"Environment" Is Now a Meaningless Construct

The Greens Have Fouled Their Own Nest

Greenism has become so extreme in New Zealand that it has lost its way as a credible political force.  The Green Party now depends substantially on a protest vote of former Labour Party stalwarts who no longer find that party to their more radical taste.

The term "environment" and the phrase "environmental protection" has become so inflated in the hands of the Greens that they can no longer define it in any meaningful sense, except to say that it embraces and encompasses everything.  As the hapless Dennis Denuto so eloquently put it: " It's. . . um. . . the Constitution of Australia. . . . It's just the vibe of the thing.  It's all parts of it.  It's the vibe of it. . . .   It's the Constitution. It's Mabo.  It's justice.  It's the vibe.  No that's it.  It's the vibe.  I rest my case."

One struggles to imagine a more inept and inane response than Denuto's were members of the current Green Party of Aotearoa to be asked, "What is the 'environment' "?  It's so big, so vast, so important that it's everything.  "It's all of it.  It's the vibe."

The Government in New Zealand has put forward some modest proposals to restrict the more draconian provisions of the Resource Management Act ("RMA").  This pernicious act, under the guise of environmental protection, places huge impediments over the development of land in New Zealand.  In most cases land development is subject to an objection process which allows objectors to claim all kinds of environmental degradation if the development were to proceed.

But the Greens have so inflated the concept of the "environment" that it now embraces personal aesthetics and tastes and preferences of everyone else--or at least the aesthetics of Greenist fanatics.

Test-Tube Superstition

Karakia, Anyone?

Intellectual deceit and rampant hypocrisy crowd the modern Western stage.  Unbelief is not just a nasty termagant, it is also replete with intellectual dishonesty.  Take, for example, the militant insistence that New Zealand be a secular nation.  Religion, we are told, is replete with myths, lies, and deceits.  The only truth is secular truth--which apparently means truth which can be observed and experimentally proven in a test-tube.

But at the same time, and out of the same mouths (albeit from the other side) there is an enthusiastic celebration of spirituality.  In our country this has become institutionalised in the employing of Maori to incant and pray at all public events and gatherings.  In fact, it is pretty well acknowledged now that no event would be a happening at all, were it not accompanied by Maori prayers, or incantations (karakia), or traditional animist chants to invoke the Maori pantheon of gods.  No formal school opening, no commissioning of a public project, no opening of a New Zealand embassy anywhere around the world would be the real deal without an effusive display and contribution from Maori spiritualism.

Apparently Unbelieving secularism has fallen prey to the rationalist-irrationalist dichotomy.  In the end, the rationalist becomes the superstitious irrationalist. 

This is not just a New Zealand failing.