About the Book
The environmental movement has helped produce significant improvements in the world around us—from cleaner air to the preservation of natural wonders such as Yellowstone. But in recent years, environmental activists have arisen who regard humans as Public Enemy #1. In this provocative book, Wesley J. Smith exposes efforts by radical activists to reduce the human population by up to 90% and to grant legal rights to animals, plants, and Mother Earth. Smith argues that the ultimate victims of this misanthropic crusade will be the poorest and most vulnerable among us, and he urges us to defend both human dignity and the natural environment before it is too late.
Named by National Journal as one of America’s leading experts in the area of bioethics, attorney Wesley J. Smith is a Senior Fellow of Discovery Institute’s Center on Human Exceptionalism and the previous author of books such as A Rat is a Pig is a Dog is a Boy: The Human Cost of the Animal Rights Movement, Consumer’s Guide to a Brave New World, and Culture of Death: The Assault on Medical Ethics in America. Smith also writes the popular Human Exceptionalism blog at National Review Online.
Reviews
“If there were an international award for continuing to focus on and document cultural and political threats to basic human life and potential–I emphasize human—the winner would be Wesley J. Smith… [In The War on Humans] Smith has now written a riveting expose of this multi-dimensional assault on human beings that for life saving reasons—I kid you not—must be read by human beings beyond their political, religious, and all other affiliations.”
—Nat Hentoff, Syndicated Columnist
“The War on Humans is terrific. Within the world of benign and admirable conservation and ecological-awareness organizations, an irrational and misanthropic ideology has metastasized that in its fanaticism is as dangerous as the fascist and communist crusades of the past century. In The War on Humans, Wesley Smith succinctly exposes the “philosophy” and the aims of this movement, cites its deep unreason, and brilliantly extrapolates the horrors inevitable should it triumph. Sincere conservationists should be concerned if only because anti-humanist thinking has the power, in the social and economic destruction it would create, to discredit even those with humane and reasonable goals of conservation, preservation, clean water, and clean air.”
—Dean Koontz, Bestselling Novelist
“It used to be said of certain kinds of scientific utopians that they loved humanity, but didn’t like any actual humans. Now many scientific utopians don’t even like humanity. Wesley Smith grasps the dangerous paradox of thinkers whose first step in exalting nature is to attack human nature. In order for nature to have ‘rights,’ it has become necessary for humans to have none. This is always the first step toward tyrannical dehumanization of real human beings. We owe much to Wesley Smith for keeping vigil against this deeply anti-human strain of modern thought, for issuing another timely warning before it is too late to avoid another self-inflicted humanitarian catastrophe.”
—Steven Hayward, Visiting Scholar in Conservative Thought and Policy, University of Colorado, Boulder