there is a full-throated campaign to destroy human beings as being on the pedestal of uniqueness there is a full-throated ideological and viscerally emotionally intense desire to turn us into just another animal in the forest the idea behind that is if we see ourselves as just part of nature then we will be more gentle on the land and we will treat animals more humanely and so forth I suggest that's folly if we see ourselves as just another animal in the forest that's precisely how the life in September 2010 longtime environmental activist James Lee took hostages at the headquarters of the Discovery Channel cable network just outside of Washington DC he pulled out the handgun that he came in with and pointed it at one of the hostages Lee demanded that the Discovery Channel changed its programming to highlight what he regarded as the planets biggest enemy humans Lee condemned humans as the most destructive filthy khalood of creatures around he added that the earth did not need humans and it is the responsibility of everyone to preserve the planet by not breeding any more children armed with guns in an explosive device Lee was eventually killed by police and his hostages escaped James Lee was clearly mentally disturbed but his belief that human beings represent a threat rather than a blessing to the planet is shared by a growing number of leading scientists policymakers and journalists Sir David Attenborough is one of the world's most respected wildlife filmmakers in a 2013 interview he denounced humans as a plague on the earth according to Attenborough humans are an enormous horde that are fast outgrowing the planet's space for them he further believes that famines and countries like Ethiopia are inevitable because they are quote too many people there unquote Attenborough is affiliated with a group called population matters which says it favors only non-coercive population control but it's official magazine has defended China's harsh one-child policy explaining that according to the Chinese people who behave in an anti-social manner should expect to suffer severe penalties similar views can be found among prominent University professors the University of Texas in Austin is one of America's leading research universities it's also home to Professor Eric Bianca an evolutionary zoologist who argues that the planet would be better off if 90% of the human population were eliminated Pianka complains that were sucking everything we can out of Mother Earth and turning it into fat human biomass he advocates imposing penalties on anyone who has children you should have to pay more when you have your first kid you pay more taxes he says when you have your second kid you pay a lot more taxes and when you have your third kid you don't get anything back they take it all for activists like Bianca population control is justified less by concern for human welfare than by the belief that human beings have no special status and therefore their needs must give way to the rest of nature and P Uncas words humans are no better than bacteria and other things on the earth have been here longer than us they have a right to this planet - that includes wasps that sting you and that bite you scorpions and rattlesnakes Wesley Smith has been recognized as one of America's leading experts in the area of bioethics a longtime defender of human rights he has co-authored for books with consumer advocate Ralph Nader Smith believes it's important to protect our planet but in recent years he has grown increasingly concerned about a radical strain of environmentalism that views humans as the enemy radical environmentalism says we're the villains of the planet were the cancer on the earth were the vermin species we are destroying this pristine planet and we have to have massive human depopulation if we're going to prevent a terrible harm to the planet according to Smith the belief that humans and their needs no longer take priority has far-reaching consequences it's a day sometime in the future and you are shopping at your local supermarket you want to buy a steak for dinner but there is no steak to be found in fact there is no pork there is no chicken there is no meat at all the store manager explains to you that a judge has just issued an order on behalf of cows pigs and chickens to prevent the violation of their constitutional rights welcome to an emerging area of the law known as animal standing one of the major agenda items in the animal rights movement is to give animals the right to sue this is called animal standing and the idea is that animals could say rise up against their cattle herders and to them well of course it wouldn't be the animals who would be utterly oblivious to what was going on it would be ideologues like People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals who would then take these animals as litigants and bring a lawsuit in the name of the animals to get what they want done in terms of their ideological desires PETA has already done that they had some whales killer whales sue SeaWorld to have the animals the the whales declared to be slaves well I didn't go anywhere but the reason it didn't go anywhere is that the judge said a slave is a person and a person can only be a human being well let's cut to what is being proposed by the the nonhuman Rights Center which plans very soon to bring lawsuits all over the country to have animals declared to be persons if you have a court declare an animal to be a person then the lawsuit that was thrown out of court suddenly becomes something that a judge could determine and actually we've had court saying that animals could have standing if Congress decided to pass a law but as we we've seen in recent history you don't need Congress to pass a law you just need a judge wanting to make