Best of Power Hour: Robert Zubrin on Merchants of Despair

On this week’s Power Hour “best of” episode, I talk to Robert Zubrin, author of Merchants of Despair: Radical Environmentalists, Criminal Pseudo-Scientists, and the Fatal Cult of Antihumanism.

Dr. Zubrin’s is a fascinating history of the theory and practice of what Zubrin calls “anti-humanism”–the belief that “human beings are pathogens whose activities need to be suppressed in order to protect a fixed ecological order with interests that stand above those of humanity.” Zubrin traces anti-humanism from the doctrines of Thomas Malthus centuries ago, which led to murder and sterilization campaigns in the name of protecting ourselves and the planet from “overpopulation,” to the racist social mis-interpretations of the theory of evolution that led to mass-murder in the name of protecting ourselves and the planet from “degeneration of the gene pool,” to the modern “environmentalist” movement’s war against life-saving practical energy, pesticides, and genetically-modified organisms, in the name of saving ourselves and the planet from an “excessive” human “footprint.”