced to order and enforced by coercion to what our theory allows. Man, in this view, is in the universe. He is to make as little dent on it as possible. He has no transcendent purpose other than keeping the world in steady existence down the ages.”
“The individual human beings who, at one time or another, inhabit the world have no significance in themselves. Each merely keeps the species alive down the ages. The cosmos is a ‘success’ to the extent that it looks like it did before man appeared, however he appeared.”
“Since, it is said, resources are finite, every generation is responsible for distributing them to every other generation on the basis of what it estimates these resources are. No generation is allowed to use more than its share. Just how this ‘share’ is to be calculated becomes itself a basis of political power.”
“Some higher inner-world entity, the cosmos itself, becomes what is superior to man. This force is the new ‘god’ (or sometimes ‘goddess’) who rules the ecological world. Now eternity comes to mean not the personal destiny of finite rational persons with God, but the unending cycles of keeping the earth as it was in the beginning.”
“In any case, man must be restricted, for as long as the earth supports life, so that he does not ‘deprive’ future generations. Thus, future generations become more important than present generations. By this logic, we are all now deprived of what we need by the actions of billions who went before us on this earth, by what they took and did on this earth while they were here. All of this, no doubt, assumes there have been or will be no discoveries or developments that render the worries of the parsimonious earth out of date. The ecological world is a world without the human mind except as a tool to guarantee no changes in the world.” (My Bolding, Jim B)
“We hear complaints that the soil under the freeways and roads of this world protests its subjection to man. But again we ask, just who is doing this protesting? The only answer is not the stone or the soil but human beings imbued with a certain theory that wants to leave the stones in the ground and the roads unpaved.”
“The ‘intellectual resources’ of the beings that are not God include this understanding of themselves that they are finite. They are indeed not God. We are open to receive what is not ourselves. We can be taught. This conclusion, I think, is what Goethe meant when he said: ‘Often we are not quite sure whether in the end, we are seeing, looking, thinking, remembering, fantasizing, or believing.’ What we are sure of is that we are doing one or the other of these things in our efforts to know what is. (My Bolding. Jim B) Here is the final source of all both ‘natural and intellectual resources’.”
Two suggested takeaways –
1.We must restore the “primacy of man” in the cosmos and recognize that man has a transcendent purpose. Today we see how treating man as just another animal in the cosmos and rejecting the understanding of an afterlife with an all-powerful Creator leads us to far more than “astray”. I do not see how we can reject this ecological theory or heresy by simply rejecting it and those that propound it. If we do not accept and value the traditional mores, cultures and beliefs that have underpinned millenniums of civilizing societies how can we defend them from avid proponents of this “ecological theory” or convince others to do so? We would be like the soldier once described by GK Chesterton as fighting to the death not because of what lay before him but because of what lay behind him like his home, family and friends: except we would have nothing behind us to spur us on to fight and prevail.
2.The political power being created by this “ecological theory” and its view of man as just another animal is seeping throughout society and destroying everything it contacts like Carolina rivers after Florence. When we accept this theory and vision of man: why is it wrong to declare disparate rights to persons based on sex or race? Why is it wrong to prefer certain animals over humans? Why is it wrong for government to seize control of or abolish religious practices? Why is it wrong to protect deadly animals attacking humans? Why is it wrong to kill humans in the womb while harshly punishing humans that kill wolf pups or manufacture or sell fur products? Why is it wrong to steal, cheat, take property, have laws for the rich but not the poor? Why is anything right or wrong?
The answer is, when you accept the “ecological theory” and the power it creates like some atomic reactor; you accept the totalitarian rule that such power breeds and you will have no choice but to watch it seep into everything we do and everywhere we go.
Either we restore what once inhabited all these empty churches to give us the courage to stamp out this heresy, or we will watch things get worse for our descendants in a nasty world we soon won’t recognize.
Jim Beers
26 Sep. 2018
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Jim Beers is a retired US Fish & Wildlife Service Wildlife Biologist, Special Agent, Refuge Manager, Wetlands Biologist, and Congressional Fellow. He was stationed in North Dakota, Minnesota, Nebraska, New York City, and Washington DC. He also served as a US Navy Line Officer in the western Pacific and on Adak, Alaska in the Aleutian Islands. He has worked for the Utah Fish & Game, Minneapolis Police Department, and as a Security Supervisor in Washington, DC. He testified three times before Congress; twice regarding the theft by the US Fish & Wildlife Service of $45 to 60 Million from State fish and wildlife funds and once in opposition to expanding Federal Invasive Species authority. He resides in Eagan, Minnesota with his wife of many decades.
Jim Beers is available to speak or for consulting.
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