history you have very powerful people wanting animal standing Lawrence tribe who is a very famous harvard law professor once talked as being on the supreme court he's a little long in the tooth for that now he has stood for animal standing you have more than 100 of the best law schools in the United States with animal rights law clinics who are teaching the lawyers of tomorrow who are very interested in animal right preparing lawyers to bring these cases so if you ever had a judge say yes an animal can bring a lawsuit it would be Katie bar the door if you end up with animal standing no animal industry is going to be safe from potentially being sued by the animals that they use instrumentally and that would be very destructive not only to our economy but also to our self-image as unique human beings and of course that's the point animal standing is a result of the growing movement for radical animal rights and I'm not talking about animal welfare I'm not talking about the human duty which is by the way part of human exceptionalism to treat animals humanely of course we have that duty in fact if being human isn't what gives us the duty to treat animal animals humanely what does it's it is the fact that we're human that we have that obligation but animal rights the ideology People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals is just one example they say being human isn't what gives value and if you think that you are a species just that is you believe in discrimination against animals and so they ask a second question well if being human isn't what gives value what does and they will say the ability to feel pain or the ability to suffer and since a cow can feel pain and a human being can feel pain that means what we do to a cow should be viewed the same way as if that action was done to a human being meaning that cattle ranching just as one example is akin to slavery and that allowed people for the Ethical Treatment of Animals to actually mount what was called the Holocaust on your plate campaign where they equated having leather shoes and a leather couch to being an inmate at Auschwitz and you know I've been to Auschwitz I've been in a gas chamber I've seen the Crematory I've walked that terrible railroad terminus in which Jews were separated for extinction or for slave labor and any movement that can't distinguish between the worst evils ever done to humankind and animal husbandry well it seems to me they've lost the ability to talk about morality to anyone to preach morality but that comes when you deny human exceptionalism which animal rights does but some people claim that granting rights to cows and chickens is not enough they are now actively calling for personhood for plants who said that you said that you said that hmm be me you can talk I got a talking plant say it again Phoebe oh boy I never been to college and I ain't been around much but I'd have been willing to bet there ain't no such thing as a talking plant the individual dignity of plants was actually extended in the pages of the New York Times no less by an article by a fellow a professor named Michael martyr and he said that because peas can communicate chemically through the soil which I suppose sends a signal about changes of for example drought conditions that there might be drought conditions that this actually means that peas in a sense are persons - and he actually said that we should not consume annuals that if we're going to consume plants which we have - it should be perennials because that is a gift of the plant to us but these annual plants they they have higher standing than we think and so we can't we shouldn't eat peas which also means by the way we shouldn't eat tomatoes but these are fruits of the annuals I mean so that the whole thing gets crazy I think it's nuts and I think perhaps it's just just to try to show a sophisticated approach to life but it is potentially tremendously anti human because you're actually talking about with animal rights and with this idea of plant rights restricting what we can eat as a species and it's also very destructive to us when you say well because a plant has a chemical signal that sends that that's akin to human being morally in terms of our communicative abilities in our moral sense although plant rights may still seem outlandish to many people the idea has moved out of the ivory tower into public policy in countries like Switzerland Switzerland I think has gone off the edge of the world frankly they have put into their constitution a clause that protects the individual dignity of plants I'm not talking about ecosystems I'm talking about individual plants and they actually appointed a big bioethics Commission to figure out well what is it about plants that gives them individual dignity in the same way humans might have individual dignity and they concluded it's because we share molecular substances at the cellular level and so and this is the example they used it is immoral when the farmer walks down a path and decapitates they literally use that term a wild flower that's just nuts and this is a country where there are suicide clinics where people fly in from all over the world to be made dead it is against the law in Switzerland that's what to flush a live goldfish down the toilet and yet individual plants are said to have dignity when you give up on human exceptionalism you go a little off your rocker next on the horizon is the proposal to grant rights to nature as a whole Equador for example in bolivia having their constitutions that nature has rights literally rights and in essence they're co-equal with those of people Santa Monica Pittsburgh and about 20 other American municipalities have also instituted ordinances that basically enact the rights of nature it's the right to