Wynn Alan Bruce, climate martyr and climate saint, killed himself in a climate memento mori. We can pass him off as a clearly disturbed man and pray that his soul has found eternal rest, but what to say about the fact that a movement exists that valorizes him? In the long term, like the Shakers before them, climate activists will write themselves out of the future both with purposeful childlessness and by refusing to engage in life on normal terms.
On April 22—Earth Day—the climate activist Wynn Alan Bruce, of Boulder, Colorado, set himself on fire outside the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington D.C. The day after his death, the climate scientist Kritee Kanko tweeted, “This guy was my friend…This act is not suicide. This is a deeply fearless act of compassion to bring attention to climate crisis. We are piecing together info but he had been planning it for at least one year. #wynnbruce I am so moved.”
Kanko’s sanguine, even proud, reaction to a friend’s self-immolation is an example of what has become increasingly obvious to anyone who has kept up with today’s professional tree huggers: climate activism is now a death cult.
I have family members who work in the field of environmental protection, so I grew up around plastic reduction measures and solar panel installations and manuals about composting and recycling bins. I’ve worked on environmental projects my whole life, and I believe that we have a moral responsibility as the stewards of creation to protect it, especially when we see, for instance, how microplastics are causing infertility or how soil degradation is costing farmers money while lowering our food quality. But the “climate justice” movement, far from fighting to protect us, aims to destroy not only our quality of life today, but the existence of the human race in the future.
Consider the following headlines: “Climate change is making people think twice about having children,” from CNBC, “Your Diet Is Cooking the Planet,” from the Atlantic, “Social Distancing? You Might Be Fighting Climate Change, Too,” from the New York Times, and “Climate change anxiety is real. Here’s how you can manage those feelings,” from NPR. When the mainstream media marches in lockstep on this question, it is clear that there is a concerted push to make you feel bad for being a person. After all, we emit carbon with every exhalation.
