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| Hijacking "Spaceship Earth" Claiming that Earth is a spaceship with limited resources requiring central control, globalists are steering humanity into the black hole of UN-dominated world government. [T]he ethical system which will dominate the world-state will be shaped primarily to favor the procreation of what is fine and efficient and beautiful in humanity....And for the rest — those swarms of black and brown and |
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| yellow people who do not come into the needs of efficiency? Well, the world is not a charitable institution, and I take it they will have to go. The whole tenor and meaning of the world, as I see it, is that they have to go. — H.G. Wells, Anticipations, 1901 Our society is turning toward more and more needless consumption. It is a vicious circle that I compare to cancer.... Should we eliminate suffering, diseases? The idea is beautiful, but perhaps not a benefit for the long term. We should not allow our dread of diseases to endanger the future of our species. This is a terrible thing to say. In order to stabilize world population, it is necessary to eliminate 350,000 people per day. It is a horrible thing to say, but it’s just as bad not to say it. — Jacques Cousteau UNESCO Courier (French language edition), November 1991 The choices that confront humanity are starkly drawn: We must either take "control of our own destiny" by making immediate and radical changes in the way we live, or our planetary biosphere will collapse. This message is a staple of apocalyptic science fiction. Used as a plot for an escapist novel or big-screen thriller, that premise can be entertaining. But it is potentially deadly in the hands of real-world coercive utopians, of whom Wells and Cousteau were typical. Though the writings and pronouncements of such people often seem derived from the farthest fringes of science fiction, they are deadly serious in their ambition to make sci-fi into science fact by seizing global power. Collectivist politics require public acceptance of a scarcity-based mindset, in which people defer to the directives of an anointed elite regarding distribution of wealth and resources. In promoting this mindset, coercive utopians have found the sci-fi-inspired concept of earth as a "spaceship" to be singularly useful. Eco-science Gone Mad The 2002 edition of The Living Planet, an annual report from the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), usefully illustrates the convergence between science fiction and radical environmentalism. Published in anticipation of the forthcoming UN "Earth Summit" in South Africa, the report earned a wave of headlines for predicting that unless drastic measures are taken to curb human reproduction and consumption, by 2050 the Earth will "expire" — and humanity will be forced to colonize two earth-type planets elsewhere in the cosmos. "Using the image of the need for mankind to colonize space as a stark illustration of the problems facing Earth, the [WWF] warns that either consumption rates are dramatically and rapidly lowered or the planet will no longer be able to sustain its growing population," summarized the July 7th Guardian of London. "It seems things are getting worse faster than possibly ever before," declared Martin Jenkins of the World Conservation Monitoring Centre in Cambridge, England, which helped produce the report. "Never before has one single species had such an overwhelming influence. We are entering uncharted territory." The "one single species" referred to by Jenkins is humanity — a group to which he and his fellow eco-radicals belong, their pose of Olympian detachment from the rest of us notwithstanding. The WWF report’s stilted language — a mixture of apocalyptic warnings and clinical descriptions of humanity as merely one "species" within a global "biosphere" — offers echoes of science fiction themes found in countless novels and films. And some of the environmental solutions offered by the WWF and its eco-radical comrades could be derived from the "mad scientist" premise frequently found in the horror genre. In familiar fashion, the WWF indicts "population growth" for causing humanity’s ecological "overdraft." More than a decade ago, Britain’s Prince Philip, who heads the WWF, grimly suggested that if he were to be reincarnated he would return as a "killer virus" with a mission to decimate the surplus human population. Genocidal daydreams of this sort abound among radical environmentalists. "Human happiness, and certainly human fecundity, are not as important as a wild and healthy planet," opined David Garber, a research biologist with the National Park Service. "Until such time as Homo Sapiens should decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along." While world-renowned transplant surgeon Sir Ronald Calne, author of the book Too Many People, doesn’t endorse unleashing a lethal virus on the population at large, he does call for developing "the ‘O’ virus, a hypothetical fertility limiter," which would be injected into women worldwide and reversed only upon government approval. In addition, Calne recommends imposing global population controls akin to those used in Communist China, including a system of "reproduction licenses" and a strict two-child quota. David Brower of Friends of the Earth agrees that "Childbearing [should be] a punishable crime against society, unless the parents hold a government license.... All potential parents [should be] required to use contraceptive chemicals, the government issuing antidotes to citizens chosen for childbearing." In his 1990 Gaia Atlas of Future Worlds, Dr. Norman Myers, an advisor to the World Bank, the World Resources Institute, and various UN agencies, praised Communist China’s population control program, which employs coerced abortion and infanticide to meet strict demographic targets. "Is it too far-fetched to imagine that one day people might be issued with a warrant entitling them to have a single child — a type of green stamp?" wrote Dr. Myers. "This warrant might even carry commercial value, allowing individuals to decide not to have children at all and to sell their entitlements to others wanting larger families." Myers’ "green stamp" idea revisited a proposal made decades ago by the late economist Kenneth Boulding, who advised both the UN and the League of Nations. Boulding recommended issuing women a marketable license permitting them to have a limited number of children: "The right to have children should be a marketable commodity, bought and traded by individuals but absolutely limited by the state." "Spaceship Earth" Boulding may not have been the first to urge imposing such draconian measures, but he did devise a cunning justification of a global garrison state: The concept of "Spaceship Earth," a closed, finite system in which resources must be centrally regulated for the good of all. "Earth has become a spaceship, not only in our imagination but also in the hard realities of the social, biological, and physical system in which man is enmeshed," stated Boulding in a May 1965 address at Washington State University. "Man is finally going to have to face the fact that he is a biological system living in an ecological system.... It is clear that much human behavior and many human institutions in the past, which were appropriate to an infinite earth, are entirely inappropriate to a small closed spaceship." "We cannot have cowboys and Indians, for instance, in a spaceship, or even a cowboy ethic," Boulding continued. "We cannot afford unrestrained conflict, and we almost certainly cannot afford national sovereignty in an unrestricted sense." The creation of "machinery for controlling the total numbers of population" is a pressing priority, Boulding maintained. In a separate essay entitled "Toward a World Social Contract," Boulding examined possible global mechanisms to abate conflict within "Spaceship Earth," including "universal policed disarmament down to internal police levels" and "the organizational union of the armed forces of the world under a limited world government" — both of which are key elements of unfolding official U.S. government disarmament policies envisioning a world "effectively controlled" by the United Nations.* Eagerly embraced by the opinion-molding elite, Boulding’s concept captured the public imagination following the dramatic Christmas 1968 voyage of Apollo 8 — the first manned spacecraft to orbit the moon. The three Americans aboard that vessel were the first humans ever to see the entire globe at once. An international television audience was treated to that stunning spectacle during a dramatic live Christmas Eve telecast from the spacecraft: As the earth rose over the lunar horizon, Commander Frank Borman and his crew read the creation account from the Book of Genesis. Along with millions of others, Borman and his shipmates looked on the awe-inspiring sight as a testament to the Creator. Opinion-molding elites bent on indoctrinating the masses in the gospel of globalism worked to misdirect that reverence by focusing it on the creation, rather than the Creator. In 1972, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, an inter-governmental organization wedded to the UN, published Alternative Educational Futures in the United States and in Europe, by Willis Harman, president of the Institute of Noetic Sciences (INS), a New Age "think tank" specializing in research into "consciousness and human potential." According to Harman: "Nothing less than a new guiding philosophy [of education] will do.... It is not enough to be intellectually aware that at this point in history nationalism is a suicidal course.... Educational experiences must be contemplated which are akin to psychotherapy … that result in a felt realization of the inevitability of one inseparable world, and a felt shift in the most basic values and premises on which one builds one’s life." Educators had a responsibility to preside over "a shift from a parochial to a ‘one world’ view of ‘Spaceship Earth’...." Harman has done more than his share to bring about this dramatic "shift." He has served as a consultant to the White House National Goals Research Staff, in which capacity, according to his own account, he "formed and led a team to assist the U.S. Office of Education in efforts to apply the newly emerging discipline of futures research to guiding the nation’s policies in education and educational research." Harman has been a conspicuous presence at Mikhail Gorbachev’s "State of the World" forums, and the former Soviet dictator has long maintained that his vision of "Perestroika" was inspired by the "Spaceship Earth" concept. "The new thinking postulated [that] we are one planet regardless of confrontations, ideological and physiological struggles; we are one planet, one human civilization," Gorbachev told a PBS interviewer in April 2001. "There are others living in the world, so why should we act in a way that could