Sitting in the Dark

Daniel Greenfield

Forget the World's Fair, we now have a new way to celebrate human accomplishment. Instead of going to see a vision of the future, we turn off the lights and sit in the dark for an hour. Earth Hour shows how far we have come from celebrating human accomplishment to celebrating the lack of accomplishment. For all its pretentious activism, environmentalism is a movement that promotes inaction. Don't build, don't create and don't do-- are its commandments. Turn off the lights and feel good about how much you aren't doing right now. Slacker morality at its best. While we take the electric light for granted-- to be able to read and write after dark by a clear light is a technological achievement that has transformed our civilization. Animals are governed by day and night cycles. Artificial light made it possible for us to work independently of the day and night cycle. There is no way to measure the increase in knowledge gained. And there is no better measure of the unthinking contempt of the environmentalist movement for that achievement than a call to turn off the lights and sit in the dark.

Like all environmental gimmicks, Earth Hour is perverse and hypocritical. Far more energy is consumed promoting it, then is saved by practicing it. Websites switch to black, even though broadcasting black on TV sets or displaying it on monitors actually consumes more energy. Turning off electricity to major landmarks well after working hours, and then turning it on, costs more than letting it run. So does getting 90 million people across the United States to turn their power on and off at a scheduled time. The energy savings of turning the power off, is more than offset by turning it on again. And since power companies draw down on their more expensive 'green' generators first, Earth Hour actually results in a shutdown of 'green' power.

But its sponsors don't claim that Earth Hour saves energy or prevents us from polluting the globe with every breath of carbon we exhale. Like every environmentalist stunt from flying rock stars around the world on jet planes to give Earth Day concerts to carving thousands of statues made of ice and then leaving them to melt in a public square, it's meant to bring awareness. And awareness is just compliance misspelled.

The WWF, who are behind the Earth Hour farce, have learned that alarmism and shrill attention seeking are reliable fundraising methods. One of their uglier moments was a 9/11 ad that showed hundreds of planes headed toward the World Trade Center, to highlight just how much more important their work is than fighting terrorism. Franny Armstrong of Age of Stupid, which was promoted by the WWF, ran a 10:10 campaign in the UK, whose ads featured environmentalists murdering dissenters, including a group of schoolchildren. The ads are just ad, but London's leftist former mayor, Ken Livingston had said of Age of Stupid, "Every single person in the country should be forcibly sat down on a chair and made to watch this film."

That is the dark side of environmentalism, an ugly violent side that emerges easily. The most active non-Muslim domestic terrorist group is environmental. The undercurrent of violence finds easy purchase in environmentalism's creed that the only real problem with the world is the people. No amount of turning off the lights is enough. Eventually you come around to having to turn off the people.

The Nazis were among the most enthusiastic environmentalists of their day, even the term 'Ecology' was coined by Ernst Haeckel, whose racial views served as precursors to Nazi eugenics. But while Nazi environmentalist believed that we were all really animals, they insisted that they had come a good deal further than others from the ape kingdom-- modern environmentalists believe that we are all worse than animals. In their view we are both natural and unnatural. Natural because we come from the ape and unnatural because we are intelligent. We live on the planet, but we don't belong on it. So the environmentalist view of man has become ominously similar to the Nazi view of the Jew.

The incompatibility of productive man with the natural world is as much as a fundamental tenet of environmentalism-- as the incompatibility of the Jew with Germany was to the Nazis. Everything we do is destructive, because of what we are. We are tool builders, inventors and producers. And the environmentalist movement is aimed at convincing us to stop being these things. To turn off the lights, make do with less and march back to the caves with a few clever ad campaigns and a catchy tune. Zero Population campaigns and calls for mandatory one child families are the eugenics of environmentalism. The old eugenicists were concerned with improving the human breed by promoting the reproduction of some, and preventing the reproduction of others. Environmental eugenics treats all of mankind as an inferior race.

And not only mankind, but the animals that man has domesticated and bred-- cows, dogs and cats. Why do you think PETA kills thousands of dogs and cats a year, opposes house pets, promotes the euthanasia of wild cats, pet spaying and its staffers have even been known to kidnap animals and then kill them. (Which is why campaign posters for PETA should feature Cruella DeVill, not some random actress looking to shore up her environmental credentials.) Or why the Global Warming crowd has made cow emissions into their whipping bovine. The environmentalist movement does not believe in animal rights, it doesn't care about the cruelty of eating a hamburger-- its goal is to eliminate domesticated animals.

Environmentalism is not motivated by a love for all creatures-- but by a romanticized idea of natural wildness over human cultivation. It prefers the wild meadow to the wheat field, the swamp to the garden, the wolf to the dog, and the tiger to the house cat. This preference is not scientific, it is emotional, rooted in an antipathy to industrialization and human development. It wraps itself in the cloak of science, but it is actually whole reactionary, a longing for a romanticized past that never existed. In the environmental bible-- man is the source of all evil. The transition from the nomadic to the domestic, the village to the city, and the craftsman to the factory, their version of original sin.

The environmentalist began with a distaste for human civilization and a fetishization of the rural, even though like Rousseau or Tolstoy they had nothing to do with a need for actual labor. The champions of "naturalism" were inevitably artists and writers who were enthusiastic about being in touch with nature. Then came the "Nature Faker" crafting myths about the genius and high moral standards of wild animals. Domestic animals in such stories were always wicked and dumb, while wild animals lived deep and spiritual lives out in the woods.

The world was divided into two polar opposites, the green and the gray, in an apocalyptic struggle. Either man would drown the world in industry, or he would return to a natural way of life through a lethal virus (Mary Shelley, The Last Man, 1826), a devastating war (H.G. Wells), oppressive social policies (Edward Bellamy) or eco-terrorism (The Monkey Wrench Gang). As time went on, the scenarios became more stark and the outcome apocalyptic culminating in the two great environmental myths, nuclear winter and global warming, that served the same purpose for environmentalists as apocalypses do for all religions. A time when the sinful order is overturned and the earth is renewed to make way for the faithful.

Man is the environmentalist's devil. He must be beaten, broken and subjugated. Even the animals he has bred, who are the spark of his genius, must be taken out and killed. Take away his food and his power. Blame him for the natural cycles of the planet and the inevitable extinction of species that goes on whether he is there or not. Take away his technology and his inventions. Smother his religion and his faith. Tell him that the humblest bacteria is better than him, for it is dumb and follows its natural instincts, while he insists on using his mind. Take away his primacy and his learning. Put out his lights and leave him in the dark.

It is happening now as we speak. The environmental movement is tenacious, fanatical and deceptive. Its creed is the undoing of all human progress as the Kingdom of Gaia on earth. There is money to be made from that, as there is in all revolutions, money to be made by selling indulgences and endorsements. Wealth moving from the sinners to the faithful to atone for their sins against mother nature. But underlying the petty and the great inconveniences of living under an environmental regime, from dirty clothes to high taxes, the obligation to listen to the hypocrisies and false pieties of the Gorean clergy of environmentalism heating their mansions while the poor freeze on energy rations, is that darker reality. Environmentalism is an anti-human movement with a vicious hostility toward the civilization he has built. Whatever he has built, it must destroy.


The gap between darkness and light is a profound symbol in every civilization. The light of knowledge pitted against the shadow dark of ignorance. The light reveals, but the darkness hides. Civilization and the moral code exist in the light of awareness, but the darkness is home to unthinking bestial things. To call for a return to the darkness is a profound bit of symbolism. It is a ritual act laden with unknowing meaning. A civilization that celebrates a return to the darkness for even a single hour is longing for a return to a more profound form of darkness. A darkness of the soul.