In ‘My Property, My Trees’: New Tree-Cutting Law Divides N.Y. Town, the New York Time’s Hilary Howard reports on a law in Mamaroneck, New York, that regulates tree removal on private property. Requiring property owners, including homeowners, to get a permit to remove a tree is disturbing enough from a pro-liberty standpoint. But what really got my attention were the rationalizations at the forefront of the new law. Howard reports:
When Robert Herbst returned to his hometown about 30 miles north of New York City in 1992, he wanted his children to be immersed in the lush greenery of his childhood. But over the decades, he noticed more trees coming down to make way for bigger houses.
Mr. Herbst, a lawyer, and other like-minded residents of Mamaroneck, N.Y., view the vanishing trees as a serious threat in the era of climate change.
“We should be protecting trees for our own survival,” said Jacob Levitt, a dermatologist who lives in Mamaroneck. “It’s suicidal not to do it.”
But some residents say they should have the right to remove any and all trees on their properties to make way for more sunlight or a home expansion, or simply because they want them gone.
“People want to landscape the way they want to landscape,” said Eve Neuman, a realtor who lives in the area.
Herbst and Levitt are leaders in the war on tree removal. But, what right do these men and their cohorts have to use the coercive power of the state to impose their values on everyone else? None. Enter “climate change.”
I wrote these comments, which were not published because the comment section of the article was closed before I could get to it. :
“[V]anishing trees [are] a serious threat in the era of climate change. ‘We should be protecting trees for our own survival. It’s suicidal not to do it.’”
How does one answer such Chicken Little hysteria? You can’t, any more than you can rebut “It’s God’s will.” Yet such quasi-religious rhetoric is used to justify trampling people’s sacred property rights, without any evidence that cutting down a tree would violate the rights and/or safety of anyone else.
If you can use climate change—or “the climate crisis”—as a God-like justification for trampling individual rights to cut a tree on one’s own property by law, then what dictatorial scheme can’t be justified by it? On that standard, none of our liberties are safe. Faith is impervious to reason and morality. But that’s the point, isn’t it? “Climate Change” is the newest calling card of totalitarianism. America beat back tyranny in the Revolutionary War, Civil War, WWs 1 & 2, and the Cold War—only to give up our freedom to the likes of “tree advocates?”
In the Constitution it is written that no law respecting the establishment of religion shall be made. The Founders well understood the threat of theocracy. Yet a new secular religion—Climatism—is exactly what is being established by this law. Totalitarian theocracy is the ultimate goal of anyone who raises climate change as a justification for rights-violating laws. It's a reincarnation of The Divine Right of Kings, and the Separation of Religion and State should apply here. End the madness.
The term “climatism” is not mine. The term was first coined by Robert Bryce, as far as I can tell. Bryce roots the term in economic terms: Environmentalism, Bryce observes, “has morphed into the NGO-corporate-industrial-climate complex.” That’s true enough. But I see something deeper. I see the tentacles of religious dogma and authoritarianism wound through the entire movement. Climatism fits the bill very nicely, in my view. “Follow the money,” says Bryce in explaining Climatism’s grip on policy. But religion provides something far more consequential—and dangerous—moral firepower. Replace God with Climate Change, and you have a new superior power to submit to. And just as “God’s will” is determined by faith leaders who claim to speak for God, and thus must be unquestioningly obeyed, so we have “climate experts” who claim to speak for “the fight against climate change,” and unquestioningly obeyed. Neither authority requires evidence. Any dissident is heretical, which makes you a sinner—or a climate denier on the moral level of a neo-Nazi. . . a holocaust denier.
Of course, like all manifestations of statist assaults, the best moral and practical defense is individual rights.
Related Reading:
‘Climate Crisis’: The Dem’s Path to Totalitarian Socialism
New U.N. Study Shows Climate Catastrophists Getting More Open About their Totalitarian Designs
Environmentalism In America Is Dead: It has been replaced by climatism and renewable energy fetishism. by Robert Bryce
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