I joined the American Anthropological Association in 1978 while a graduate student at Stanford University. Impressed by the anthropologists’ concern for native peoples, and thinking that I was going to make the study of man my profession, I paid out $1,000 for a life membership. In the years since, as the academics who dominate the Association have turned radically against the human race, I have often wished I had that money back — with interest.
Such a feeling came over me last month when I discovered that the Association had sponsored a symposium at its annual meeting on the proposition: “Is the Human Species a Cancer on the Planet?” An Association member by the name of Warren Hern from Colorado organized the symposium.
The chief evidence that Mr. Hern offered for his thesis was that “aerial and satellite views of urban centers taken ever a period of years [bear] a striking similarity to images of cancerous tissue (particularly melanoma) invading the healthy surrounding tissue.” Hern went on to say that “in many parts of the world the increase in human numbers is rapid and uncontrolled, that it invades and destroys habitats, and that by killing off many species it reduces the differentiation of nature. All of these features are characteristics of cancerous tumors.”
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to recognize that Mr. Hern’s hypothesis is nonsense, and that his “evidence” is really an extended metaphor. Neither the earth nor its biosphere constitutes a living creature. All this talk, so common among the population controllers and their radical environmentalist friends, of man as some kind of planetary invader is no more than a clumsy figure of speech. Perhaps this is why the American Association For the Advancement of Science four years ago rejected this same symposium out of hand. “You may not ask that question,” the AAAS said at the time.
Mr. Hern was joined at the symposium by Dr. Lynn Margolis of the University of Massachusetts, whose chief claim to academic distinction is the ‘“Gaia Hypothesis.” This is the notion (I will not call it a hypothesis) that the earth itself (“Gaia”) constitutes a kind of living organism, maintaining an environment hospitable to various forms of life via various feedback mechanisms. Gaia is the New Age term for Mother Earth. The New Age believers hold that the earth is a sentient super-being, kind of goddess, deserving of worship and, some say, human sacrifice. Compared to Gaia worship, the simple animism of primitive cultures is wholesome.
Ms. Margolis, like Mr. Hern, views human beings as a pestilence on the planet and longs for their extinction. “For millions of years the earth got along without human beings,” Margolis told her assembled colleagues, “and it will do so again. The only question is the nature of the human demise that has already begun.” Like the radical environmentalists, her idea of paradise is the Garden of Eden before the creation of Adam and Eve.
If Ms. Margolis longs for the extinction of the human race, Mr. Warren Hem is actively working towards that end. For Mr. Hern makes his living by performing abortions. Viewing a human being as a cancer on the planet undoubtedly makes his grisly work easier. Perhaps he even feels a bit heroic as he inserts his long knife into the sanctuary of the womb and ends another human life. After all, in his misanthropic view he is merely excising a cancer.
As for me, I will be resigning my Association membership in protest. This once-prestigious scientific body has begun substituting New Age superstitions for science, and has turned on the peoples that it once defended. I only wish they would refund my $1,000.
