From the Easy Chair

Environment & Environmentalism

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons

Lesson: 50-214

Genre: Speech

Track:

Dictation Name: RR161AZ96

Year: 1980s and 1990s

Dr. R. J. Rushdoony, RR161AZ96 , Environment & Environmentalism from the Easy Chair, excellent colloquies on various subjects.

[Rushdoony] This is R. J. Rushdoony, Easy Chair number 206, October 18, 1989.

This evening Otto Scott and myself are going to discuss the environment and Environmentalism, a very important subject today, especially inasmuch as Environmentalism is becoming the religion for many people.

Otto, would you like to introduce the subject generally?

[Scott] Well, I think your closing statement, brief as it was, summarized the situation to a great extent when you said Environmentalism has become a religion for many. The main people who seem to have rushed into Environmentalism are those who were formerly against the Vietnam War, were formerly Socialist and in some cases Communists, in many cases radical, people who have seen their old beliefs beginning to fall apart in the USSR and in Red China and places like that where the Socialist rationale no longer survives and have rushed into the idea of a clean and perfect environment. They have overlooked, they overlook the fact that industrial countries are the most pollution free countries in the world and that primitive societies are the most polluted. They don’t know that the American Indian was a grave polluter who used to move his camp site only when it became to filthy to endure, who used to burn forests in order to get the game, just as the primitives of the rain forest are burning the forest to get the game in that part of the world. This is a primitive phenomenon. And, by the way, the forests replenish themselves as we were told by a forestry expert.

The Environmentalist, the first time around promoted this, their hysteria through Congress in the early 70s at a time when the United States was the largest manufacturing power in the world. The peak, our peak was 1968 when we produced a third of all the manufactured goods in the world.

The Clean Air Act, the first Clean Air Act was promoted through Congress. Senator Muskie was one of the leading proponents. If it had been applied with the rigor which the law called for, it would have probably closed down the United States. There were over 400 chemicals that were supposed to be monitored from factory to use. In the final analysis only about four were actually followed, because we didn’t have the bureaucracy or the ability to do all the things that the law demanded.

But because the courts were beginning to tilt, as they had in New Deal days, against the corporations and against the commercial sector, because Congress had enacted these horrible laws, our heavy industries began to melt.

I have a book at home called And the Wolf Finally Came. It is about the steel industry. They don’t have to worry about smog in Pittsburgh anymore because there are no jobs. The factories are gone. They are closed. Ninety percent of our steel industry has gone into smoke. It has just vanished. Ten percent is still alive and profitable and the newspapers keep telling us steel is making money again.

From one third of all the manufactured goods in the world, we fell now to 15 percent in a period of 20 years. The second wave of environmental laws, command and control laws, probably will complete the task. I talked earlier today to a department head in the National Association of Manufacturers in Washington, DC and I told her that a friend of ours who is a member of the... a former member of the air quality control board in LA said that if the new presidential Complete Clean Air Act is... is put together the way they threaten, it will close down southern California which is the largest industrial complex we have left in the country. And she said, her name is Theresa Pugh. She said, “They want to do that, Mr. Scott. They have told us from Southern California, the environmentalists have told us that they want to stop all industrial growth in the area. In the face of all the immigrants into that area they want to put them all out of work.”

I said, “At this rate, the only place that would please a true environmentalist would be a grave yard where none of the people who are residing there would be polluting any longer. And they would be providing home for the worms and the birds and the trees and the grass and so forth.”

She said, “I think so.”

[Rushdoony] Well, when Lenin accomplished the Russian Revolution he expected Utopia to be born. All you had to do was to eliminate the capitalist, the kings, the nobility and a marvelous new order would raise automatically, spontaneously and the world would be a new Garden of Eden. That blind mentality still prevails because the environmentalist’s idea is that if we get rid of industry, if we get rid of everything that pollutes and the farmer’s now are being seen as polluters. After all, if you plow, dust gets in the air. If you have to burn off a field, smoke gets in the air.

