Since we are highly concerned with liberty here at Liberty21 and The American Culture, we consistently point out to our readers intellectual fads and government policies that seek to curtail our liberty. One such fad of our intellectual and cultural elites is environmental extremism. This is captured very well by a leftist French intellectual, Pascal Bruckner, who has broken ranks with his ideological soul mates; needless to say his once admirers don’t take kindly to such heresy.

What’s refreshing is to see a leftist who understands modern fundamentalist environmentalism’s threat to our liberty. Here are a few quotes from the piece, but it is well worth the entire read:

“The planet is sick. Man is guilty of having destroyed it. He must pay,” is how Bruckner caustically portrays the received wisdom on environmental “sin” and damnation in his latest book Le fanatisme de l’Apocalypse (The Fanaticism of the Apocalypse).

“Consider .?.?. the famous carbon footprint that we all leave behind us,” he writes in his introduction. “What is it, after all, if not the gaseous equivalent of original sin, of the stain that we inflict on our Mother Gaia by the simple fact of being present and breathing?”

Subtitled Sauver la Terre, punir l’Homme (Save the Earth, Punish Human Beings) the book rails against a peculiar Western malady. Yes, concerns about the environment are legitimate, Bruckner asserts, but catastrophisme is transforming us all into children “put in a panic in order to be better controlled”.