thrive it's the right to procreate and recreate it's almost a right to life for nature I grew up in Los Angeles I know Santa Monica like the back of my hand there's no nature left in Santa Monica unless they want to tear down the pier for the mackerel and they're not going to do that but it's an ideological statement according to Smith giving legal rights to nature could devastate human society as we know it valuable natural resources from oil to land could be placed permanently off-limits for human use farmers could be held criminally liable for plowing new fields if it caused the deaths of rodents snakes and even weeds hydroelectric projects to bring power to villages in Africa could be shut down because they violated the right of rivers to run freely in short in the name of giving nature rights humans will be made to suffer on a massive scale and those who suffer the most will likely be those who are already the world's poorest and most vulnerable people there really is an intent on the upon in the radical environmental movement to prevent broad human access to resources and development of land and that will result in a much reduced standard of living for those of us in the developed world and I really worry what will happen in the undeveloped world places that have very rich resources and if they could just get their cultures together they might be able to create tremendous prosperity for people currently in destitution but if nature is going to have the same rights as these destitute people those people are going to remain in destitution and then we'll see international agencies saying well we have to redistribute wealth and you will actually make it so we're poor and and people in the developed developing world don't have a chance to get out of their bone crushing poverty Smith believes that current efforts to grant nature rights can be traced back to an ideology rather than science and again you can trace it all back to this I think neurotic desire to deny the specialness and uniqueness of human life but where did the desire to deny human exceptionalism come from some attributed in large part to the ideas of one man the year is 1837 the place London a few months earlier a young man returned from a long sea voyage around the globe during his journey he explored the plants and animals of exotic lands now he started a notebook to carefully record his new ideas about nature it is absurd to talk of one animal being higher than another he wrote later he added people often talk of the wonderful event of intellectual man appearing the appearance of insects with other senses is more wonderful the young man was Charles Darwin some argue that the roots of current anti humanism can be found in the ideas of Darwin and his popularizers a lot of the animal rights movement today is driven by the notion that humans are just another animal that were not qualitatively any different from other animals and a lot of this does flow from the evolutionary the evolutionary concept that we descended from other animals incremental II and so there's nowhere to really draw the line there's no line to be drawn in Darwinian terms human beings are really not special at all we're just one part of nature that's happened develop at this particular time in history and we're really no more special than salamanders or moss or fungi in fact some Darwinian biologists make that point today repeatedly and so there's nothing sacred or special about human beings and that means that we should also treat people accordingly Darwin also helped encourage fears about unrestricted human breeding in 1838 he read the reverend thomas malthus's essay on population Malthus warned that the natural result of overpopulation among humans and animals is mass death as they competed for limited resources Darwin later said that reading Malthus inspired his theory of evolution by natural selection Darwyn turned Malthus on his head by arguing that there's something good about this death that's going on and in Malthus it I mean we're talking about mass death because if you think about organisms they reproduce far more than they can possibly be supported in Darwin's theory mass death became the great engine of progress in nature in his words from the war of nature from famine and death the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving namely the production of the higher animals directly follows Darwin himself was a kindly man who was ambivalent about the social implications of his theory however some of his followers have not been so conflicted today Darwinian ideas influenced the views of many of the most strident anti human activists when eco-terrorist james lee took hostages at the Discovery Channel there was little coverage of the central role Darwin's theory played in Lee's ideology yet in his list of demands Lee called on the Discovery Channel to talk about evolution talk about Malthus and Darwin until it sinks into the stupid people's brains filmmaker David Attenborough's claimed that humans are a plague likewise grew out of a Darwinian worldview according to Attenborough in the past natural selection kept humans in check by killing them all but modern society undermines natural selection by saving the sick and finding ways to feed more and more people because of this we need to find new ways to reduce the human population if the planet is to survive other activists today invoke Darwinian ideas in order to deny that humans have special value Christopher Mane's was an early leader in the influential environmental group earth first in his book green rage he argues that evolution means there is no basis for seeing humans as more advanced or developed than any other species according to mains human beings are not the goal of evolution because evolution has no goal