America’s biggest problem right now is that “We’ve got people in charge of important shit who don’t believe in science.”

Well, at least it is if you believe that world-renowned expert Harrison Ford.

Ford was speaking at an environmental awards ceremony in Culver City, California, where he was fêted for his work as executive vice chair of Conservation International.

According to Hollywood Reporter:

“We face an unprecedented moment in this country. Today’s greatest threat is not climate change, not pollution, not flood or fire,” Ford said during his acceptance speech of the Founders’ Award. “It’s that we’ve got people in charge of important shit who don’t believe in science.” He went on to criticize those politicians who let “political or economic self-interest denigrate or belittle sound scientific understanding of the causes and effects of human pressure on the environment.”

Yeah, right. The problem with this speech is that every word is tosh, including all the “ands” and “buts.”

It would have been accurate during the Obama era when the administration was indeed chock full of activists – John Holdren; EPA administrators Lisa Jackson and Gina McCarthy; NASA GISS’s James Hansen – who believed science should very much take second place to progressive politics.

But thanks to Donald Trump, those days are over.

Ford’s speech got even more stupid later.

“I’m here tonight for one reason: I care deeply for the natural world. It’s not about me, it’s not about me at all, it’s about this other world we’re going to leave behind.”

No, Harrison. It’s totally about you. Like Leo DiCaprio, like Matt Damon, like every other braindead Hollywood celebrity who has jumped on the green bandwagon, you’ve done this because it’s fashionable, because it shows you in a good light, because it appeals to your ego to “save the world.” But you’ve never looked into the issues deeply or considered the consequences of the measures you support, because if you had you wouldn’t involve your name with such a morally dubious cause.

“If we don’t stop the destruction of nature, nothing else will matter. Jobs won’t matter, our economies won’t matter, our freedoms and ethics won’t matter, our children’s education and potential won’t matter, peace, prosperity. If we end the ability of a healthy natural world to sustain humanity nothing else will matter, simply said.”

Yadda yadda. Who wrote this compendium of cliches? Sack the moron! And if you wrote it yourself, then seriously consider giving up speech-making.

That stuff about “freedoms and ethics” and “peace” and “prosperity” stinks, especially. As Ford would have discovered if he hadn’t been so busy preening and virtue-signalling, the conservation industry he supports has wreaked havoc with the lives of the native peoples in the countries he claims to be saving for “humanity.”

Mark Dowie – formerly the editor of Mother Jones, so hardly what you’d call a rabid conservative – estimated after two years’ research that as many as 14 million indigenous people had been cleared from their ancestral lands by conservationists.

Other analyses put the figure as high as 20 million.

Whatever the number, it’s a hell of a lot of ruined lives: hunter gatherers; forest agriculturalists; rotational farmers now forced out of their tribal homelands to live in shanty towns. More than ten per cent of the developing world’s landmass – 11.75 million square miles, more than the entire continent of Africa – has been placed under strict conservation.

As Elizabeth Nickson reports in her book Eco-Fascists, the groups responsible for this, either directly or indirectly, are environmental NGOs.

The World Wildlife Fund, the Nature Conservancy, and the UN’s Conservation International are the principal players, and while they do not directly clear people from their homelands, they step aside when national governments do so, at their request. The conservators maintain plausible deniability and assert that they are creating “sustainable” economies, proffering examples that serve as today’s version of the Potemkin village.

She goes on to quote a Karen native, in northern Thailand, whose family was suddenly told one day by men with guns that their home was now a designated national park.

That was the first we knew of it. Our own guns were confiscated…no more hunting, no more trapping, no more snaring, and no more ‘slash and burn’. That’s what they call our agriculture. We call it crop rotation and we’ve been doing it in this valley for over two hundred years.

Now there’s argument, with which many environmentalists would secretly agree, I’m sure, which goes: “Sod ’em! They’re only savages. Their lives and traditions aren’t nearly as important as those of the rich eco-tourists who’ll soon be flying over from California to marvel at the diversity of the ancient rainforests.”

I happen personally – deplorable, conservative, climate change denier, though I am – to consider this an utterly despicable point of view.

But if that’s what Harrison Ford and all the other Hollywood actors who support charities like Conservation International actually think, then I think they should have the courage of their convictions and tell us so.

What sticks in my craw here is the hypocrisy.

For decades, since at least Dances With Wolves, and before that, Little Big Man, and more recently with James Cameron’s Dances With Smurfs Hollywood has never tired of lecturing us on the evils of the White Man and his utter disregard for the native peoples he has historically treated as a lower life form.

Are they really so stupid – actually don’t answer that: they are – that they cannot see the irony?