Among the eco-fans

Where it's important to remember that "fan" is short for "fanatic".

First up, of course, has to be that demented ad for something called the "10:10 climate change campaign" in Britain. Apparently, it was thought that showing warmist believers in positions of authority blowing minority skeptics, including school children, to bloody bits would be funny. Which, in terms of the comedy of stupidity, it kind of is, but not in the way intended. Anyway, here's a link to the original (hastily taken down by the 10:10 campaign itself, but not hastily enough to prevent it going viral). And here's a re-mix, which nicely exposes the murderous rectitude at its base:

Thanks to Hot Air

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The next stop doesn't have quite the impact of the previous, and at least doesn't pretend that it's "funny" -- it's a post by Doctor Science at Obsidian Wings, entitled "Of Stink Bugs and Men". It's point is simply that human beings, in coming out of Africa, are an "invasive" species, like, oh, stink bugs, kudzu, or cane toads. Never mind that the nasty examples mentioned are nasty only in a human-centered orientation in the first first place, nor that every single land animal is also an "invasive" species, nor that the "invasion" of new ecological spaces is a natural aspect of evolution for every species that ever existed -- no, what's intended by this particular observation is just a variation on the common theme in the large pathological wing of eco-ideology, that human beings are a "cancer on the planet". As the Doctor says:

The overwhelming factor, for H. sapiens as well as stink bugs, is that our native range is adapted to us -- humans or bugs become dangerously invasive when we can escape not just the limited space of our native range, but the constraints on our population that come from other co-native species: predators or parasites (including diseases).

Thanks to Megan McArdle 

If we strip the pathology from this, though, it becomes more interesting -- human beings became successful, in an evolutionary sense, when we escaped the constraints of our initial environment and began to colonize wider spaces, following retreating glaciers into environments that must have seemed impossibly harsh in comparison to our origins. The courage and drive of those early "invaders" can provide us with a good lesson now -- having spread to all corners of the globe, isn't it time that we start to look beyond it? Those who look upon humanity as a kind of stink bug or cancer, of course, would say no.

I'd say yes.