God Preserve Us from the Environmentalists

There is no doubt that the environment of the world would be closer to perfection if human beings did not inhabit the planet. Sometimes, it seems that the goal of the environmental movement is to kill off as many human beings as possible while preserving as many of God’s other creatures as possible! They seem to be doing a pretty good job on that front.

Rachel Carson, the grandmother of the environmental movement who wrote Silent Spring, warned us of the danger of DDT, how it was making the shells of birds’ eggs thinner and would destroy the population of our feathered friends. Her theories have since been proven to be incorrect, yet we are still not using the pesticides. Apparently the birds are not picking up the slack and eating the mosquitoes that cause millions of deaths every year by transmitting malaria. Most of those deaths are small children and infants.

How about an issue closer to home? We have allowed the environmentalists to practically destroy our country and then we allow them and their stooges in Congress as well as local and state government to blame it on the oil companies, and we have been doing it for 30 years. Consider the following: We cannot drill for oil along our coasts or in Alaska, which is about as safe to the environment as can be. Of course, the Chinese are drilling off our shores, staying outside the territorial waters but drilling on an angle to take our oil. Instead of using our own oil, we send billions of dollars overseas, much of which ends up in the hands of terrorists who are dedicated to our destruction and then we blame the war on oil. Our stupidity in that area is only exceeded by our stupidity in the alternatives we try. Concepts like ethanol are not cost effective, are more damaging to the environment than drilling in Alaska and only make a few corn raising farmers rich, most of whom are big corporations. I would just as soon make the oil corporations rich. The cost to the environment? Well, Brazil is cutting down its rain forests to plant corn fields, not for food, but for ethanol. The South American country ranks fourth in the world in carbon emissions, most of which come from deforestation. It takes as much energy to produce a gallon of ethanol as it does a gallon of gasoline. We will see people starving just to keep oil in the ground. We are creating a shortage of corn and driving the prices of corn products sky high. We are already seeing food riots in parts of the world and we complain about the cost of gasoline. All of this is directly related to the “Gores” of the world and the do-gooder environmentalists. So what does this have to do with chiropractic?

Anything that affects the economy of the country is going to affect the chiropractic profession. Whether it is people who do not have the money to pay the chiropractor or cannot afford the gasoline to get to the office.

There is also a philosophical issue here. The environmental movement is really an outside-in approach. It is the arrogant, egotistical mind of man thinking that he knows what is best for the environment, for the world and for all the life forms of the planet, including man. Now there is nothing wrong with man using his sound mind to make intelligent decisions for the betterment of mankind and other creatures but there is a limitation on that sound mind and that intelligence. Part of understanding that limitation is the recognition that there is something, or more accurately, Someone, Who runs and controls this universe. Someone, Who is much smarter than the finite educated intelligence of man. Historically that has been the real clash between the practice of medicine and the practice of chiropractic. It is not that physicians are not smart. It is that they are not smart enough. But then neither are we. The difference is that we recognize that we cannot run the body. We cannot make the important decisions about life, health and how much insulin we need. Most important, we recognize that there is a principle of life in living organisms that is able to do that and in the human organism, it needs no help, just no interference. When you have people who believe that they possess all of wisdom to run the body, it does not make any difference whether they are medical doctors, chiropractors or nutritionists. It is simply wrong thinking and no ultimate good can come from wrong thinking.

In a similar way when you have people who believe that they have the answer to the world’s environmental problem and that there is no power greater than their educated mind, you are never going to solve the environmental problem. The lack of recognition of an innate intelligence with adaptative capabilities is one of the problems. Environmentalists are really elitists who believe they have the ability to run the planet. They do not acknowledge a simple chiropractic principle: birds have the ability to adapt to DDT, caribou and reindeer have the ability to adapt to drilling and pipelines in Alaska and, if some species do not, well, maybe it is their time to go. Species have been dying out long before the creation of the combustion engine. It is part of the flow of life. There are species dying out as you read this, through no fault of man.

Our objective as chiropractors should be to allow the human organism to adapt to its environment as well as it can by removing interference in the nerve system. Notwithstanding the few of us that adjust other vertebrates, our objective is directly related to human beings and we should be interested in their survival. (Frankly, I do not believe that is the goal of the environmentalist.) We are interested in adaptation of the organism by removing interference in the nerve system at the vertebral level. God can take care of the survival of the planet because we do not have the ability to handle that task.

That is not to say we should not do everything we have the ability to do. We should treat this planet with respect as you would someone’s property. We have adopted the road in front of our office and we pick up litter on a regular basis. We recycle our lawn waste. That makes sense. We conserve water and do other things that save us money. What we do not do is lower our standard of living or support efforts that are intended to take us back to the 18th century. We use our wood burning stove because trees on our property give us a decent supply of free wood and it reduces our oil heating bill.

Environmentalism, like health measures, should be a matter of common sense. Unfortunately, too many people do not have common sense and yet they are the ones who seem to rise to the forefront of these movements. Part of that reason is that we fail to speak up or we allow people, like Al Gore, to convince us that the “debate is over.” In the case of much of the environmental issue, there has yet to be a debate. I have never seen a debate, perhaps because we have all been told that the debate is over. It is very much like the intelligent design debate. It has yet to take place because those who fear the challenge to their entrenched positions do not want debate. V23n4