About 6 years ago, I started talking about something I call "Agent Smith environmentalism."
The term comes from the iconic villain of the first Matrix film: a malevolent computer program named "Agent Smith."
At the end of the first movie, the villain gives a classic monologue to one of the heroes that goes like this:
Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area.
There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus.
Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You're a plague and we are the cure.
That classic villain speech has formed the basis for every single leftist interaction with nature. For the modern environmentalist, human presence is treated as a disease, a violation of the pristine planet we live on.
All our environmental efforts, billions and billions of dollars, are focused almost entirely on "reducing human impact." We are told we must reduce our quality of life, reduce our number of children, reduce our safety and prosperity, reduce, reduce, reduce.
We have Apple commercials in which CEO Tim Cook pays fearful homage to a vengeful god called "Mother Nature," portrayed for some reason by Hollywood's typecast sassy black woman Octavia Spencer.
We have columnists in the New York Times calling for people to stop having children altogether.
We have psychotic anti-humans like Jane Goodall (who was just awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Joe Biden) wishing for the mass extinction of billions of human beings for the sake of the planet.
In all these efforts, we see pagans bowing to a pagan Earth-god, sacrificing innocent people, and timidly begging for mercy.
In no place is this more starkly apparent than in California.
For decades, California has been ruled by a firmly entrenched cabal of radical environmentalists. Hundreds of regulations are mercilessly churned out each year, all of them sacrificing human citizens to the Earth-god in exchange for the promise of favorable weather, rain for the crops, and the prosperity of a tiny junk fish called the Delta Smelt.
And every year, California is rewarded by this vengeful god with droughts, wildfires, and millions of people desperately escaping the state.
We're told California actually has plenty of water, but most of it is allowed to flow directly into the Pacific Ocean, rather than being rerouted into Southern California. All to protect a non-endangered bait fish.
Gavin Newsom has also presided over unprecedented dismantling of dams in California, as part of agreements with tribal governments to return land back to its natural state. It has left once-beautiful lakes devastated, now nothing more than trickling streams.
It doesn't end there. Several years ago, desperate, water-deprived Californians overwhelmingly voted to approve the building of massive rainwater collection infrastructure to get more water to residential areas. Newsom, bound by environmental lobbyists and suicidal ideology, has built absolutely nothing, against the will of his own people.
Furthermore, California does almost no wild brush clearing or controlled burns to prevent future fires. They've allowed their environment to become a pristine, untouched, dry powder keg of destruction.
Now, almost all of Los Angeles is ablaze as multi-million-dollar mansions, schools, and hospitals go up in smoke. The fire is prevailing against an understaffed fire department and fire hydrants that have run dry.
This is the dark side of "reducing human impact" on our environment.
Ironically, the cure for this madness is found in the first few chapters of the best-selling book in human history. In the Bible's book of Genesis, we are given the command God passed to newly created mankind at the dawn of history.
It's known as the Creation Mandate, and it goes like this:
Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.
The Earth was made for man, not man for the Earth. God put mankind in charge of nature, to tame it, to conquer it, to subdue it for human flourishing.
Mankind is meant to be a steward, a gardener, a builder, and a cultivator. We are meant to make the Earth a more beautiful, fruitful, and safe place than it would be without us.
Instead, we are being ruled by pagans who treat human beings like a disease, and our presence here as a violation. We have politicians who are afraid to take dominion, to rule over and harness nature for good.
