The Personal Costs of Spurning Green Misanthropy

There is a darkly humorous scene in the Wachowskis’ film The Matrix in which the sentient computer program called Agent Smith explains his epiphany about the true nature of human beings:

I’ve realised that you are not actually mammals. Every mammal on the 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 ... Human beings are a disease, a cancer of the planet. You are a plague. And we are … the cure. 

In those lines the Wachowski siblings encapsulate, if inadvertently, the raison d’être of Greenpeace. Perhaps this is because the same crypto-Marxist misanthropy that informs The Matrix is at the core of Greenpeace International. In his latest book, Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout, Patrick Moore explains that even in Greenpeace’s earliest days there were fantasists who spoke privately of the need for a “religion of the environment where people simply have faith in the gurus”.

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