Van Jones and the Rights of the Earth

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  • 08/21/2022

Fox News reports that “Van Jones, the Obama administration's controversial former ‘green jobs czar,’ has found a new calling: helping to push for a new, global architecture of environmental law that would give Mother Nature the same rights status as humans.”

That’s not really a “new calling.”  It’s just new packaging for his old calling, which is the expansion of collective power at the expense of the individual.  Van Jones and the “Rights of the Earth” crowd are natural partners in the never-ending battle against truth, justice, and the American way.

Truth?  You’ll find very little of it among the radical Greens.  Like all collectivists, they believe truth is too dangerous for the little people to handle.  They’re not really “qualified” to understand the truth anyway.  They need hockey-stick graphs, absurd predictions of environmental apocalypse, and agitprop films about super-storms wiping out cities to move them toward the “greater truth.”

Justice?  The “Rights of the Earth” movement is one of the greatest travesties against justice ever conceived.  The point of the exercise is to create a code of compulsive law in defense of an omnipresent constituency – all of Nature – which cannot speak for itself.  The high priests of the movement will do the speaking, and a massive cadre of bureaucrats will gain tremendous power by converting their words into law.

There will be no reciprocal obligations placed upon the Earth.  Citizens will not be able to sue Nature for wiping out their homes in a flood, or starving them with a drought.  Corporations will be able to purchase indulgences from the priesthood of the all-powerful State… but they won’t come cheap.

The American Way?  That way of life is based upon liberty.  The ownership of property is the cornerstone of economic liberty.  You can’t “own” something that has “rights.”  That would be slavery.  Granting the Earth “rights” is the legal repeal of the individual right to own and control property – and that’s hardly a new “calling” for the radical environmentalist movement, which routinely brings development to a halt over the presence of snails and lizards, and counts such economic devastation among its greatest victories.

Jones has joined the board of “an obscure San Francisco New Age-style organization known as the Pachamama Alliance, which has been creating a global movement to make human rights for Mother Nature an international reality - complete with enforceable laws - by 2014.”  The “enforceable laws” are the point of all this, not the health of the Earth.  The movement Jones has joined may sound absurd, but his presence is one more bit of evidence that you can’t afford to ignore it.  This is a man who was installed as an unelected, unaccountable “czar” with billions of dollars at his disposal, by the sitting President of the United States.  He was removed from that office because of his participation in a morally offensive and embarrassing movement of conspiracy theorists - the “9/11 Truth” crowd – not because of his collectivist philosophy.

The “progressive” movement is all about the perpetual growth of government, which requires increasing power to protect an ever-growing list of favored clients.  That process will be kicked into overdrive if it acquires the largest client of all – a perpetually aggrieved constituent whose presence we can never escape, and which is part of every action we take. 

Soon you’ll hear a great deal from Van Jones and his allies about how “backward” the United States is, because we are reluctant to join enlightened nations like Bolivia, which extend the full panoply of enforceable “rights” to nature itself.  Those rights cannot be “created” or “recognized.”  They must be taken away from people and given, not to inanimate Nature, but rather to the State which serves as its all-knowing guardian.  May America remain a “backwater” of freedom and prosperity in such an era of “enlightenment.”

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