Man is wolf to wolf

The Left undoubtedly has the best of it, though. They certainly have the best of this volume, which contains nothing of Stephen Bodio's at all—nothing at all sympathetic to hunting, except as carried out by Ameri- can Indians. Bill McKibben, the editor of American Earth, has been a keen propagandist against global warming and an apostle of “sustainability.” In his prefatory note to the lyrics of Woody Guthrie's song “This Land Is Your Land,” McKibben tells us: “Were I in charge of such matters, [Guthrie's song] would alternate weeks with 'America the Beautiful' as our national anthem.” I'll confess I've always liked the song, but given Guthrie's stint as a columnist for The Daily Worker, I doubt it will ever be a favorite at Republican National Conventions.

Woody Guthrie is not the worst of it. Here is the white-hating, man-hating, and most particularly white-man-hating—or, as McKibben says in his preface to the extract, novelist of “the struggle against racism and patriarchy”—Alice Walker, railing against “Indian killers and slave owners Washington and Jefferson and the like.” Here is the “literature of social justice” novelist Barbara Kingsolver, though rhapsodizing unpolitically, for the most part, about her Appalachian cabin. Here is the liberal New York Times editor Joseph Lelyveld at the first Earth Day observance in 1970, quoting the ultraliberal New York City Mayor John V. Lindsay with approval: “Beyond words like ecology, environment, and pollution there is a simple question: Do we want to live or die?” (Probably the victims registered in the near-tripling of New York's homicide rate on Lindsay's watch would have preferred to live.)

Here are Carl Anthony and Renée Soule yoking together, with all necessary rhetorical violence, the diversity of the natural world and the great modern cult of “diversity” that pays the salaries of a million talentless sub-intellectual busybodies like themselves:

Ecologists and social justice advocates both promote respect for diversity. That respect depends upon a mature capacity to embrace and even celebrate apparent contradictions. This internal stance of inclusivity is the key to ecopsychology, where a healthy multicultural, multibiotic, multiregional and multifacted psyche merges and blends gracefully with Earth's ecology.

The leap from the social to the ecological, from our injustice to each other to the insults we inflict on the natural world—from, as it were, “man is wolf to man” to “man is wolf to wolf”—seems to come very readily to writers of the multicultural-left tendency. The palm here must go to Alice Walker:

Some of us have become used to thinking that woman is the nigger of the world, that a person of color is the nigger of the world, that a poor person is the nigger of the world. But, in truth, Earth itself has become the nigger of the world.

~ more... ~