Comment // Health

‘One Health’ and the demotion of humankind to the level of livestock

Listen to Mark Anderson's podcast on the same subject.

The Malthusian mass media cartel’s noxious nagging narrative on aging populations, such as the population of Japan, often involves demoting and sacrificing humanity on the altar of nebulous “climate change” theory, even while abortion is virtually ignored as a factor in depopulation; thus, seriously restricting abortion in the interests of of repopulation is a policy that goes largely unspoken.

Instead, open migration—a rather odd thing to push, given the media’s hyper-fear porn over the supposed spread of Covid—is being touted by the world news apparatus as a way for countries with graying populations to gain enough younger workers to keep the social contract from dissolving: a redistribution of people rather than encouraging the births of more human beings. Apparently, the “carbon footprints” of too many newborns could stymie the slithery schemes of the world’s self-appointed managers in international institutions like the United Nations and its World Health Organization.

The scribblings of London-based TIME magazine writer Ciara Nugent are representative of the media’s myopia in this context. In a 26 January online article, Aging populations can be good for the climate change fight, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida was quoted as saying his country is “on the brink of catastrophe”. With 29.1% of Japan’s people over age 65, deaths significantly outpace births. Furthermore, by about 2050, Japan’s population is expected to shrink by a fifth. And with the workforce contracting, the social security burden is growing.

“Our nation is on the cusp of whether it can maintain its societal functions”, Kishida remarked, as he announced last-ditch policies to increase the birth rate. “It is now or never.”

But then Nugent takes it upon herself to reproach Kishida:

“Never” might be best, from a climate perspective. Population issues can be hard to talk about in the environmental movement. A controversial subset of campaigners has framed population growth in Africa and South Asia as the greatest threat to efforts to stop global warming—despite people in those regions contributing a small fraction of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. I want to be clear that population control is not the solution to climate change.

Such modesty. As a peddler of doublespeak, Nugent actually is pushing population control to combat climate change; in the very next paragraph, she avers:

But it doesn’t make sense for developed countries to ignore the positive role that their shrinking populations could play in the climate fight. The average person in Japan emits 54 times more carbon dioxide a year than the average person in South Sudan, the country that grew the most in 2021.

Even though emissions in developing regions will likely grow with living standards, in the crucial next few decades, it is wealthy, aging countries like Japan, the U.S., the U.K. and Germany that are the bigger problem. Fewer people in those countries would mean less consumption, lower emissions, and less damage to the natural world. Individuals have begun to contemplate that fact, with one in four childless adults in the U.S. citing climate change as a reason not to reproduce . . . [emphasis added] 

 

The ‘One Health’ régime

So, if you’re getting the feeling that key institutions, including media and academia, are reducing the status of human beings in terms of their place in the earthly realm, you’re spot on. What else is one to think when one considers that Nugent’s view of humans as reckless intruders against “the natural world”, rather than an integral part of the world—biblically speaking, the crown of Creation—is a nearly universal worldview in the militantly irreligious secular-humanist establishment?

In this context, consider the works of the UK-based medical journal, The Lancet. This leading periodical recently published a series consisting of an introductory editorial, four chief papers, and a summary commentary—themed “One Health”—all predicated on the notion that humankind, far from being a creation of God, occupies no special place in the natural order.

To wit:

The notion that the well-being of an individual is directly connected to the well-being of the land has a long history in indigenous societies. Nowadays, the term One Health has become an important concept in global health. The One Health High-Level Expert panel defines One Health as “an integrated unifying approach that aims to sustainably balance and optimise the health of people, animals and ecosystems. It recognises the health of humans, domestic and wild animals, plants and the wider environment (including ecosystems) as closely linked and inter-dependent.”

To be sure, the basic well-being of human beings is certainly adversely affected if the physical environment—flora, fauna, air, soil and water—are jeopardized or seriously contaminated. Food supplies, for instance, could either be tainted or in short supply for various reasons. And the creatures of the world are fascinating. Many of us marvel at their beauty, variety, complexity and abilities (consider the uncanny navigation involved in the migratory patterns of butterflies and birds). We find comfort in their company as pets, and devote considerable academic resources to studying and appreciating them in their natural settings, despite the fact that some animals are predatory of our livestock and even of us.

But what might resemble environmental common sense, basic stewardship and a kinship with the natural world actually has a dark underbelly. In a passage that deserves to be read closely, The Lancet’s study goes on to intone:

Modern attitudes [toward] human health take a purely anthropocentric view—that the human being is the center of attention and concern. One Health places us in an interconnected and interdependent relationship with non-human animals and the environment. The consequences of this thinking entail a subtle but quite revolutionary shift of perspective: All life is equal—and of equal concern. [emphasis added]

Thus, it becomes entirely conceivable, given the grave political sins committed by sociopathic despots and tyrannical régimes of all stripes recorded in history, that the contemplated top-down management of a “One Health” world could—since its stated goal is to “balance” the regard for humans with non-human life, premised on human life being merely “of equal concern” with all other life forms—career down a steep slope into depopulation schemes, of whatever nature and scale.