Somehow this new paradise will emerge when they kill off industry and agriculture.

Well, do you remember World Watch, the World Watch Institute? They put out a book about five or six years ago, seven or eight years ago on what the environment should be like. We would use windmills and water wheels. We would stop using fuel powered airplanes. We would use dirigibles and perhaps sailing ships in the sky. We would go back to sailing ships on the high seas. We would stop using automobiles all together. We would use bicycles. We would get out of cities all together and we would have nothing but crafts. Farming would be done with what they call biomass, which is humus and animal dung. And all residences would be in a small area with perhaps 1000 people and small pads in between houses which would all be the same and bicycles would be sufficient. International travel and travel in general would no longer be necessary, because all the world would be the same. The idea would be that our living standard would adjust to the living standard of all other people, so that from one end of the world to the other you would have the same kind of villages, the same kind of bicycles, the same kind of agriculture and the same level.

[Rushdoony] Yes. But it is interesting in Africa where you have people trying to create this brave new world. They live in specially created complexes with air conditioning, refrigeration, television and all the amenities of life that they feel are bad for people.

[Scott] Well, the Soviets did for a while, you know, set up that sort of society. The elite had its own special stores.

[Rushdoony] They still do.

[Scott] They still do. Their own special dachas, their own special rooms, their own special apartments, their own special hospitals, their own special clothes which, in the aggregate are no better than what we have, but the thing that makes them precious is that the rest of the Russians don’t have it.

How often have you seen a fellow’s face fall in chagrin when you got something that he had? Possessions seem much more precious when they are rare. But that is the other side of the coin. The thing that interests me is the hatred that emerges with these people who love the environment.

Now, technically speaking, it started as an official campaign with Rachel Carson in her book The Silent Spring. She was a wonderful writer. I read several of her books and they are brilliant. But Silent Spring she wrote when she was dying of cancer and she knew she was dying of cancer. And she was in that state where she was dying, the whole world was dying. I think she saw death all around. And apparently she had no faith to sustain her in this ordeal.

[Rushdoony] No.

[Scott] So therefore she projected this fantasy of a New England with no birds and talked about what terrible thing that would be. And then right after that Ralph Nader, that wonderful man who was on the payroll of Senator Ribicoff of Connecticut. Senator Ribicoff had an ambition. He wanted to be the Vice President of the United States. And he chose automobile or traffic safety, rather, highway safety as one of his great topics. And Ralph Nader, while he was on the payroll wrote a book. He got off the payroll before the book appeared and he since has said, I believe, that he didn’t write it on Senator’s time. But at any rate it was an amusing event, because in the final analysis Mr. Nader became more famous than Senator Ribicoff. In fact, Senator Ribicoff dropped into the shadows and finally evaporated all together. But Mr. Nader went on to become a great hero. He is the one who gave us our seatbelts.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] A number of people who died because of those seatbelts because they couldn’t get out of the way of an oncoming train in time or an oncoming car.

Between Rachel Carson and Mr. Nader we had a case here where chemicals were manufactured to poison the world and automobile were deliberately made in order to kill people. Now that sort of reasoning actually captured the greatest minds in the United States on the bench and in Congress and in ... certainly in newspaper offices.

When I was working on the San Diego Union as an editorial writer, one of my colleagues used to write editorial, environmental editorials with a cigarette dangling from his lips. And I said, one day, “How did you get to the office?”

He said, “I drove in.”

And I said, “What? How dare you drive in and write against automobile pollution?”

He said, “Well, it is a lot more convenient.”

And I said, “Why don’t you give up cigarettes?”

He said, “I like them.”

Well, I said, “Why do you write this tripe?”

He said, “The readers like it.”

[Rushdoony] Yes, well, that brings up a very important point. One of our fellowship, Tim Vaughan handed me an article today on Bible translations which we will have in the report some time late winter, early spring. And, of course, the problem in Bible translations is that people are governed now not by God, but by their environment. So the critical factor is how will this go over with the people?

