Walter Block in The Wall Street Journal: Hating Humanity Won’t Get You Canceled

Hating Humanity Won’t Get You Canceled
By Walter Block

Until such time as Homo sapiens should decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along.” So pronounced David M. Graber in 1989. In case it wasn’t clear he was serious, he added that he was “not interested in the utility of a particular species, or free-flowing river, or ecosystem, to mankind. They have intrinsic value, more value—to me—than another human body, or a billion of them.”

Who is this guy? Some uneducated drunk mouthing off at a bar? No. He’s a scientist with a doctorate in biology from the University of California, Berkeley (that figures). He was employed as chief scientist of the Pacific West Region for the U.S. National Park Service for more than three decades. He is a published author in refereed journals. The article I’m quoting—a review of Bill McKibben’s “The End of Nature”—was published in the Los Angeles Times.

Why was Mr. Graber so eager for masses of human beings to drop dead? Because, he wrote, “human happiness” is “not as important as a wild and healthy planet. I know social scientists who remind me that people are part of nature, but it isn’t true. Somewhere along the line—at about a billion years ago, maybe half that—we quit the contract and became a cancer. We have become a plague upon ourselves and upon the Earth.”

All we have to do to cease being a “cancer” on the planet is turn the clock back half a billion years—roughly 1,000 times the span since Homo sapiens emerged—and Mr. Graber will get off our case. True, that would mean no airplanes, polio vaccines, metals, dentistry, Mozart, air-conditioning, plans to go to Mars. But who needs those things anyway? It is more important that we again become part of nature, as we were, happily, eons ago.

Read the rest here.