blow up our planet, our spaceship Earth?" "Every one of us should feel a single crew of Spaceship Earth," declared Gorbachev in a May 24, 1993 speech at The Hague on behalf of his Green Cross International organization. "This symbolic manner of speaking may be a bit trite, but still I think that we cannot yet say that our thinking has adjusted to the idea that we are indeed acting as though we are passengers of one spaceship." As a result, he asserted, "we are facing the task of formulating and processing [new] values and new social goals.... We can even begin to think about renouncing economic growth as it has evolved over the past two centuries. We face a formidable task in reorienting the mentality of mankind towards a more human economy. The yardstick for assessing the effectiveness of such economy would be, above all, the safe and sustainable progress of mankind." To anybody with even a cursory understanding of Marxism, there is nothing novel about the "new" values and social goals Gorbachev suggests for "Spaceship Earth." Nor is it surprising that Gorbachev describes "mankind" as "a unity [that is] increasingly becoming a single subject in international politics" and calls for the UN being given the role of "‘channeling’ international development" in the interest of "sustainable development." The UN’s agenda for global "sustainable development" — meaning global regulation of all human activity everywhere on the planet — is set out in the mammoth Agenda 21 document produced at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. From Science Fiction to Religion That Mikhail Gorbachev, a life-long Communist, is an avowed atheist did not prevent him from working as a co-architect of the UN "Earth Charter," which he described as "a kind of Ten Commandments for the environment, something that no one would be allowed to violate." During the 2000 "Millennium Forum" at UN headquarters, Stephen C. Rockefeller, a member of the Earth Charter Commission and chairman of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund (the tax-exempt foundation that funds much of the radical environmental movement), said that the Earth Charter is "a declaration of interdependence and responsibility, [and] a universal code of conduct," as well as "an attempt to formulate an integrated legal framework for all sustainable development and environmental law." Scheduled to be presented to the General Assembly this year, the Earth Charter is, according to Rockefeller, a "soft" law document that will prepare the way for a "New Covenant" treaty — a "hard" law treaty through which the UN would claim the power to enforce regulations governing human interactions with the global biosphere. In his remarks to the 2000 UN gathering, Rockefeller — the Earth Charter’s primary author — said that a July 4, 1994 address by former Czech President Vaclav Havel inspired him to participate in the project. Havel described the need for humanity to understand that "our destiny is not dependent merely on what we do for ourselves, but also for what we do for Gaia...." In the rarefied circles of globalist eco-paganism, the earth is referred to as "Gaia," a self-sustaining, holistic entity worthy not only of protection, but also of worship. In his speech Havel declared: "we are not here alone for ourselves alone, but we are an integral part of higher, mysterious entities against whom it is not advisable to blaspheme." This occultic vision was enthusiastically "seconded by President Gorbachev," recalled Rockefeller, and it was decided to encapsulate that "spiritual vision in an Earth Charter." "Unless human beings take seriously their responsibility to the community of life — and not just for it — we [will] not make the major changes in our life that must be made in order to protect the planet," explained Rockefeller. The Charter’s insistence that human beings are merely part of a "community of life" inverts the created order described in Genesis, in which man — acting under God’s sovereignty, and complying with His laws — was given dominion over nature. By contrast, the Earth Charter affirms "that individual living creatures — animals, plants, and micro-organisms — are worthy of moral consideration … quite apart from their value to human beings," noted Rockefeller. It also commands that humanity "adopt patterns of production, consumption, and reproduction that safeguard Earth’s regenerative capacities, human rights, and community well-being." This directive would require, in principle, abolishing property rights, and even the right to life, where the "greater good" of the "community of life" requires it. It is a larger and immeasurably more malignant version of the concept embodied in the Endangered Species Act, which has inflicted unimaginable damage on property rights and livelihoods throughout the Western United States. This September 28th, the Earth Charter Initiative will convene its second annual "Earth Charter Community Summits," a series of satellite-linked events across the country described by the organization as "a simultaneous celebration and commitment to the values and principles of the Earth Charter … our Declaration of Interdependence." While some may dismiss such devotees of the "Spaceship Earth" notion as mere space cadets, this thought should be kept in mind: If such people continue to amass the power that they seek, how will they treat occupants of the planetary "spaceship" unwilling to defer to their demands? Article originally appeared in The New American |