Now that is a poor way to translate a Bible, but there are theories of missions called contextualization. The gospel has to be tailored to the context. And Tim cites in his article a devastating instance in Papua where he worked. A Bible translator rendered the New Testament passage, “Behold the Lamb of God which taketh away the sins of the world,” as “Behold the pig of God,” because, he said, in Papua they don’t know anything about lambs. They don’t have them, but they have pigs. Nothing about educating people up to God’s Word. No, you bring the Word of God down to the level of the people. Why bother to convert them?

Now that is the kind of blasphemous thing that Environmentalism leads to. It destroys people, because it is in terms of Cornelius Van Til’s magnificent phrase, integration downward into the void.

[Scott] Well, yes. I read a clipping recently. A woman who is taking part in a class action suit against a refinery she said, “My husband died of leukemia. And there is a man across the street, one of our neighbors who is dying of leukemia.” And she said, “I think it is because of where we are living so close to this refinery.”

Now the refinery has employed thousands of men over the years. Sixty years it has employed tens of thousands, I guess. I don’t know exactly. Very few of them have died of leukemia, no more than normal. And I read that and read that poor woman and I felt sorry for her, but I also thought, now here this is primitivism. Primitive people think when there is a death in the family it is due to the malignant curse of an enemy. And in this case the woman thought it was due to that evil refinery down there, which was supporting the whole region. It paid the taxes which made the sewer system that she was taking advantage of. After all, she pollutes. We all pollute. That is the reason we have flush toilets. And I thought they have substituted corporations and industry for the devil.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] The Communists have reached a greater audience through the environment than they ever reached through Communism. Suddenly they have turned the American people against their own livelihoods.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And this isn't to say that industry pollutes deliberately. But it is to say that as you proceed you don’t do things the same way in 1989 as you did in 1929, because you get better and better.

The famous Love Canal case turned out to be absolute hoax. A few years ago Lake Erie was supposed to have nothing in it but dead fish. That is not true. Another case was the cranberries. Remember the cranberries?

[Rushdoony] Yes. And the apples.

[Scott] And the apples. And then the mercury in fish.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And they discovered that there has been mercury in fish for thousands of years.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] So, ok, well, forget about that and go on to the next one. Now, of course, you can never run out. And in the meantime we are setting up through Congress a series of laws to get everything that moves is capable of pollution. So therefore everything that moves will have to be controlled. As Gorbachev decentralizes, we are centralizing beyond anything they ever dreamed of.

[Rushdoony] Yes. And we are doing it the name of saving man and saving the environment. You referred earlier to so-called primitive man and their treatment of the environment. Slash and burn did describe it. One of the first things I learned when I went on the Indian reservation was that the Indians did not enjoy fishing just to catch, say, a few fish. The only time they were interested in fishing was in a spring run when fish were spawning, when you could go out and net hundreds of them. Then they were interested. But if it meant going out and catching a handful of trout the hard way, that didn’t appeal to them. And this is the way they had always hunted. They had burned to drive deer or whatever else it was towards them. They were not mindful of the environment.

[Scott] They are not mindful of the future.

[Rushdoony] No.

[Scott] Primitive ... primitive cultures do not think of the future.

[Rushdoony] That is right. And it is only Christian civilization that has been mindful of the future and has been protecting the environment. If in some instances you have areas of the world where primitive peoples have lived and they have not destroyed the environment, it is only because they didn’t have the capacity to do anything like that.

[Scott] So you know the first great war of Europe after the fall of Rome was to clear the forest and tame the wild animals and convert the savage tribes of Europe?

[Rushdoony] Yes. And what we forget is that there were vast areas of Europe that were not habitable. They were deserts over rocky wastelands. And it was Christian monks especially that were given these lands, because they knew the monks would go in there and level the land. They would bring in water. They would change the environment and make it habitable. And it was monks, again, that first started the construction of the dykes in the Netherlands so that the Christian realms became productive, fertile and prosperous in a way that no other part of the world could be in those days.

