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RUSH: It’s the Rush Limbaugh program and the EIB Network. I’m talking here so other stations can’t steal my song.
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RUSH: Yes. I noticed this. The name of the group here is Rare Earth. The tune is from 1968, is called Get Ready. The Temptations did this song, and this is a Motown group, one of their sub-labels. I have the most incredible story here. This is actually from a couple days ago on July 14th. It’s Newsweek, published on the MSNBC website. The headline is, ‘After We Are Gone.’ The subhead is, ‘If humans were evacuated, the Earth would flourish.’ This is a serious story about how great the planet could be again if we were just all wiped out, and it focuses on a guy who’s trying to accomplish that and deals with it genuinely and seriously! Let me read you a few short excerpts. ‘The Second Coming may be the most widely anticipated apocalypse ever, but it’s far from the only version of the end times. Environmentalists have their own [vision] — a vision of a world not consumed by holy fire but returned to ecological balance by the removal of the most disruptive species in history. That, of course, would be us, the 6 billion furiously metabolizing and reproducing human beings polluting its surface.
‘There’s even a group trying to bring it about, the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, whose Web site calls on people to stop having children altogether. And now the journalist Alan Weisman has produced, if not a bible, at least a Book of Revelation, ‘The World Without Us,’ which conjures up a future something like … well, like the area around Chernobyl, the Russian nuclear reactor that blew off a cloud of radioactive steam in 1986. In a radius of 30 kilometers, there are no human settlements — just forests that have begun reclaiming fields and towns, home to birds, deer, wild boar and moose. Weisman’s intriguing thought experiment…’ Intriguing thought experiment? Intriguing thought experiment! This is a lunatic. Somebody that needs to be institutionalized is being given credibility by the Drive-By Media. His ‘intriguing thought experiment is to ask what would happen if the rest of the Earth was similarly evacuated — not by a nuclear holocaust or natural disaster, but by whisking people off in spaceships, or killing them with a virus that spares the rest of the biosphere. In a world with no one to put out fires, repair dams or plow fields, what would become of the immense infrastructure humans have woven across the globe?
‘In a matter of days or weeks, nuclear power plants around the world would boil off their water and melt into vast radioactive lumps. Electrical power would fail, and with it the pumps keeping New York City’s subways from flooding; in a few years Lexington Avenue would collapse and eventually turn into a river. Lightning-caused fires would blow out the windows in skyscrapers, and concrete floors would freeze and buckle. A few centuries on, steel bridges would fall victim to rust and the inexorable assault of vegetation taking root in windblown clumps of soot. Masonry structures would last the longest, although the next ice age would wipe them out, at least at the latitude of New York, and bronze sculpture, Weisman estimates, would still be recognizable 10 million years into the future, probably the last recognizable artifacts of our civilization. And what of the biosphere? Unless global warming has already progressed beyond the point of no return, it would eventually recover much of its diversity and richness. Contrary to widespread belief, cockroaches would not take over the world if there were no one around to step on them: tropical insects, they wouldn’t survive their first winter without central heating.
‘Rats and dogs would miss us the most, it seems — the former for our garbage and the latter our protection from bigger predators. Feral cats, on the other hand, would do quite well: there would be plenty of birds for them to eat. Elephants would once again have the run of Africa, and the oceans would be filled with fish as few alive have ever seen them. Much of the world would come to resemble … well, the Korean demilitarized zone, where no one has set foot for more [50 years], now a mecca for Korean bird watchers. Sound appealing? Well, it did to Weisman, too, when he began work on the book four years ago. And ‘four out of five’ of the people he’s told about it, he estimates, thought the idea sounded wonderful. Since we’re headed inexorably toward an environmental crash anyway, why not get it over cleanly and allow the world to heal? Over time, though, Weisman’s attitude toward the rest of humanity softened, as he thought of some of the beautiful things human beings have accomplished, their architecture and poetry, and he eventually arrived at what he views as a compromise position: a worldwide, voluntary agreement to limit each human couple to one child.
‘This, says Weisman — who is 60, and childless after the death of his only daughter — would stabilize the human population by the end of the century at about 1.6 billion, approximately where it was in 1900.’ I don’t know that he’s a commie. I never heard of this clown. All I know is that he’s got a book, and Newsweek is treating this as legitimately as they did these wackos and the director who made the movie about assassinating Bush. A virus that wipes us all out? It’s going to happen anyway. Global warming is going to wipe us out, right? Why not do it painlessly and quickly and come up with a way that will spare every living organism but humanity? I have warned you people about this for 18 years. This is where these people have been headed, and the thing is, they’re not laughed out of the room. Can you imagine if I, on this program, suggesting wiping out four and a half billion people? Can you imagine what the reaction would be? Oh, yes, you can. I certainly wouldn’t be treated with respect and credibility, and no one would be intellectually curious to examine this idea. But this guy comes along and does it… How does a guy write a story like this? Writing about some clown that wants to kill him, wipe him off the face the earth — and this Weisman guy, the subject of the story, acts like he’s not even part of the human race. ‘They,’ ‘you,’ but never ‘us,’ in his words.