The right is understandably wary of the green movement. As it currently stands, the movement is a net negative for humanity, built on hatred of America, fabricated science, and the poison of woke “intersectionality.”

But it doesn’t have to be like this. Caring for the environment could be a bipartisan issue. But for this to occur, the movement needs a complete overhaul in both tactics and philosophy.

The left thinks that humans should change their behavior for the sake of the environment or “Mother Nature.” Environmental catastrophes are often spoken of as the “cries of Mother Earth.” The environment is personified, treated as something with inherent rights and dignities which humans are stripping from it.

The green movement on the left says that humans should eat machine-made “beyond meat” because cow flatulence is bad for the environment. In Europe, regulations around air-conditioning force citizens to live in sweltering heat, all for the environment. Thousands of acres of farmland are taken up for windmill farms that are vastly more inefficient than alternative energy forms.

These regulations miss the point of it all – the good of humans themselves. There’s no reason to save “Mother Earth,” except that her destruction would negatively impact our entire economic and environmental structure.

In the few cases where the good of humanity is the focus, the green movement immediately falls into race and gender politics, claiming that politicians’ perceived inaction is evidence of systemic racism. Phrases like “environmental justice” are used to harness the collective white guilt of America to capitulate to all sorts of wild policy demands.

Littering in the ocean is bad for humans. It presents hazards on the beaches that we enjoy, kills off the fish that we eat, and is an aesthetic nightmare. Penalizing littering, then, seems like the sort of thing that a developed country would be well within its rights to do. A country that cares about its people will be a beautiful one, since aesthetics mirror how we think about ourselves and each other.

One example in my own life is on our small homestead, where we grow a kitchen garden and raise chickens for meat and eggs. I have no qualms about watering my garden as much as I like, despite what the green movement claims about this “harmful” practice. The option to simply let my plants die in the sweltering sun makes far less sense than using gallons of water to enrich the soil, water which will then flow back into the earth in a perfect cycle of Creation. Water is meant to be used for many worthy things, and the production of my family’s food is certainly one of them.

In the raising of our chickens for meat, we practice a method where our chickens are transported in a mobile “tractor” coop across our yard, where the birds eat up weeds, grass, bugs (including nasty ticks and mosquitos), and fertilize the soil with their droppings. After a day or so when we move the tractor again, the area where they were looks dead and barren. Yet in a couple weeks, those patches of grass will be the most verdant on our property, bolstered by the healthy soil which our chickens unknowingly created while feeding themselves. When these chickens finally make it to our table, they will have done so using less grain and water than a bird raised on a factory farm, all while enriching and fertilizing the soil. Regenerative farming practices are amazing for the environment in a way that is encouraging for those of us who wish to steward our earth well, for the sake of the men and women who live here.

Scientists and researchers claim that homegrown food is five times worse for the environment than “conventionally grown” food. This claim is dubious, but also leaves out the whole reason we are stewarding our environment in the first place. Can we really claim that we would be better off if pesticide-spraying factory farms bolstered by cheap foreign labor grew all our food?

The green movement looks at only one angle, in this case “carbon emissions,” and makes policy and lifestyle recommendations based on that. But when a scientist tells us something is bad for the environment and thus should be stopped or heavily regulated, that is our first indication of an anti-human worldview. The question isn’t what is bad for the environment, but what is bad for the men and women who live in that environment.

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The republication of this article is made possible by The Fred & Rheta Skelton Center for Cultural Renewal. 

Image Credit: PikPic