in his words evolution simply unfold life form after life form and Darwin invited humanity to face the fact that the observation of nature has revealed not one scrap of evidence that humankind is superior or special or even particularly more interesting than say lichen the use of Darwin's theory to debunk human dignity spans the ideological spectrum Princeton University bioethicists Peter Singer is author of the book a Darwinian left Singer claims that the life of a newborn baby is a less value than the life of a pig a dog or a chimpanzee and where does Peter Singer get this from he's told us in an interview Peter Singer made very clear that his view was going back to Darwin he said Darwin really showed us that human beings aren't special we're not so separate from the rest of nature were not unique and so that we should be treated that way and so this idea that there's something special or unique about human beings that human beings deserve special treatment really is undermined by Darwin in Peter singers view the same dismissal of human uniqueness can be found amongst some on the right John Derbyshire was a longtime writer for the conservative journal National Review in 2012 he was dismissed after writing an article for another publication arguing that blacks are more antisocial and less intelligent than whites Derbyshire believes that racial differences are the product of evolution he also believes that Darwinian theory refutes the claim of traditional Western monotheism that human beings are exceptional in his words the broad outlook on human nature implied by Darwinian ideas contradicts the notion of human exceptionalism two modern biologists informed by Darwin we are merely another branch on nature's tree but not everyone in the scientific community agrees engager earned her PhD in biology at the University of Washington and she later did postdoctoral research at Harvard doctor Gager believes that science supports rather than undermines the case for human uniqueness you may have heard that we're a lot like chimps in fact 98% similar in fact though if you look at us we are orders of magnitude different from chimps in many ways there's a quantum leap that goes from whatever our common ancestor with chimps might have been to us take for example poetry or music or language that chimps are capable of complex thought they don't study themselves or other animals they just live when I think of the difference between chimps and humans I think of the great works of art Michelangelo sculptures paintings by Goga or the great impressionist paintings or the Dutch masters Rembrandt I think of quantum physics no chimp has ever developed an equation to describe even throwing a ball across the room so to say that we are 98% similar to chimps is to ignore the the differences that are the most important to go beyond that it's not even true that were 98% similar to chimps when those numbers were calculated they were done in a very crude fashion and they were strictly looking at genes that code for proteins so if you take all the genes that code for proteins and compare them between chimps and humans at the DNA level or the amino acid level yeah we're pretty similar but those are the it's like those are the building blocks that you used to make a house the bricks the pipe the wires those are shared in common across all houses all houses need bricks or wires or more two-by-fours so it's not surprising that we're similar but the more we're looking in detail at how our genes our genomes are arranged the Z the non-coding stuff you're finding a fair amount of difference and it's something that there's so much difference that we haven't even got a firm handle on how much difference there is defenders of the idea that humans are special believe that all of us have a stake in the outcome of current debates through the history of human life when people devalue some parts of human life for various reasons that can have really tragic consequences and so our view of the human person whether we're unique or not is important to us not just personally in our own sense of meaning but to whether we're going to have a compassionate society part of human exceptionalism is that only we have duties so we have a duty for example to treat the environment properly we have a duty to treat animals we have a duty to treat each other with respect and dignity we have a duty to our posterity to leave them a better place I think than what we found at when we came along the founding fathers of the United States we're talking about their posterity all the time that's us no animal is thinking or has a duty to posterity they don't have duties to each other we do one reason traditionally we have spent so much and cared so much about social welfare efforts in the United States and about the poor and the most impoverished among us and about equality of people of different races is because we've had this intuition that has also been buttress by frankly our religious beliefs and our cultural beliefs that human beings are unique and that human beings are special and that all human beings are unique and special and have basic rights and should be treated with respect if you believe in civil rights if you believe in universal human rights but you reject human exceptionalism you're going to be working at cross-purposes with yourself because you if you don't have intrinsic human dignity as an objective factor how do you have universal human rights it will collapse because there'll be no weight bearing pillars to hold it up so if you believe I don't care if you're politically left you're politically right I don't care if you're atheist or deeply Christian a Buddhist or Muslim if you don't believe in human exceptionalism you are going to be undermining universal human rights