Is Tampering With Nature a Good Thing?

June 14 -- Across the United States, there's an ever-loudening outcry over genetic engineering, cloning and environmental threats like global warming.

Why have recent advances in science been met with fear, protests, even acts of terrorism? Why is the industrial society that helped make our comfortable lives possible treated with suspicion and contempt?

Environmental activists have had an enormous impact on our national agenda over the past generation. Sure, it's good to take care of the planet. It's nice to plant trees. But have radical activists brainwashed us into thinking that everything humans do is bringing us all closer to Armageddon?

Being at one with nature is a popular view today. But that's an extreme idea when you give it a little thought. What that really means is running around naked, hungry, maybe killing a rabbit with a rock, then dying young. That has been "natural life" for most of human history.

Sometimes nature is pretty hostile to humans, and tampering with it has actually been good for us.

Educating or Indoctrinating?

But that's not what kids are learning. Many grade-school students are taught that tampering is evil, that humanity is destroying the Earth. This is even part of the curriculum in some schools.

One child said he learned: "President Bush is polluting the country so he can make millions for his friends."

The organizers call this education. What's more, they say it's "nonpartisan."

But our kids are thoroughly scared. They fear massive floods — "Alaska's melting!"— increased cancer and even "drowning in our own garbage!"

Why don't they know that over the past 30 years, the air has been getting cleaner? Nitrogen dioxide, sulfur dioxide, carbon monoxide, lead and every major pollutant the government measures is decreasing. Lakes and rivers are cleaner now, too.

According to former Greenpeace Director Patrick Moore, the environmental movement has been hijacked by political activists. "They're using environmental rhetoric to cloak agendas like class warfare and anti-corporatism that, in fact, have almost nothing to do with ecology," Moore says.