[Scott] Well, there is somebody who has written a book recently called How Europe Got Rich. The Christian civilization did not have any great experts from China to come and tell them how to do things. There was no group of international bankers who sent money into Europe to capitalize their governments or their people. There was no other civilization that came and gave lessons. The Chinese inventions were held exclusively to China. I am sure, you know, how silk was smuggle out of China.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] ...by a woman who had discovered the secret of how it was made, because the Chinese kept all of these things to themselves. Every civilization that we know of, with the exception of the Christian has always kept all its own benefits and all its own advantages to itself. The Christian civilization is the only one that spread these things around the world.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And to take care of the resources of the earth is a Christian idea. And yet we find the heirs of Christendom shrieking to the heavens demanding that everyone be put under an overseer, lest he molest the soil.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] This is a strange conclusion by an ignorant populace which apparently has never been taught that the basis of wealth is all under the ground.

I remember getting that lecture from Mr. Kennedy. He was a... He is, I think, still the director of Kerr McGee and a senior vice president of one of the large investment banking firms in New York. He pinned me to the wall, so to speak, on this monologue. He said, “Everything we have comes from the earth, the food, the water, the crops, the minerals into which we process the materials by which we build and construct, everything.”

But you have to work to get it. Now it... wasn’t it you who told me recently? No, it was someone else who has a friend who has a gold mine who said if the president’s Clean Air Act goes through we won’t be able to mine anymore. And I talked to a refinery operator recently. I said, “How are you doing?”

He said, “Well, I am pretty close to retirement.” And he said, “I just pray at night that the refinery doesn’t have an accident between now and my retirement, because,” he said, “You know, they are criminalizing accidents. If we have an accident,” he said, “They are going to treat us as criminals.”

[Rushdoony] Well, the San Joaquin Valley of California is the most fertile area in the world, together with the Nile Valley. And the San Joaquin Valley is the most productive area. If you shut down California agriculture by a strike, within a week there would be serious food shortages and rationing from coast to coast. That is how productive California is. And its great central valley as well as the {?} and the Imperial Valleys are the reason for California’s preeminence in agriculture. And yet I can remember back in the 20s and 30s when a good deal of the valley was alkali flats, when it would not even grow weeds. But it has progressively, over the years been subjugated.

Now in the area of {?} County some of that was due to some of the early settlers and it brought alkali up to the surface. But in a good deal of it, it was because the waters out of the Sierras would come and stand there endlessly and it brought the alkali to the surface. You would look at the land as you drove along in the 20s and 30s and it was white, white with alkali. Now we are helping feed the world.

Well, that is the kind of productivity that Christianity has brought to every country, that remade the face of Europe and has remade this country.

[Scott] I remember driving in Germany where the trees are all standing at attention like so many soldiers. You never saw anything like it. Even the trees in Germany are regulated. And it is amazing. And you know they are all planted.

[Rushdoony] They are a product of the Black Forest.

[Scott] They have all been made by man.

[Rushdoony] Of... of Lu there.

[Scott] Yes.

[Rushdoony] Luther’s work. The Lutherans.

[Scott] The Lutherans.

[Rushdoony] Revived the forests of Germany.

[Scott] Well, do you remember? Ken this morning gave me some papers.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] One was a description from 1795 of Spanish mariners going along the coast of California commenting upon the great slicks of oil that were floating on the surface.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And the tar balls on the sand.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And the same thing again in 1895. The ... the cracks in the ocean floor from which the oil seeps upward along the Pacific coast has been noted by every explorer through the centuries. But it wasn’t until the oil companies came out to tap that oil, that suddenly the environmentalists came to protect the seagulls.

[Rushdoony] Yes. And the risk of that type of continuing oil pollution all over the coastal areas has been dramatically diminished and almost abolished by the oil drilling. Now that oil is productive. It is not endlessly polluting the ocean.

