Tracy Stone-Manning, the current nominee for the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), is coming under fire for various comments she’s made about how children are an “environmental hazard” and her views on population control.
The person in charge of BLM controls the largest land management agency in the United States, which includes “one in every ten acres of land in the United States, and approximately 30% of the Nation’s minerals. These lands and minerals are found in every state in the country and encompass forests, mountains, rangelands, arctic tundra, and deserts.”
Stone-Manning may soon become the leader of BLM, though critics are questioning her credentials and some of her extreme beliefs on climate change, especially when it comes to children.
Focus on the Family believes that children are a gift from God and a blessing, Stone-Manning has a different interpretation.
As reported by The Daily Caller, Stone-Manning’s 1992 graduate thesis focused on eight advertisements she created about overpopulation. She wrote, “The origin of our abuses is us. If there were fewer of us, we would have less impact. We must consume less, and more importantly, we must breed fewer consuming humans.”
In one of her advertisements, she shows a picture of a child and asks the question, “Can you find the environmental hazard in this photo?”
The answer is of course, the child as human beings themselves are the ultimate hazard.
“That’s right, it’s the cute baby,” Stone-Manning’s wrote under the picture. “Americans believe that overpopulation is only a problem somewhere else in the world. But it’s a problem here too.”
“The earth is only so big, and we can tap into it only so often. In America, we tap in often and hard. When we overpopulate, the earth notices it more. Stop at two. It could be the best thing you do for the planet.”
Her work reads similarly to Malthusianism, a theory of overpopulation created in 1798 by Thomas Robert Malthus, an English political economist.
He wrote, “The power of population is so superior to the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race.”
Malthus and his gloomy projections for earth’s future were instrumental in influencing people like Charles Darwin, Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, and others in the eugenics movement.
As the Scientific American explains about Malthus, “His scenario influenced policy makers to embrace social Darwinism and eugenics, resulting in draconian measures to restrict particular populations’ family size, including forced sterilizations.”
Unsurprisingly, none of his predictions came to pass.
She also wrote another ad encouraging couples not to have more than two children, arguing, “A child born in America will burn 499 times more energy than a child born in Ethiopia. And each year, Americans add 2 million energy-eating humans to the earth. We consume one quarter of all the world’s resources simply by living as Americans. When we have children, the planet feels it more.”
The messaging and wording of that ad is pretty disturbing – viewing children as “energy-eating humans.”
But her views are not outside the realm of that other environmental activists are saying, with some young people even refusing to have children because of climate change.
Hopefully, more people will recognize that children are an inheritance from God and not an “environmental hazard.” After all, a child born this year could help reverse the climate situation that others remain so concerned about.
Photo from CNP/REUTERS
