A recent guest essay published in The New York Times makes the point that a shorter population would be better for the planet. While the author, Mara Altman, has her tongue firmly implanted in her cheek, her blatantly size-ist bigotry is impossible to ignore. Entitled “There Has Never Been a Better Time to Be Short,” Altman’s article declares that a shorter human race is better for everyone.
Altman, who reports that she is only five feet tall, bluntly states that the future belongs to the diminutive as she states, “short is better, and it is the future.” She is the author of Gross Anatomy, a book of humor in which she discusses in detail her own body in sometimes graphic and vulgar terms.
“The short are also inherent conservationists, which is more crucial than ever in this world of eight billion,” Altman points out. Echoing the writings of Thomas Samaras, known as the “Godfather of Shrink Think,” Altman concludes that if we “were just 10 percent shorter in America alone, we would save 87 million tons of food per year (not to mention trillions of gallons of water, quadrillions of B.T.U.s of energy and millions of tons of trash).”
So, your six foot teenage boy who eats a lot to keep up with his ghastly growth is inherently bad, while another parent’s elfin teenage girl who eats like the proverbial bird is intrinsically good.
“Short people don’t just save resources, but as resources become scarcer because of the earth’s growing population and global warming, they may also be best suited for long-term survival,” Altman posits.
She suggests that one way to ensure a shorter population is to lower one’s dating expectations — literally.
“Lowering the height minimum for prospective partners on your dating profile is a step toward a greener planet,” Altman suggests. Because “when you mate with shorter people, you’re potentially saving the planet by shrinking the needs of subsequent generations.”
Altman and the Times met with a fair amount of ridicule regarding the article.
Roland Baker, a UC-Berkeley professor who studies molecular genetics, equated Altman’s anti-tallism with Nazis and eugenics.
“The @nytimes supports eugenics & decides we should remove tall people from the breeding pool adding a 10th trait to the models of Harry Laughlin who established at the US Eugenics Record Office the forced sterilization policy which inspired the NAZI’s,” Baker tweeted.
Retired Air Force physician Joel O’Bryan suggested that the Times was infringing on news satire site the Babylon Bee’s territory.
While Altman’s piece is at least in part an attempt at humor, it’s important to note that certain climate fanatics have actually advocated genetic engineering to make people shorter as a means of causing them to consume less. They’ve also suggested such things as inducing allergies to meat in the population in order to make people crave less of it, and introduced the idea of decreasing testosterone and adding hormones like oxytocin and seratonin to increase mankind’s ability to empathize with others.
At least the piece in the Times sheds a bright light on one of the climate cult’s most closely held secrets. Humans, the cult insists, are bad, and there must be fewer of them in order to maintain the planet. Altman coyly points out that, if only humans were smaller, things would be better as far as the Earth is concerned. But in the Malthusian dreams of the climate cultists, it’s the human population that must grow smaller, not simply the size of each human being.
