Bolivia President Evo Morales speaks at the government palace in La Paz last year.
Bolivia President Evo Morales speaks at the government palace in La Paz last year. (Juan Karita/AP)

Amid all the crises now gripping the world - human rights atrocities, poverty, famine, disease, genocide - the United Nations will devote at least some of today's agenda to debating the inalienable rights of "Mother Earth." Maybe that's because Earth Day is on Friday. Or maybe it just has nothing better to do.

Bolivia's madcap coca farmer-cum-president, Evo Morales, is leading the charge to create a UN treaty that would give our planet, that mass of molten lava and rock, as well as all of the creatures that inhabit it, the same rights as humans. This is the same Morales who believes that "the central enemy of Mother Earth is capitalism," just in case you were wondering.


Certainly, capitalism seems to be the enemy of Morales' vision for Bolivia, which is among the poorest countries in South America, with more than half of its population living in poverty, according to a dire UNICEF assessment that also says the Morales government "restricts the exercise of human rights."

But despite those needs, a new Bolivian law is primed to recognize 11 new rights for nature, including "the right to not have cellular structure modified or genetically altered," according to a summary by the U.K.'s Guardian. That law would also establish a Ministry of Mother Earth.

It sounds compassionate, but only if you think that the centipedes of Bolivia are more important than its people; only if your zeal for a "green future" trumps the possibility of poor children around the world having a future of any kind.

Now the Morales circus is coming to New York City, where he will try to hector the UN into adapting the ecotyranny he is imposing on his own people.

This blow-hard populist is hardly the first person to make asinine claims about the natural world. We see it when Hollywood airheads like Danny Glover suggest that the earthquake that devastated Haiti was due to global warming. We see it when televangelists like Pat Robertson warn that natural disasters are God's way of punishing our sins.

Heck, we saw it this very week, when mass murderer Charles Manson (he of the swastika tattooed on his forehead) broke his 20-year silence to bemoan global warming with this baffling gem: "Everyone's God and if we don't wake up to that there's going to be no weather."

But the real danger is not when madmen rant but when the evidence-free but ideology-rich posturing of people with actual influence is taken seriously.

Al Gore's Oscar-winning documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth," which helped him win the Nobel Prize, is taught as science in many schools, even though much of the alarmist research it peddles about greenhouse emissions has been called into question.

President Obama employs at least two scholars prone to junk science as special advisers. His administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, Cass Sunstein, has argued in the past that animals should be given legal standing to have their owners sued.

And, John Holdren, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, suggested in his 1977 book "Ecoscience" that controlling certain segments of the population by sterilization is acceptable - as long as it has no effect on "children, old people, pets or livestock."

Sure, both men today might well say that their views have "evolved." But one does have to wonder: The above are the published thoughts of supposed scholars, not cocktail hour chatter.

And now the UN, which has enormous global influence despite its troubling history of inaction where human rights are concerned, is giving a world stage to a meaningless, not-at-all-actionable initiative to treat Mother Earth as an actual human being. This while Libya remains in dangerous flux and much of Africa remains hungry and in turmoil. All those people can wait; beetles and earthworms can't.

I recently sat down with Bjorn Lomborg, the Danish scholar and director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center whose book and movie "Cool It" debunk many of the myths asserted by preachers of the global warming gospel. He pointed out that there are, in fact, serious threats to our environment that must be addressed. But political grandstanding, pseudoscience and maudlin histrionics do more harm than good. We need smart solutions to real problems, not dumb solutions to nonproblems.


S.E. Cupp, whose column appears on Wednesdays on NYDailynews.com and often in the print edition of the newspaper, is a political commentator and author of the book "Losing Our Religion: The Liberal Media's Attack on Christianity." She is also co-author of "Why You're Wrong About The Right." S.E. has a regular feature at The Daily Caller and is a contributing editor at Townhall magazine. She lives in New York City.