Green Madness
13th December 2018
What drives anti-vaxxers, besides their unfounded warnings about autism, is the same principle that motivates the non-GMO crowd: we need to keep our technological hands off the supposedly divine order of nature, even if elements of that divine order, like viruses, are killing us.
I found this out firsthand years ago, when I had a conversation with the late Arne Naess, the Norwegian father of what is known as “deep ecology” and guru of the European Green movement. How seriously did Naess regard the divinity of Mother Nature? He told me that the eradication of smallpox was a technological crime against nature. The smallpox virus, he said—which had maimed, tortured, and killed millions of human beings—somehow “deserved” human protection.