Traditional Environmentalism

In 1996, I enrolled as a freshman at Michigan Technological University (MTU) in Houghton, Michigan, located in the Keewenaw Peninsula which I honestly believe is one of the most beautiful parts of the country. During my senior year at Airport High School, 40 minutes south of Detroit, I was recruited to run Cross Country by MTU’s Coach Gary Nichols who had a thick Yooper accent inherited from his Finnish ancestors. He was a wonderful coach and he also coached me in Nordic Skiing and Track & Field. Coach Nichols and my teammates were like extended family. As much as my life revolved around endurance sports, I did also enjoy the vast majority of my classes. It was through majoring in environmental engineering, playing on three Varsity sports teams, competing in Ultimate Frisbee tournaments, going on multiple hiking trips with a scouting club, and being involved in a couple of environmental clubs all in a beautiful setting, that I was certainly becoming more and more in love with nature.

Even though MTU was state-run, there were quite a few Catholics who attended the school. I was nominally raised in the United Methodist denomination as a boy but had recently started going to a couple different Baptist churches shortly after turning 18. By my sophomore year at MTU, I had at least five good Catholic friends with who I ran Cross Country. I hadn’t really considered Catholicism as being a good option for me because I did not consider it as Biblically grounded as the denominations I was familiar with. I had visited the Jesuit-run University of Detroit Mercy while a senior in high school.  My experience there led me to believe that most Catholics were more interested in partying hard than they were in the sacraments. Luckily, when I was a sophomore, I was befriended by a freshman mechanical engineering student named Michael who loved to talk to me about philosophy and apologetics and how my beliefs actually aligned with Catholicism. To make a long story short, at the beginning of my junior year, I finally agreed to go to Mass with Michael and two other runners from the Cross Country team.  I fell in love with Mass and the Catholic faith. I immediately spoke to the pastor of St. Ignatius Catholic Church, Fr. Tom Poisson, and after going through RCIA, he Confirmed me in the Catholic Church at the 1999 Easter Vigil.

Reflecting back on this time at MTU, as much as I liked most of my classes, I consider that there was an almost inverse relationship between learning what was taught in the science classes and the deepening of one’s Catholic faith. The biology classes taught evolution, and while I was joining the Church founded by Christ nearly 2,000 years ago, some of my cradle-Catholic friends were leaving their faith because they believed they had been indoctrinated by a false religion by their Catholic parents and schools. They were now “enlightened” because, for the first time, in their minds, they truly understood science, being finally unbound by the chains of a repressive faith. Another common tenant of the environmental movement seemed to be that humans were inherently bad. Whenever I spoke to young women I was potentially interested in, they almost all said they either didn’t want to have any kids or perhaps they wanted one or two at the most. We were led to believe by some of the professors that mankind was damaging the planet and therefore the best thing you can logically do is not have many children as a way of responsibly shrinking the earth’s population.

I got my degree in environmental engineering in 2001. I realized that the philosophy and priorities I had concocted in my head were profoundly different from the mainstream environmental movement and I didn’t think I could stomach going with the flow of the environmentalist crowd which seemed to be pushing a false narrative. I ended up working as an engineer for less than a year and worked a variety of different jobs in different fields for many years after that.

So, fast forward to over 17 years later. In late 2018, I had been married to my wife Susan for over 15 years. We had seven kids at the time (now we are up to eight) and having been avid gardeners for many years, we finally went full time as urban farmers, living just one mile from downtown South Bend and one mile from Dr. E Michael Jones, editor of Culture Wars magazine. Using a couple of empty lots down the road from us, as well as our own yard, we have enough land to grow quite a bit of densely farmed produce. We call our operation Sunchoke Farms. Sunchokes are also know as Jerusalem Artichokes. They are a native root vegetable that grow all over North America and are eaten like potatoes.  

In 2020 and 2021, in the midst of the so-called global pandemic and the onset of the Great Reset, we are all being told to isolate from one another and that the preferred methods of communication are social media, phone, e-mail, and Zoom meetings. This obvious push by the oligarchs to isolate and divide us has only made my family and me more resolute in striving forward to be an active part of our community and to try to do some good in the world.

This brings me to the point of this article. Our human nature makes us want to do something good for the world. I think that is why there is such cooperation with so many people in this fight against COVID-19.  We are all searching for meaning in our often seemingly meaningless lives. So, when a propaganda campaign emerges and says “Wear a mask. Save a life,” who wouldn’t want to do something simple like that and become a hero?  Living where I do, in an especially progressive neighborhood, I have tried multiple times to partake in logical conversations with progressive people and it almost never leads to any positive results. We have been trained by the oligarchs to label people as either Right or Left and to not actually utilize logic when discussing contemporary issues. While it’s true that most of us lean either slightly or majorly one way or another, it does a disservice to our search for Logos to not actually consider all the nuances that exist in each individual’s will and intellect. I believe the oligarchs have purposely conditioned us into thinking we need to go along with one major political party or another so that they can gain more control over us. In this article, I hope to show that you can be a person with traditional values and still care about the environment. Despite the propaganda that says only leftists/Democrats care about our planet, I contend that traditional-minded people actually care about the earth and the environment the most. After all, we are the ones who prioritize following God’s commands and understand that man is superior to the rest of God’s creation. Henceforth, we need to be good, responsible stewards.

The more I read, the more I come to realize that the people who claim to be environmentalists over the past century are often really better described as promoters of population control. Paul R Ehrich, the author of the controversial 1968 book The Population Bomb, made many predictions about how there would be a massive die off of the population in the ‘70s.  His forecast turned out to be wrong.  Ehrlich starts off his book by stating

The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate ...1

Readers may remember John Holdren, who served as President Barack Obama’s senior adviser on science and technology issues. He also was a strong proponent of population control. Holdren co-authored an article in 1969 with Ehrlich in which he states

if the population control measures are not initiated immediately, and effectively, all the technology man can bring to bear will not fend off the misery to come.2

Even if I wrote a whole book, it would only scratch the surface of the agenda of the century old population control movement and how the oligarchs use half truths to falsely claim that they are the ones who truly care about our planet. There are people and corporations who have indeed done harm to our planet by partaking in irresponsible activities. But, let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater. God put man on this planet to be in charge of all the animals of the world. We may have done quite a bit of damage, but isn’t it logical that man can also right many of the wrongs done in the past and help return Earth to how God created it?

[…] This is just an excerpt from the March 2021 Issue of Culture Wars magazine. To read the full article, please purchase a digital download of the magazine, or become a subscriber!

Ryan Greutman is an Urban Farmer and co-founder of Sunchoke Farms in South Bend, Indiana, a Catholic Environmentalist.


Footnotes:

Coming Soon!