Clarity Blog

In case you missed the news, three people at the Discovery Channel headquarters were held hostage today by James Lee, a madman who had “beef” with the network. Unlike the typical disgruntled former employee hostage-taker, Lee was a crazed uber-environmentalist who felt the Discovery Channel isn’t living up to what he saw as its responsibility to save the planet.

It’s getting pretty extreme when an environmentalist takes hostages at one of the most (if not the most) environmentally-friendly cable networks.  But then, Lee’s manifesto is an exercise in extremism, ranting about the need to end to a particularly “filthy” and “parasitic” problem:  human infants. Lee demanded Discovery run programs that encourage people to stop breeding, save the environment and stop wars — not because wars kill people, but because they kill animals.

If you tune in to the opinions being voiced on social media about this episode, you will find most people disagree with Lee (phew!), but the wave of anti-people sentiment is pronounced and continued to grow with each passing hour. We see milder evidence of this with our land development clients, as some of our more radical opponents cry that there are too many people, that we need to stop new development in order to stop population growth, and that any impact at all is too much for the poor planet to survive. Never mind that people had discovered sex and kept at it, even long before there were master bedrooms with spiffy bathrooms and massive walk-in closets.

The Center for Biological Diversity, the environmental organization we most like to poke, has an entire campaign fighting overpopulation. They are more articulate than Lee and never go as far as to call humans parasites, but the sentiment is there, as the CBD states, “Discussion of overpopulation has become somewhat taboo in the environmental movement,” and to change that, “more than 200 conservationists and scientists, including the Center for Biological Diversity, pledged during the February 2009 Global Population Speak Out to promote awareness of the problem — and we pledged again in 2010.”

As growth returns to the economy (hopefully soon) we fear we’ll see more people like Lee.  We’ll certainly see many of the tamer version.  Should we just ignore them?  Or should he put the spotlight on them and actually win more support for new developments?  Interesting options, eh?

In any case, even if James Lee was no Boy Scout, it pays to always remember the Boy Scout Motto:  Be prepared.

Tags: Discovery Channel, environmentalism, hostages, James Lee

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 1st, 2010 at 6:23 pm and is filed under Environment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.