Homo Sapiens, Get Lost

...Over the last few hundred years in the West, the moral foundations of society were profoundly pro-human. Judeo-Christian moral philosophy and secular humanism both promoted human flourishing and the protection of individual rights as primary purposes of society. But in recent years we have witnessed a rebellion against “human exceptionalism” — the view that ultimate moral value comes with being a member of the human species. Spain, for example, has passed the Great Ape Project into law, declaring that chimpanzees and gorillas are part of the “community of equals” with people. Switzerland has declared that individual plants have “intrinsic dignity” and that “decapitating” wildflowers is a great moral wrong. Ecuador’s new constitution provides for “rights of nature” that are equal to those of Homo sapiens. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation has a website called “Planet Slayer” aimed at children. It features “Dr. Schpinkee’s Greenhouse Calculator,” which helps kids add up their carbon score, a game that ends with a “carbon hog” bloodily exploding. Above its remains a legend appears, telling the respondent how much longer he can live before he will have used up his “share of the planet.” Here and abroad, environmentalism itself seems to be evolving from a movement dedicated to conserving resources, preserving pristine areas, and protecting endangered species into an anti-humanistic ideology that increasingly disdains humankind as a scourge that literally threatens the existence of “the planet.” This subversion of environmentalism was conceived and gestated in the Deep Ecology movement, inspired by Norwegian philosopher Arne Næss in the 1970s. Næss promoted an “environmental egalitarianism” based on the belief that nature and its constituent parts should be given equal consideration with human beings. Once flora and fauna were elevated to the level of human importance, it didn’t take long to brand human exceptionalism as arrogant and harmful to nature...NRO