Environmentalism, assault on Western society

First published in Feb. 25, 2022, Contrepoints

Posted on February 25, 2022

By Nicolas de Pape.

Samuel Furfari, former senior civil servant at the European Commission’s Directorate General for Energy, warns against environmentalism, a liberticidal ideology which often hides, behind good intentions such as the fight for the sustainability of our biosphere, an agenda totalitarian which primarily targets our Western civilization.

Doctor of applied sciences, polytechnic engineer and president of the European Society of Engineers and Industrialists, Samuel Furfari taught until recently at the Free University of Brussels from where he took a well-deserved retirement. He is the author of numerous books including Hydrogen Utopia and The Urgency to Electrify Africa which dismantle contemporary truisms. The latest is titled Ecologism, Assault Against Western Society.

He warns against the new “green Marxism”, namely a punitive ecology presented as progress for a humanity that is more respectful of the environment, but which contains the seeds of the advent of a real dictatorship.

He quotes in the preamble the author of Narnia, C.S. Lewis who underlined:

“Of all tyrannies, those sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive…Those who torment us for our good will torment us endlessly because they do so with the approval of their own conscience. »

The scene is set…

Anti-humanist ideology
Because if Professor Furfari positions himself resolutely (this was his main activity at the European Commission) against all pollution and respect for nature, he underlines that the theoreticians of ecology go much further today than the only defense of the environment: they want to set up a new society in which humans are subordinate to nature.

His demonstration begins with a return to the sources of environmentalism: Hans Jonas, author in particular in 1979 of The Responsibility Principle. An ethics for technological civilization. Jonas develops his an-humanist vision of the world there when he specifies that Man, who destroys nature by his predation, is not the only creator of values and is no better than the other elements of nature.

“A vision totally opposed to Judeo-Christianity and the Enlightenment”, specifies Samuel Furfari. Hans Jonas is also a precursor of ecological millennialisms when he develops the concept of “Fear-Principle”, used today in particular in the “awareness” of global warming, and which amounts to perverting the precautionary principle by constantly terrorizing the population on the hypothetical advent of a climatic cataclysm:

“Perhaps this dangerous game of mystification of the masses is the only way that politics will ultimately have to offer: to give influence to the Fear-Principle under the guise of the Hope-Principle. »

Jonas also develops the concept of “pious lies”, essential to convince the masses and takes the opportunity to praise socialism which conceptualizes the popular acceptance of an imposed renunciation regime. According to him, a socialist society would more automatically induce the path of economic frugality. While, recalls Furfari, in their claim to compete with capitalist productivism, communist regimes have obtained some results, but at the cost of a very great environmental cost… All you have to do is travel to the former Soviet Union and contemplate its nature ravaged by irrational decisions: think of the salinization of the Aral Sea.

Environmentalism is not Marxism
It is important to emphasize, however, the differences between Marxism and ecologism: Marxism (in its Leninist and Trotskyist component in particular) posits that “electricity will replace God” and that “Man will only be freed from religion when a technique will free him from any degrading dependence on nature”. As such, the famous metaphor of the watermelon “green on the outside and red on the inside” is not completely relevant.

Environmentalism is also anti-Christian, says Samuel Furfari, who is also a pastor, quoting another great environmental theorist, Lynn White:

“We will continue to have a worsening ecological crisis until we reject the Christian axiom that nature has no other reason to exist than to serve man. »

But what about contemporary environmentalists?

Inevitably the liberals, they are very influenced by ecological orthodoxy, underlines Furfari. But their ideology is very largely based on the societal spectrum of minorities of all kinds, valuing for example “the plurality of sexual orientations and gender identities”. Political ecology, an oxymoron if ever there was one, since one cannot pretend to be both science and politics, in fact, the brew is very large. and…

But eclectic as it is, environmentalism pursues its real goal: to destroy Western society, based on technical progress and human development. While energy consumption is positively correlated with the human development index, environmentalism “obviously no longer lies in the debate of environmental protection, but in the attempt to impose degrowth and voluntary frugality”, points out Furfari, recalling the benefits of technical progress (vaccination) and plastic derivatives of petroleum (protective material in particular) in the fight against Covid-19. And who says energy consumption, says CO2 emissions… In this respect, based on United Nations statistics, Furfari offers (page 69) a graph showing that life expectancy at birth increases as a function of CO2 emissions . A heresy for most mainstream media… which fail to recall that the European Union is only responsible for 9% of global emissions and that China is responsible for 30%.

Any policy to fight against global warming that would emanate solely from Europe would therefore be doomed to failure.

A very violent nature
Going against the grain of good-natured environmentalism that seduces political elites and notoriously European elites, Furfari also reminds us that nature is anything but benevolent towards us. In addition to viruses such as Covid-19, it regularly sends us signals of its great violence in the form of tsunamis, volcanic eruptions and earthquakes.

Nature is nothing idyllic. It is tough. It is tough and ruthless and while one can try to manage it and minimize the dangers, it is generally out of control.

Samuel Furfari concludes on the European Union that he has served so much as a senior civil servant with a quote from Renaud Girard from Le Figaro:

Europeans cannot limit themselves to making their continent a gigantic low-carbon amusement park. The Soviet Union died of the excesses of its red ideology. Our Europe must save itself from the excesses of its green ideology.