Dear Kid: Die Now. Thanks, The Planet

Mark Meador

Over at On the Square, the blog from First Things, they have shared a post by Wesley J. Smith on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s “Planet Slayer” section of their website. The site, aimed at children with its cartoon characters and simple language, purports to “educate” them about greenhouse gases and our effect on the environment through the way we live.

But as Smith points out, their real intent becomes disturbingly clear when you click on “Professor Schpinkee’s Greenhouse Calculator.” This fun little application for kids asks you questions about your lifestyle and spending habits, does some calculation in the background, and then tells you when you should die. The idea is that you have used up your allotted tons of CO2 and should die now to save the planet.

Yet even beyond the possibility for this idea to scar and warp our children (imagine how an eight-year-old would process being told, as I was, that he should die shortly after he turns ten in order to save the Earth), its underlying approach to human existence is one that treats us as pests instead of worthwhile entities. Smith quotes a prior article of his where he writes that events such as these are

a symptom of a cultural disease that has infected Western civilization, causing us to lose the ability to think critically and distinguish serious from frivolous ethical concerns. It also reflects the triumph of a radical anthropomorphism that views elements of the natural world as morally equivalent to people.

Why is this happening? Our accelerating rejection of the Judeo-Christian world view, which upholds the unique dignity and moral worth of human beings, is driving us crazy. Once we knocked our species off its pedestal, it was only logical that we would come to see fauna and flora as entitled to rights.

On top of this, a little tinkering with the Greenhouse Calculator yields some interesting results. There are ten multiple choice questions and then a bar on which you place sliders to indicate how much money you spend on “ordinary things,” things that are “better for the environment,” and “ethical investments.” If you answer every question with the option described as the “average” response and spend all your money on ordinary things, you “should” die after 9.3 years. With all average answers and 100 percent of your money spent on things that are somehow “better” for the environment, you still have to die after 48.1 years. It turns out that the only way to earn a longer life—or, if you can get below 2.4 tonnes of CO2, to “live forever"—is to increase the percentage of money you put towards “ethical investments.” These they define as “investing in businesses/organizations that make environmentally responsible products.” When I finally figured out how to get below that 2.4 tonnes threshold so I could “live forever,” I was spending 57% of my money on ordinary things, 13% on things better for the environment, and 30% on their “ethical investments.”

So here is your lesson, kids: you don’t deserve to live. You are a cancer upon the earth. But don’t worry, you can pay for the right to live just by donating large portions of your income to companies and activists that will repair all the damage you do on a daily basis.

This, of course, is ridiculous. The real way to justify your existence on this planet is to donate to the Trinity Forum. Oh, wait . . .

Mark Meador is a 2008 John Jay Institute Fellow interning with the Trinity Forum.

1 Responses (comments are closed) • Fodder, Environment and Creation, Faiths and Worldviews, Thu 19 Jun 2008