An Early Victim of the Population War
Yesterday’s news when it comes to environmental issues was that an ecoterrorist attacked Discovery Channel offices, eventually being killed by cops. His demands, which can be seen on his site, make him an early victim in the coming Population War, because his main concern was obviously overpopulation. (In case that site will be taken down or is already blocked by your ISP, I do have the page saved. I won’t upload it here, for obvious reasons, but leave a comment with a valid e-mail address if you want to see it and can’t and I’ll get back to you.)
I’d look for more articles about this, trying to find a better one, but I dread the prospect because I saw a few and don’t exactly feel like wading through countless others that just depict him as insane and the concerns regarding overpopulation as ravings of lunatics. Which is not to say that he wasn’t insane at the time he took this action, or in fact at the time he wrote those demands, but focusing solely on that and dismissing the valid concerns he pointed out produces articles that I just can’t stomach anymore. Seen way too many of those, since generally people don’t even need a reason to start calling anyone who brings up that topic lunatic, Nazi or just plain evil.
What James Lee did was undoubtedly a terrorist act. Now I’m not against radical action and ecoterrorism in itself, quite the contrary, but the problem here was the target he picked and the way in which he chose to act. When you do something like this, you need to strike at those directly responsible for causing the problem and do it in a way that will help the cause, while also making full use of any media attention you will receive to make your opinion known in a rational manner. However, he did pretty much everything wrong and therefore at best sacrificed himself for nothing, and most likely did more harm than good.
He seems to have subscribed to the idea that commercial television should educate people, which is quite simply wrong. Or, sure, it would be nice if it happened, but it doesn’t and you can’t demand it of them. So, while Discovery Channel is quite obviously not part of the solution when it comes to the overpopulation problem, they’re not directly responsible for perpetuating it either. But it seems to have been an ongoing conflict between him and Discovery Channel, as he has repeatedly protested and demanded using their programs as an active method of coming up with solutions for the major environmental problems the world is facing.
On the other hand, the way in which his demands were written clearly shows that he was in a very unstable state of mind, which does nothing but undermine the causes he was fighting for and put the rest of us who share those concerns in an even worse light, though it often seems like the public’s perception of those who wish to reduce the human population can’t exactly get any worse. In addition, he’s demanding an end to wars, which sounds quite hypocritical considering the violent method he used to make his demands known. At least I never claim to be a pacifist in any way…
Quite frankly, his actions set us back and we’ll need to figure out how to recover from this. For that reason, I most certainly won’t call him a hero and shy away from calling him a martyr as well, but he is a victim of the Population War. And make no mistake, there will be one, if it hasn’t started already. It would all be very peaceful and simple if people would understand that this is by far the world’s biggest problem and that it can rather easily be solved by simply reducing fertility rates well below replacement level until the population will get back within sustainable limits, which can be anywhere between 100 million and three billion, depending on the studies you check and each person’s environmental footprint. But people will never do that willingly, so the end result is inevitable, but his actions were still unwise to say the least.
So now I’m looking for solutions, because the wave of bad press this generated will be hard to counter. But, while I saw attempts, perhaps we shouldn’t even try to counter it, but instead hit the ground running and see where can we go from here. The media is there to be used after all, and sensationalism sells. Plus that heavy-handed methods are needed if we’re to get anything done anyway, so we should look more into what would actually be effective ways to use radical action and ecoterrorism in the future. I’m not particularly worried about the backlash, because the people who started posting comments all over and saying they’ll specifically go against environmentalists and do things that harm Earth in response to this are those who were doing such things anyway and the chance of making them see the error of their ways nicely is slim to none.
If I let my mind drift down that path I can actually come up with several interesting ideas, not to mention targets. But I’ll dwell on them a while longer, though I already mentioned a couple in another place. There are probably some law enforcement agencies getting a bit interested in me already, considering how they track everything…
Back to James Lee, I’ll say again that he seemed to have serious mental problems, picked the wrong target and acted unwisely to say the least. He also went too far for my liking with his demands, obviously supporting a policy similar to that of VHEMT, which I don’t agree with simply because we still need to be around to fix the damage we have caused and prevent it from happening again in the future, when perhaps other similar species would evolve or land on Earth. So his mind was seriously flawed, but in principle his heart was in the right place. I fully share his concern about overpopulation, the belief that civilization has brought about so many evils and that those who most need saving and better living conditions are the other species we share this planet with.
What’s left to ponder now is whether this will start something or end it. I do hope for the first option, though also hope that any further action will be much more rational and done in such a way as to aid the cause instead of harming it. When it comes to this issue, we’re but a few Davids facing a huge army of Goliaths, so we must stay on our toes and make every shot count. One way or another, it will get very ugly very fast… Even if only because nothing will be done and more and more people will be fighting over fewer and fewer resources and struggling with more and more pollution and environmental damage.
