Managing Human Wildlife

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The Nation­al Wildlife Fed­er­a­tion regards human beings as just anoth­er form of wildlife to be managed.

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A year ago this month, the US Nation­al Wildlife Fed­er­a­tion pub­lished a curi­ous, 60-page doc­u­ment titled The Psy­cho­log­i­cal Effects of Glob­al Warm­ing, And why the U.S. Men­tal Health Care Sys­tem is not Ade­quate­ly Pre­pared.

Yes, that’s right. Wildlife activists devot­ing time and mon­ey to writ­ing reports about men­tal health. Cli­mate change sure does odd things to people.

The tone of this report is ama­teur­ish and the log­ic is strained. For exam­ple, the word “sui­cide” appears 29 times and par­tic­u­lar atten­tion is paid to sui­cides by armed forces per­son­nel. We’re told that Amer­i­ca should embrace “alter­nate renew­able sources of ener­gy” for the sake of its mil­i­tary, and that

Our nation­al need to put these young peo­ple in harm’s way would also decline if we were sim­ply more ener­gy effi­cient. How will we answer these ser­vice mem­bers’ ques­tions about why we didn’t work hard­er at fix­ing this problem?

As if a wildlife group writ­ing about men­tal health wasn’t sil­ly enough, these peo­ple also believe they’re in the busi­ness of pro­mot­ing “social jus­tice.” The pref­ace to the report tells us its pur­pose is to raise awareness:

by expos­ing the emo­tion­al side of the issue, to find the place in our hearts that mobi­lizes us to fly into action, fore­warned, deter­mined, relent­less. It also is a call for pro­fes­sion­als in the men­tal health fields to focus on this, the social jus­tice issue of all times… [bold added]

Else­where, the report com­pares cli­mate change to child abuse:

We must ask…if the call for cli­mate change action is any less com­pelling than stop­ping child abuse or pro­tect­ing the sick. In the final analy­sis inflict­ing the bur­den of cli­mate change on the vul­ner­a­ble is an immoral act that puts future gen­er­a­tions in mor­tal dan­ger. [bold added; page xiii]

The authors of this report believe that those with psy­cho­log­i­cal train­ing should be using this train­ing to pro­duce polit­i­cal­ly cor­rect out­comes. For exam­ple, page 31 declares:

The dis­ci­pline of psy­chol­o­gy can be used to uncov­er what the bar­ri­ers are to reduc­ing our car­bon foot­print and adopt­ing a green lifestyle.

The fol­low­ing page says:

We need peo­ple to learn about and sup­port pos­i­tive steps at home and in their com­mu­ni­ties in order to low­er car­bon footprints.

Indeed, from the per­spec­tive of the Nation­al Wildlife Fed­er­a­tion, we humans are just anoth­er form of wildlife to be man­aged. Mem­bers of the pub­lic aren’t pre­sent­ed as vot­ers capa­ble of mak­ing up their own minds. The pub­lic isn’t viewed as the final author­i­ty to whom politi­cians must answer.

Instead, we’re errant chil­dren who require shep­herd­ing. Thus, the report declares that:

America’s lead­ers should be trained to use the most per­sua­sive edu­ca­tion­al tools to influ­ence peo­ple to change and to sus­tain their changes. [p. xiii]

Sim­i­lar­ly, busi­ness­es are urged to

present envi­ron­men­tal­ly sound prod­ucts that will steer the con­sumer to make eth­i­cal pur­chas­es. [bold added, p. 34]

And then there’s the down­right offen­sive. Accord­ing to this report, poor people

need pro­fes­sion­als and the men­tal health care com­mu­ni­ty to help them voice their out­rage. [p. 34]

Source:  http://nofrakkingconsensus.com/2013/02/22/managing-human-wildlife/