Ed. note: This is Part 2 of a six-part series. “America’s Enlightenment Heritage” (Part 1) is here; “Inhuman Rights” (Part 3) is here; “Philosophic Conflict” (Part 4) is here; “The Value of Nature” (Part 5) is here; and “The ‘Ideal’ of Primitivism” (Part 6) is here.

“The ultimate goal of the mainstream environmentalist movement, therefore, is not conservation of natural resources for human use. It is preservation of nature as an end in itself.”

Nowhere was the traditional fear of self-responsibility and the hatred of individualist economies more evident than among intellectuals. Over the years, they began to translate the pre-modern Zeitgeist into more intellectually palatable terms: into formal philosophical critiques of reason, individualism, and capitalism.

Early Environmentalism

The Eden Premise lay at the core of the thinking of philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau, the intellectual godfather of today’s “counterculture.”…

Ed. Note: The ideology of environmentalism has proven itself to be, by far, the most persuasive enemy of the Master Resource, energy. Pollution … Health Hazards … Species Extinction … Ecosystem Destruction … Resource Exhaustion … Global Cooling … Global Warming … Melting Glaciers … Rising Seas … Climate Change. Why do the enemies of energy industries seem always to fall back, in the end, on environmentalist themes for their strongest and most effective stands? Is there something deeply embedded in our Western culture that makes the philosophy of environmentalism the most influential instrument for opposition to the energy industry?

Today, Master Resource begins a six-part series analyzing the philosophic basis of environmentalism, its enmity to the technologies of instrumental reason (especially energy technology), as well as its incompatibility with the foundational individualist philosophy of the United States.…