What Are They Doing to Our World?

Environmental quality, resources threatened by failing economy

by Dr. William L. Pierce

DURING 1981 the real spendable earnings of the average American wage earner fell another 3.3 percent, the Bureau of Labor Statistics in Washington announced on January 22. Of all the economic statistics monitored by the government — consumer price index, average hourly wages, etc. — the real spendable earnings figure is the one which is tied most directly to the average standard of living. It is the amount of real money (i.e., money adjusted for inflation) a wage earner has left to spend after taxes. (ILLUSTRATION: A satellite image of the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch" that has expanded to twice the size of the continental United States. It is mostly made up plastic, the inevitable consequence of growing populations and unchecked mass production. This waste, what is left over from largely needless items used by an increasingly degenerate and low quality population, is thrown away with no sense of responsibility for the consequences.)

When we consider non-economic factors, however, we must anticipate a much worse decline in the American living standard than indicated by the falling figure for real spendable earnings.

The crime rate is an example of a non-economic factor which has a strong effect on the standard of living — or quality of life — of the average American. Each year the average U.S. citizen’s chances of being murdered, raped, robbed, or burgled increase. That costs everyone money, whether he is a crime victim or not, in higher taxes for police protection and in higher insurance rates. The non-monetary costs, though, are far higher, as fear of crime increasingly hedges in the average American’s life and restricts his activities.

Disease is another example. Until quite recently, the United States could boast one of the lowest disease rates in the world, with the rate for most infectious diseases continuing to fall each year. Many dread afflictions common in other parts of the world had been virtually eradicated here. This was one of the benefits of an enormous investment over the years in sanitation, inoculation drives, and other public health programs.

The Inquiring Mind of Aldous Huxley

The Human Situation: Lectures at Santa Barbara, 1959, by Aldous Huxley, edited by Piero Ferrucci (Flamingo, paperback).

reviewed by Nick Camerota

BLOOD WILL TELL, says the old folk wisdom. Back in 1902, even the socialist H.G. Wells believed it. (In Anticipations, he held that the less advanced races, those “swarms of black, and brown, and dirty-white, and yellow people,” who believe the world to be a charity institution, “will have to go.”)

But this idea seems to have been washed away by the rising tide of color and by the present, unreasoning insistence that all men are somehow “equal.” However, a brief look at the Huxley family shows us there is more truth than poetry in the old saying.

Aldous Huxley’s great uncle was Matthew Arnold. Huxley’s grandfather, Thomas H., was a friend and champion of Charles Darwin. Huxley’s father, Leonard, was a noted writer and editor. And Aldous’ brother, Julian, the distinguished biologist, is also far from retarded.

Wells, a student of T.H. Huxley, saw a strong physical resemblance between Aldous and his grandfather. The similarities seem to extend to qualities of intellect and character, since neither of them was afraid to express unpopular ideas.

Man and Technology

An albatross chick found on the beach of Midway Atoll that never grew
to adulthood. Its parents accidentally fed it bits of plastic from the
Pacific Ocean, and essentially choked it to death.

by Dr. William L. Pierce

TECHNOLOGY has come somewhat into bad odor among many of today’s young people. Sensitive souls who find themselves out of tune with the gaudy, gimmicky, and artificial world of 20th-century America often place the blame for this dissonance on the technology which has made all the gimmicks possible. This attitude is revealed, for example, by the pejorative use of the term “plastic."

DDT and Big Brother

Hostility toward technology also often finds expression among those genuinely and deeply concerned about wildlife and the beauties and virtues of our vanishing wilderness. DDT and mercury pollution, oil spills, smog, the mind-shattering racket of jet aircraft and diesel trucks, the chemical adulteration of foodstuffs, the unsettling thought that Big Brother may be electronically eavesdropping on our most intimate and personal affairs, the Niagara of household detergent wastes which are killing our lakes and streams — all these things are blamed on modern technology to which they are, undeniably, related.

Dr. Pierce's Cosmotheist View of Environmentalism

From "Letters to Editor," National Vanguard No. 86, May 1986:

Anti-Environmentalist

As usual, your January issue was very interesting and informative. In your front page story, however, there is a comment which seems to indicate that you regard the environmentalists as the saviors of the country, whereas I look upon them as under control of the communists and aiming to put this country out of business or even out of existence.