Re: Killer Forests?, Robert Matthews, Jan. 14

Robert Matthews misses the more fundamental issue. Recent discoveries, such as greenhouse gas production by living forests, are interesting, but to an outsider observing environmentalist "science" they are no surprise. Proving environmentalist science wrong, or complex, is a distraction from what matters. The misanthropy of the entire environmentalist campaign must be rejected.

Environmentalists do not care that higher carbon dioxide levels make many agricultural plants more productive, and help them grow in deserts. (The plants can get CO2 while their pores are more closed, conserving water). Such increased productivity would make the world greener and would help feed the starving poor. When similar contradictions in numerous other environmental issues are exposed, the environmentalists do not care.

The Earth they want to preserve from man is always changing. It changes on a scale vastly beyond human control: continents drift, solar input fluctuates and ocean currents shift. Evolution has created species that are able to survive nearly anywhere on the planet -- and has dispensed with 99.9% of them! Plants have raised oxygen from trace concentrations to a toxic 20% -- killing off millions of species. In one year, volcanoes produce more CO2 and ozone-splitting chlorine compounds than all human activity since the Industrial Revolution. Environmentalists see these massive changes as marvellous features of their nature goddess, but should puny mankind perhaps cause a change, it is a catastrophe. The hypocrisy sticks in one's throat.

Milder environmentalists want human activity "restricted" to ensure "a greener future." But they work as a Trojan horse for the misanthropes. The environmentalists know, explicitly, that their restrictions on Western technology undermine the most life-affirming civilization humanity has yet created. That is what they seek to stop, despite its lower birth rate. They seek to limit our ability for technological advancement, to stop us from living better and raising our children. By their morality, the children for whom we are saving the Earth will not be born. And that is just what the environmentalist misanthropes are asking for. And, children who are born will live less comfortably, because the advancements of their future will have been taken from them by today's environmentalists.

Richard Bramwell, Mississauga, Ont.

National Post, Tuesday, January 24, 2006