 

The migration factor

Yet, at the same time, we’re being repeatedly told that some countries, depending on the circumstances at hand, may need more people. A 27 January U.S. National Public Radio (NPR) article, headlined Migration could prevent a looming population crisis. But there are catches, avoids the option of reducing abortions and of reinvigorating the time-tested institution of the nuclear family as a means of bringing more young people into society.

First, we read in the NPR article that developmental economist Lant Pritchett insightfully determined that “falling birth rates could upend economies”. The article’s writer, Kai McNamee, adds:

Last week, China reported population decline for the first time in more than 60 years, raising questions about its future economic growth. Other countries are heading towards a similar fate. Slowing birth rates in the developed world are resulting in aging populations and smaller workforces. But in parts of the developing world, the youth population is still growing, and some countries are struggling to create enough jobs for an expanding working-age population.

With regards to nations like Japan and Italy, where birth rates have plummeted—indeed, there are once-vibrant Italian towns and villages, such as Cerignale, that are chronically shrinking—we see what one might call demographic decimation.

As quoted in that NPR piece, Pritchett remarked:

You go from having lots of people in the labor force to support the elderly [to] equality of people in the labor force and . . . in the aged population. And that has just never happened in the history of the world. And it’s not clear [whether] it’s a sustainable way to sustain the social contract we have in which the young support the old.

Meanwhile the U.S. Bureau of Labor’s statisticians predict that while many of the fastest-growing jobs won’t require a college degree, one million of those jobs over the next decade will be in the areas of home-based health and personal care, mainly of the elderly. “And yet over the same period, we’re going to have three million less workers [aged] 20 to 40,” Pritchett added.

Yet Pritchett then descends to the simplistic: “I feel the path to better migration is through more migration”—this while Brookings Institution economist Tara Watson is quoted in the same piece as saying, “It’s the permanent immigrants who generate the long-run population growth for us,” and a Gallup Poll is cited which finds that nearly one billion people around the world would “migrate permanently if they could.”

Thus, the insights of this NPR article go no further than contemplating the redistribution of people, to internationalize the world even more, as opposed to the prospect of national citizens reproducing to grow society from within.

 

Confronting the issue of abortion

The Godzilla in the room is the blunt fact that more than 60 million American babies’ lives were snuffed out via abortion during Roe v. Wade’s nearly half-century federal reign from 1973 to 2022. And many of those babies would have grown up to have children, who, in turn, would have had still more children who instead were never born.

After considerable effort in trawling, a brief mention of the abortion factor, with respect to falling birth rates and the socio-economic ramifications, was found in a 27 June 2022 ABC News online article that was briefly quoted on UK Column’s 30 January 2023 broadcast.

A 1999 National Library of Medicine study (part of the U.S. National Institutes of Health), entitled “Roe v. Wade and American Fertility”, noted: “A complete re-criminalization of abortion nationwide could result in 440,000 additional births per year”. However, the ABC News article, which ran three days after Roe was overturned on 24 June 2022, cited more modest predictions of upwards of 160,000 more annual live U.S. births in the post-Roe era.

So, while it is indeed rare for the orthodox media to make the painfully obvious connection between curtailing the abortion industry and boosting the birthrate, perhaps nevertheless, now that the entire social contract—especially the Social Security system—hangs in the balance, society can finally come to grips with the unavoidable outcomes wrought by an abortion industry whose deadly deeds far surpass any war or holocaust on record.

The grim bottom line is that the utterly depraved abortion industry is the ultimate exercise of tyranny, window-dressed as a “right” to “help” women in difficult circumstances, the heavy emotionalism of which windbaggery tends to stultify the fragile moral sensibilities of the people of the world and render them unable or unwilling to stop the evil in their midst.

 

Revealing numbers

“Researchers found limiting access to abortion in several states will boost birth rates in the second half of this year”, ABC News noted in this exceedingly rare feat of objectivity, after decades of echoing the rest of the mass media cartel in mercilessly bashing pro-lifers and portraying them as virtual terrorists while protecting and promoting the abortion industry and abortionists non-stop.

Although various vices and certain lifestyles, such as homosexuality, deny the unique value and the natural objective standard of man-woman relations—and while things like harmful food additives and pollutants can and do negatively impact human fertility—the gravity of this matter becomes all the more evident when one considers that 440,000 additional yearly births constitutes 4.4 million over ten years, which is more than the entire Los Angeles population in 2021. Even if lower estimates are applied, 160,000 new births per year is 1.6 million over 10 years. That totals more than the individual populations of cities such as Denver, Portland and Seattle, surpasses the population of Dallas, and is about equal to the current population of Phoenix, Arizona.

Taking into account a three-year Covid lockdown that seems to be in retreat, but could come back with a vengeance at any given time—and especially with a world pandemic treaty in the works that is apparently slated to re-gear policy on the likes of medical emergencies on a worldwide scale—it’s vitally important to consider what the “One Health” philosophy would mean if applied to a new “pandemic”.

When it comes to sustaining and expanding the fragile liberty under which many us of manage to live, the only apparent way to win the fight for freedom is urgently to spread the word about the need to prevent such a treaty and such a philosophy from ever becoming our new reality. Once the prison is built, the resistance that’s sorely needed to prevent its construction may prove to be quite futile.