[Scott] But you know that at one point they were going to pass a regulation forbidding the tankers to go in to Alaska and California. And then they suddenly realized that without the tankers they wouldn’t have any automobiles to drive to their rally to demonstrate.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, it is amazing the stupidity.

[Scott] This is Luddites. Luddites.

[Rushdoony] Luddites is the term.

[Scott] These are modern Luddites. The machinery smashers.

[Rushdoony] Yes. When the Industrial Revolution was born there were people who saw the hope of mankind as destroying the Industrial Revolution.

[Scott] The tragedy of the linotype operators.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Who were put out of work by new developments in types and so forth.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] This is the old story.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

Otto, you mentioned the Luddites and I would like to go back to that, because I think it is a very important aspect of this entire question. In 18th century England the poverty was intense. There were a great many people who risked hanging routinely and daily to steal a loaf of bread for which you could hang and sometimes did hang. These were children sometimes, 10, 12 year old boys and girls who were starving and would steal something risking hanging.

Well, when the industrial revolution came along it changed that situation. We are told a great deal both by the Marxists and the House of Lords and with their investigations of the mines and the mills of children working in the mines and working in the mills. What they don't tell us is that before those jobs came along which those children were glad to get, they were starving and they were ready to hang for a bit of food.

The tremendous alteration of the face of Europe as a result of the industrial revolution is no longer taught in schools so that no one knows of the significance of it among the younger generation.

Well, as a result, we have the same kind of impulse as the Luddites. The propaganda, the newspapers of the day played heavily on the sins of the mill owners and the mine owners as though they represented the devils of their time. And they were able to arouse common people like the Luddites who didn’t know what was true 40 and 50 years ago to the point where they were ready to destroy the machine.

In France they were called the saboteurs, sabot, wooden shoe. They were throwing their wooden shoes in the machinery to destroy them as though these machines, instead of creating jobs had robbed them of it. People can be blinded to their own self interest and to what is before them.

Well, today we have these environmentalists, the Luddites of our time, again, the intellectuals and the snobs and mindless people who follow them ready to destroy everything that has made our civilization under the illusion that these things which produce our wealth are somehow the great evil.

[Scott] Well, he Industrial Revolution lifted the living standards of the entire globe to unprecedented, undreamable levels. But from the moment the industrial revolution began there was a whispering campaign from the French Revolution which whispered that the riches were robbing the poor. You got rich by robbing people who didn’t have anything.

They didn’t say, “Follow us and I will make you rich.” They said, “Follow us and we will stop anybody else from getting rich.”

And everywhere that industrialization moved the real reason why slavery was eliminated was industrialization. It was cheaper to pay a man for his labor than it was to support him and his whole family all his life from the cradle to the grave.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] So therefore slaves became uneconomic. Industrialization removed slavery from the world. It gave the individual an independence he didn’t have before upon the lord, upon the master, upon the owner, because with the money he could make himself independent and he, in turn, could become a businessman or whatever.

But everywhere that the fruits of industrialization spread, you might say the fruits of Christianity, because this came from the Puritans. It came from the Reformation. It didn’t come from the Latin Countries. It came from the Nordic and the northern countries. Everywhere that it went there was a whispering campaign that followed it. And our intellectuals held for this just as much as the intellectuals of France and Germany and England. Emerson hated the rising of the new man, because he, with his long tradition, his aristocratic position in New England, was being out classed by the new millionaires of the factory owners, the textile mill owners and so forth.

And in the long run, the whispering campaign became louder than the defensive campaign of the capitalists. And finally it outshouted even the results. I mean, we have the phenomenon of the fellow with the long hair and electric guitar plugging it in before he sings his protest song against pollution.

