Whether they’re old enough to believe in the EcoGospel, or Gaia, or man-made climate change or not, children are the latest weapon pressed into service by the eco-warriors. First, it was co-opting Pope Francis and Laudato Si, and now it’s kids. Will they stop at nothing? The Wisconsin Daily Independent reported this past Monday that a group calling itself Citizens Preserving the Penokee Hills Heritage Park is promoting its environmental agenda with a painting of a young Native American girl wearing traditional garb holding a bloody blade in one hand and the severed head of Gov. Scott Walker in the other. Nice.
According to the mission statement, the purpose of their group is to provide an avenue for the distribution of research, education, and information pertaining to preserving the Penokee Hills as a national heritage park in Northwestern Wisconsin…. The artist who did the piece is Native American Jodi Webster. Jodi’s bio claims that her work highlights her Woodlands lineage while also addressing the many adversities encountered by modern Native American people. Jodi is member of the Ho-Chunk Nation as well as the Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation. “My intentions in creating works are to enlighten the perceptions of Native people as well as positively promote women and children. By highlighting my own heritage within my work, I hope to make others aware of the distinct cultural beauty represented by each of the various 566 tribal identities. “
If “positively promoting” women and children means depicting cute young children as homicidal maniacs blithely beheading public figures doesn’t get your motor running, there’s this:
Eugene, Ore.-based Our Children’s Trust has been one of the driving forces behind a series of lawsuits in various states with children acting as plaintiffs, some as young as 8 years old. “We wanted to support young people in engaging in democracy because many of them can’t vote,” said Julia Olson, the organization’s executive director, an attorney and mother of two. “One principal way for them to take action with their government is to bring cases in court and to petition rule-making bodies like agencies at the state level to enact rules to limit carbon emissions.” But while the strategy has been greeted with cheers in the green movement, the use of what Olson calls “youth plaintiffs” has generated criticism in other quarters.
Generated criticism? You think?
“This step towards having kids (file lawsuits) is just a way to make it more emotional and more political and less challenging to where the science is,” said Jim Steele, an ecologist and self-described climate skeptic who spent 25 years as the director of the San Francisco State University Sierra Nevada Field Campus, considered one of California’s leading environmental education centers. “To me, you’re not trying to prove the science one way or the other,” Steele said. “You’re trying to push a political agenda and get people to be liable to what I think is fear-mongering.”… Just last week, a group of 21 kids — 11 from Oregon and 10 from other states — filed a lawsuit against President Obama and the federal government, saying the nation’s political leaders “have violated and are violating Plaintiffs’ fundamental constitutional rights to life, liberty, and property by causing dangerous CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere and dangerous government interference with a stable climate system.”
The family that litigates together stays together, or something similar to that, I suppose. But are there no depths to which eco-warriors won’t descend? Your writer’s father was a proud union man, but I don’t remember him at any time recruiting us to walk the picket lines with him at his place of employment. In another time reputable parents were above such actions. However, if the left-of-center eco-warriors can disparage and disregard Christian faith on one hand while embracing the “moral dimension” of Pope Francis’ Laudato Si on the other, I suppose any ends justifies their means – to them at least. This article originally appeared on the website of the Acton Institute.
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