Do Objectivists give to charity?

[Inspector]

Well it's more that we probably needs to be saved from nature. And who is to say who agrees more. In the end it is all about how you interpret her ideas. Remember that Atlas Shrugged, for instance, is fiction with ideas within. She says so herself that the End of her work is the story.

She meant specific, objective ideas; not open to interpretation. She also wrote quite a bit of non-fiction if you're interested in what she meant to convey...

[mweiss]

Love your sig! I copied it down for future personal use.

[RationalBiker]

And who is to say who agrees more.

Rational men with the capacity for logical reasoning and critical reading skills who have read more than just Atlas Shrugged. She's written a more on specific topics that are not "open to interpretation" except by those who might think words do not have specific meanings. Environmentalism is one of those ideas about which she expresses her position quite clearly so if you have "interpreted" that she would agree with support for environmentalism or animal rights, particularly in using government pull (or law) to accomplish those ends, you either haven't read enough of her work or you are greatly mistaken. "Environmental Crimes" SHOULD be removed from the books. The government should only concern itself with protecting the specific property rights violations of specific individuals when specific perpetrators can be objectively demonstrated to have caused those property rights violations. The general concept of "protecting the environment" is not within the proper domain of government power.

I bring up animal rights only because of material on your YouTube page so in the event that you would claim them to be compatible with Objectivism, I'm going to squash that before it happens.

Typically, I try not to be quote-heavy, but since you are implying that you have some bizarre agreement with Ayn Rand on things that many of us KNOW to be otherwise, quotes are the best way to extinguish that misconception.

If one detaches the concept of "rights" from reason and reality, however, then nothing but conflict is possible, and the theory of "rights" self-destructs. Just as bad principles drive out good, so false rights, reflecting bad principles, drive out proper rights—a process that is running wild today in the proliferation of such self-contradictory verbiage as "economic rights," "collective rights," "fetal rights," and "animal rights."

- OPAR, Chapter 10 - Government

Notice she said "animal rights" is a contradictory term.

Rights are moral rules enjoining persuasion as against coercion, and there is no way of applying morality to the amoral or persuasion to the nonconceptual. An animal needs no validation of its behavior; it does not act by right or by permission; it perceives objects, then simply reacts as it must. In dealing with such organisms, there is no applicable law but the law of the jungle, the law of force against force.

- OPAR, Chapter 10 - Government

Animals do not need nor do they have rights.

Pollution is a minor side effect of industrialization, one that only an unfettered industry has the financial and technological means to clean up.

OPAR, Chapter 11 - Capitalism

Under the subtitle "Man and Environment," a lengthy section of the Time article is devoted to the subject of pollution. "Government and business will be forced to spend ever increasing sums—possibly $10 billion to $20 billion a year, in Herman Kahn's estimate—to control pollution of air and water and to prevent the destruction of natural beauty." (Italics mine.) And: "In the next few years.., it will be widely recognized that like most forms of pollution, defiling of the landscape, whether it be with shopping centers or expressways, is hard to reverse."

The word "pollution" implies health hazards, such as smog or dirty waters. But these are not the article's main concern; observe that they are lumped together into one package dealing with such matters as "natural beauty" and that the pollutants threatening us are shopping centers and expressways.

Young men who live under the nightmare threat of the military draft should also observe that the people who propose to spend $10 to $20 billion a year on the preservation of "natural beauty" regard $4 billion a year as too high a price to pay for a volunteer army.

The real motive behind the anti-pollution campaign is stated all but explicitly: "As the decade advances, it will become clear that if the ecological effort is to succeed, much of today's existing technology will have to be scrapped and something new developed in its place. ["You'll do something, Mr. Rearden!"]... Increasingly, it will be seen that any kind of mass transportation, however powered, is more efficient than the family car. [such as the New York subway, for instance?]... Planning will have to be a much greater concern."

And here is the motive behind the motive: "The attitude, central to the modern mind, that all technology is good technology will have to be changed radically. 'Our society is trained to accept all new technology as progress, or to look upon it as an aspect of fate,' says George Wald, Harvard's Nobel-laureate biologist. 'Should one do everything one can'? The usual answer is "Of course"; but the right answer is "Of course not."'...

"Bertrand de Jouvenal adds: 'Western man has not lived with his natural environment. He has merely conquered it.'"

By the grace of Aristotle, of Galileo, of Pasteur, of Edison and of a long, thin line of often-martyred men stretching back through millennia, Western man has not lived with his natural environment, in the sense intended by that quotation. But the rest of mankind has and does.

An Asian peasant who labors through all of his waking hours, with tools created in Biblical times—a South American aborigine who is devoured by piranha in a jungle stream—an African who is bitten by the tsetse fly—an Arab whose teeth are green with decay in his mouth—these do live with their "natural environment," but are scarcely able to appreciate its beauty. Try to tell a Chinese mother, whose child is dying of cholera: "Should one do everything one can? Of course not." Try to tell a Russian housewife, who trudges miles on foot in sub-zero weather in order to spend hours standing in line at a state store dispensing food rations, that America is defiled by shopping centers, expressways and family cars.

- The New Left, Chapter 7 - The Left: Old and New.

She's not saying save and embrace the environment, she's saying convert it or use it as man needs, and to do otherwise is act against man's needs. I'm sure she patently rejected any notion such as "we all need to save the environment" or any other such collective non-sense. There may be specific instances on an individual level where a person may benefit from protecting the environment of his own land, but there is no "we" need to do this or that to save the world.