[Rushdoony] Well, an important aspect of this, whether it is in the mentality of the French Revolution or the Russian Revolution or Karl Marx or the Luddites or the Saboteurs has been a false concept of wealth. Their view is that wealth is something that is static. There is only so much there. They have got it. You haven’t got it. In order to get wealthy you have to take it from them.

[Scott] Yes.

[Rushdoony] Whereas wealth is not a static fact. It is an aspect of work and productivity, the untapped resources of the earth that we haven’t yet begun to develop.

[Scott] Well...

[Rushdoony] ...are the source of wealth for the future.

[Scott] The...

[Rushdoony] ...just as though it would be tapped thus far have made us wealthy.

[Scott] The whole interior of South America is unexplored and untapped. I have seen mountains on the west coast that are so heavy with minerals that not a single blade of grass will grow on them.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Today at our staff breakfast Tim Vaughan was telling us an amusing instance of environmentalist thinking. The destruction of the forests in Papua how according to the figures the should be no forest left in Papua, because when you say this much was destroyed in the late 17th century, the early 18th and so on to the present, they are gone. But they are there as much as they ever were, because it is a renewable resource.

[Scott] Yes. It is a renewable resource. The whole world is filled with renewable resources.

[Rushdoony] And the whole earth is a bundle of resources that we haven’t tapped, a giant ball of all kinds of resources.

[Scott] I read an article not too long ago about the comet that almost hit the earth. Do you recall it?

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Not too long ago.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] I think it was only a year or so ago ...

[Rushdoony] A little longer.

[Scott] A comet that came with... maybe a little longer. It came within a few hundred thousand miles of the earth...

[Rushdoony] Or was it a few million.

[Scott] I... I don't know, whatever. But at any rate, there was a speculation upon what would happen if it hit New York. Well, if it hit New York, according to the writers, it would have been I don’t know how many unimaginable times larger than a nuclear bomb. It would have devastated an area of hundreds of miles, hundreds of miles. And I couldn’t help but think about the time that the top of Krakatau went off.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And the explosion was heard around the earth. And the sky was colored for years.

[Rushdoony] Darkened. Hard to grow vegetables because the sun wouldn’t shine through that.

[Scott] And the environmentalists have no idea of the force of nature. They have no idea of the destructiveness of nature. Unlike Dorothy, they have never been bitten by a rattlesnake. And unlike me they have never been in a heavy storm at sea. They have never understood that this earth is cursed.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And that it contains poisons. It contains wild and vicious animals and reptiles and insects. It contains all kinds of things. When I was a boy, when you were a boy, goiters were common. Remember?

[Rushdoony] Oh, yes.

[Scott] And it came from drinking...

[Rushdoony] Very common.

[Scott] ...untreated well water. Tape worms were common. Imagine. You never hear of a tape worm anymore. Diphtheria carried one of my aunts away. Pneumonia carried almost everyone away. It was known as the old man’s friend.

There were all kinds of illnesses that carried people away. Death we knew. We saw him when we were children. We knew children who died. It wasn’t a tragedy. It was part of life. And here we live now like the people in the dream world.

[Rushdoony] I saw a statement the other day by a doctor who said, “If pollution is as bad as it is supposedly has become in recent years, and if medical practice is as bad as they claim it is, why has life expectancy from 1900 to the present gone up from 46 to something like 70 or so.” I have forgotten exactly.

[Scott] It is over 70.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] I think 73 or four for men and early 80s for women. And I talked to the director of a funeral home...

[Rushdoony] Now that is sexual discrimination. We should do something about that.

[Scott] I talked ... I talked to the director of a funeral parlor about that once and he said they work us to death.

[Rushdoony] No, I... I think we men ought to do something, Otto, about this sexual discrimination. Women last longer.

[Scott] They last longer.

[Rushdoony] This isn’t right.

[Scott] Well, they don’t enjoy it as much so that is... We will put it on that basis.

