Business & Media Institute | May 07, 2007
Dan Gainor
Apparently, saving the whales is more important than saving 5.5 billion people. Paul Watson, founder and president of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society and famous for militant intervention to stop whalers, now warns mankind is “acting like a virus” and is harming Mother Earth.
Watson’s May 4 editorial asked the question “The Beginning of the End for Life as We Know it on Planet Earth?” Then he left no doubt about the answer. “We are killing our host the planet Earth,” he claimed and called for a population drop to less than 1 billion.
The commentary reminded readers that Watson had called humans a disease before and he wasn’t sorry. “I was once severely criticized for describing human beings as being the ‘AIDS of the Earth.’ I make no apologies for that statement,” the column continued.
Watson was invoking the worst of Robert Malthus, an English political economist who claimed that mankind was overpopulating the earth. That claimed first appeared in the late 1700s. Watson urged some solutions for mankind as part of a process to “need to re-wild the planet”:
· “No human community should be larger than 20,000 people and separated from other communities by wilderness areas.” New York, London, Paris, Moscow are all too big. Then again, so are Moose Jaw, Timbuktu and even Annapolis, Md.
· “We need vast areas of the planet where humans do not live at all and where other species are free to evolve without human interference.”
· “We need to radically and intelligently reduce human populations to fewer than one billion.”
· “Sea transportation should be by sail. The big clippers were the finest ships ever built and sufficient to our needs. Air transportation should be by solar powered blimps when air transportation is necessary.”
· At least Watson was generous and said people could still talk with one another across great distances. “Communication systems can link the communities,” he proclaimed from on high.
The Watson rant kept on going calling for everything from cutting down on the population of domesticated dogs and cats to cutting down on everything else in what he called “simplify, simplify, simplify.”
Watson essentially called for humans to return to primitive lifestyles. “We need to stop flying, stop driving cars, and jetting around on marine recreational vehicles. The Mennonites survive without cars and so can the rest of us.”