The New York Times often publishes articles and columns denigrating the idea that human beings have an exceptional status. But the anti-human meme sometimes crashes with the newspaper’s focus on convincing us to “save the planet” by cutting off our noses to spite our collective faces.

On such occasions, our unique duties as humans come out of the advocacy drawer, demanding that we sacrifice ourselves — a core capacity of human exceptionalism — on the altar of the earth goddess Gaia.

Latest example? A radical environmentalist philosopher claims that in our environmental practices, we are committing crimes against humanity and the planet. From the interview with Adrian Parr, identified as a “professor of environmental politics and cultural criticism at the University of Cincinnati and the director of the Taft Research Center”:

This is a crime against what makes us uniquely human — the creative agency that comes from a combination of reasoning, imagination and emotion. We may all have different capacities and opportunities through which to realize our agency, but we share the same ability to collectively and individually realize our innovative potential.

That, my friends, is a statement in support of human exceptionalism. I am shocked it wasn’t edited out!

I don’t want to get too deep into the woods with this — my book The War on Humans delves into the anti-humanism infecting the environmental movement. But I think we should ponder how the professor’s perspective would add to human destitution and misery.

The fight against global warming is as much about anti-capitalism as it is about making the planet greener. Parr lets some of that garbage out of her leftist bag:

Because human activities cause this environmental damage, our species is culpable for a crime we are committing against ourselves. But in our defense, humanity is largely trapped by the political form of liberal state power, which facilitates the smooth functioning of global capitalism — the source of the problem.

That’s baloney. Communist countries have always been the worst polluters.

In contrast, at least since the end of the 19th century, the free market and democratic West has (mostly) sought to improve environmental practices and tread more lightly on the land, particularly in the last fifty years.

But we do want to thrive and prosper. If people like Parr were in charge, we would cease promoting economic growth:

The idea that we can “green” a capitalist economy without radically rethinking the basic premises at the heart of neoliberal economic theory is truly an example of misplaced politics. The system is premised upon a model of endless growth, competition, private property and consumer citizenship, all of which combine to produce a terribly exploitative, oppressive and violent structure that has come to infuse all aspects of everyday life.

Well, that is rich: A comfortably situated professor living off the huge endowments contributed by capitalists past, advocating policies that would devastate our standard of living and add exponentially to the destitution and misery of the developing world. Now that would be a true crime against humanity.

Photo credit: NASA.

Cross-posted at Human Exceptionalism.