[Rushdoony] Well, the Luddites have a new religion. And they have a false concept of life and of nature. You mentioned Dorothy’s rattlesnake bite. The thing that was very interesting to me was how many people had no idea how serious a rattle snake bite is or that it can kill or what kind of damage it can do, because even doctors usually protect us from the full implications of things like this.

[Scott] I think they have a ... an idea that ... or perhaps it is that the doctors now see an awful to of softness in people.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] That people not being as acquainted with the grim facts of life that I just referred to...

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] ...take the idea that any death is a tragedy. And it isn’t. We all owe God a debt, Shakespeare said. And he was quite right. And now apparently the physicians are discovering that you can’t tell people the truth. They fall apart.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Or they act very strange or they think it is your fault. They want to sue you for malpractice.

I notice that on Crossfire this afternoon on discussing the San Francisco earthquake Mr. Kinsley was trying to find some culprits. He was saying that perhaps the road wasn’t properly constructed that collapsed and buildings weren’t properly built that collapsed and so forth. I mean he seemed to think that one is really ... can really make yourself safe from an earthquake.

Well, of course, if you get a really big earthquake, nothing is safe. Managua went down in five minutes.

[Rushdoony] Yes. This matter that you refer to, how people are insulated against knowing the tragedies and griefs of life. A very vivid episode of that occurred, oh, in the early 50s. I had the funeral of a woman who was well into her 80s and she and her husband both had an unusual background in that each—and I have forgotten what it was. They came from some part of the West where the sole survivors of their families in some kind of disaster that had taken place and his would have put it back into the 80s. As a result, they had grown up, married each other. They had lived all these years. They had children and grand children so that there were about 75 or 80 people who were present at that funeral who were all related. In all that time there had never been a death.

[Scott] My goodness.

[Rushdoony] Never a death.

[Scott] That is strange.

[Rushdoony] And when this woman died the grief was unimaginable. These people all fell apart. I have never had a funeral before or since comparable to that. They had been insulated from the fact of death. It was remote to them.

Now we are deliberately insulating ourselves from things like that...

[Scott] Well, if you open up a big medical directory and start to go through the common illnesses you would be astonished at the number in which they say, “No known treatment.”

[Rushdoony] Well, you have periodically objections to funerals, objections to the coffin being open, objections to children being taken to the funeral of their grandmother or grandfather, objections to everything that will allow people to face the fact that there is death in the world.

[Scott] Objections to reality.

[Rushdoony] Objections to reality.

[Scott] I remember when my grandmother... one of my grandmother’s younger brothers died and they had a wake. It was an Irish wake down in Astoria, New York. And the coffin was in the living room and all kinds of flowers. And there was a rail beside the coffin where we could go and kneel down and say a prayer and the coffin was open. And my grandmother walked over and she prayed and then she stood up and she looked at him and she felt him.

And on the way home I said to her, “How could you do that?”

Oh, she said, “When I was a girl in Ireland the women used to wash and dress the corpse.” And she said, “My, wasn’t he thin.”

And death was a familiar figure and is a very significant thing to know.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And to respect and I think Jonathan Edwards said something about it. He said the ghastly appearance of death is enough to instill respect into us.

But now, of course we have a hospital where the baby is taken away from the mother and put in an antiseptic chamber and the doctors go around with masks on and the family is kept out away and the husband is kept away and there has been an intervention, you might speak, a sort of mechanization of the American society and impersonalization. And this has led to the illusions of the environmentalists that it is possible to have activity without risk. It is possible to have labor without accidents. It is possible to have somebody else responsible for anything that goes wrong in your life. A lot of the environmental movement is based upon the idea to get a buck from the people with deep pockets.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Not love of the environment, but a hope that by taking some company to court you can collect some damages. One woman in a telephone booth in a street corner in Akron, Ohio was hit by a car that jumped the curb and ran into the booth. She sued a Firestone plant across the street.

I said, “Why?”

The lawyer said it was the only person around there. They were the only thing around there that had any money. It was the truth. It is an actual case.

Now she can get the whole community to join the suit with her.

[Rushdoony] Well, by eliminating Christians and industry they will have their new Garden of Eden.

[Scott] They will have their grave.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Because civilizations can come apart. They have the feeling that this is absolutely impregnable, that we cannot lose. This was Lyndon Johnson’s illusion. He felt the United States could afford to fight a war thousands of miles away. Nobody has ever talked about the logistical marvel of moving 400,000 men into the jungles of Vietnam halfway around the world.

[Rushdoony] Well, while...

[Scott] He thought he could do all this and set up welfare at the same time.

[Rushdoony] While we do all this and dream of a new Eden we are turning our cities and communities into hell.

[Scott] Isn't that true?

[Rushdoony] I shall never forget my experience in the 70s of meeting a black pastor from Central Africa. He was over here I forget on what kind of a trip. I think some churches who had missions there wanted people to see what a Christian leader there was like, a superior Christian leader. And he was that. He was largely self educated, but he was a highly literate man, a very genuine Christian. And he had traveled from the west coast, Los Angeles, clear across the country and it was in the South that I met him. He had landed in New York, spent a little while there, flown to LA.

Well, he told me in some horror he said, “The real barbarians are my people here in your cities. We don’t have barbarians where I am in my country comparable to those that I have met in the cities.” And he said, “Without Christ, whether they are black or white they are barbarians. They are savages.” And he said, “I have never been frightened in Africa as I have been in the black areas of American cities.”

[Scott] Well, it is quite a contrast, because the concern for the environment is not reflected by concern for people.

[Rushdoony] No.

[Scott] I mean the country that has mandated abortion that now talks about the fact that we have got too many old people and doesn't relate to the fact that we have killed the babies, how do we expect to have young people if they are going to have this level of a million and a half abortions every year. But there is no real compassion here. There is, instead, an argument that all forms of life are equally sacred. So we have people who now have snakes and hideous sorts of organisms as pets.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] We have a worship of whales. Amazing. Amazing.

[Rushdoony] One of the fathers of all of this was Albert Schweitzer who was really a pantheist. He believed that the life of a worm was sacred almost on a level with human beings if not an actual level. And he would go around picking up worms that had crawled onto a walk during a rainstorm. And his idea of reverence for all life equally was idealized and lionized in his time and he was regarded as one of the greatest of the philosophers.

[Scott] Yes. And Gandhi’s mother would not step upon an insect. He used to refer in some what oblique ways to his reverence for life. He was the first of his sect to leave the shores of India which was forbidden to the believers. And it is interesting that he was associated with all these wonderful ideas. He was against industry. He wanted India to return to the crafts and methods of a thousand years earlier. Wanted it to reject everything from the west. Do you remember the spinning wheels and all of that?

[Rushdoony] Oh, yes.

[Scott] He went around in diapers. And he left a heritage of murder and massacre.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Yes.

[Scott] He left a sea of blood.

[Rushdoony] And is still idealized by the bubble heads throughout the West.

[Scott] Did you read that little book The Real Mahatma Gandhi?

[Rushdoony] By {?}

[Scott] Yes.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Isn’t that marvelous?

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Did you have a good bowel movement this morning, sister? Really fantastic.

[Rushdoony] He was...

[Scott] What depressed me...

[Rushdoony] Me, too.

[Scott] ...was... was... talk about bricks without straw. These are people without brains.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Yes.

Well, our time is almost over. Are there any concluding statements on Environmentalism that you would like to make?

[Scott] I think if left unchecked and if given all the power by the government that the government is threatening to give it, the environmental movement will provide us with a Depression that will curl our hair.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And then I think both the politicians and the environmentalists will have to find a storm shelter someplace.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

Well, thank you all for listening and God bless you. We are grateful to those of you, by the way, who suggested this as a subject for us to discuss.

[Voice] Authorized by the Chalcedon Foundation. Archived by the Mount Olive Tape Library. Digitized by ChristRules.com.