The news report was stark, the details sketchy: a lone gunman had entered the offices of The Discovery Channel and had issued a list of demands. “Finally!” I thought, someone else is as fed up as I am. Doubtless the gunman would now demand two things:

1. A five-year moratorium on Mike Rowe
2. An end to that little digital blur that reality shows are always putting over logos on t-shirts, hats, signs and bottles.

I mean, really, I can’t even cross the street anymore without Mike Rowe touting his denim-clad buttocks on the side of a passing bus.

And what do they think that blur is accomplishing? I know what a Coke bottle looks like; blurring the label just draws attention to the fact that the producers wanted to shake down Coca-Cola for a product placement spot and Coke didn’t play ball. Plus, if you’re going to make shows about crab fishermen, mechanics and lumberjacks, then I think you might as well show the jiggly model in the Confederate flag bikini that’s on the calendar on the wall behind them. It’s called a “reality” show, after all. If people get offended, they can always watch fiction over on C-Span.

But just as I was preparing to throw a rifle in the truck and go join the lone gunman in his crusade against digital blurs and overexposed bores, the news announced that the gunman was demanding an end to… babies, and shows about babies – or as he called them “disgusting parasitic human infants.”

It seems the gunman had been awakened by Al Gore, was very concerned about Global Warmageddon, had concluded that the biggest problem on Earth was people and he had thus launched himself into an armed crusade against “A Baby Story,” “Jon and Kate plus Eight,” “19 Kids and Counting,” “I Didn’t Know I was Pregnant (and my own Twin)” and various other shows on Discovery and its sister networks that glorify (or at least sensationalize) child birth.

In their place, the gunman wanted equally entertaining shows about sterilization, infertility, and the selfless joy of voluntary childlessness. Perhaps shows along the lines of “Jon and Kate plus a Prius,” “No Kids and Who’s Counting?” “I Knew I Wasn’t Pregnant,” and of course “Roe vs. Wade: A Dead Baby Story.”

As surprised as I was that the gunman was not put over the edge by the 17th hour of Mike Rowe’s voice one day, I cannot say that I was surprised that some kook environmental patient had finally, openly gone to war against the very concept of humanity. For a good deal of the environmental movement, the explanation for all problems boils down to some rewording of “Man is in the Forest, Bambi.” And if all that’s wrong with the world is people, then it stands to reason that the world would be better off without the “cancer” of humanity.

Using the most extreme members of a movement to paint the whole movement as nutty is a tried and true trick on both ends of the political spectrum, but that is not what I am trying to do in this article. I will grant the reader that the gunman, James Lee, was obviously unstable and not typical of most of those who share his cause of allegedly defending the Earth.

However, what is typical of that cause is a subtler version of the misanthropy that Lee possessed. “Fewer people for a better world” has been public policy on much of the globe for 40 years or more. The most sacred rite of leftism in America is the unfettered right of women to free themselves from the parasitism of unborn human infants -- for any reason at all.

Additionally, there has been a growing romanticization of petty insurgency and a legitimization of outright violence by the Green/Left for years. The violence has seen its zenith in the so-called “animal rights” movement, which, especially in Europe, has repeatedly committed self-righteous violence against its perceived villains in medical research, popular culture and industry.

While Discovery network offended Lee’s pro-nature and anti-human ethos, Animal Planet was busy glorifying a vigilante dwarf “rescuing” pit bulls, a trust-funded amateur navy declaring themselves combatants in “Whale Wars,” and a media-darling filmmaker dedicating himself to covert action on behalf of “Blood Dolphins.” (Funny how multiculturalism seems to end with the consumption of sea mammals for some reason.) And then there is the morbid fascination with which the History Channel (owned not by Discovery Channel, but by competitor A&E) imagined the renaissance of nature following the end of humanity in the “Life After People” series.

Together, the definition of people as a planet-threatening problem and the legitimization of green violence, convinced me several years ago that the appearance of radicals using violence to address the alleged overabundance of humanity is likely.

Maybe James Lee was a one-off phenomenon, a lone kook whose kind will thankfully not be seen again. But it is equally possible, in my opinion, that he may be followed by others who, having been told that humans are a toxic burden on a dying Earth and that violence in defense of nature is a heroic act, will put two and two together and decide that the burden must be reduced, by any means necessary.

Most disturbingly of all, their actions will do nothing to address that damn blur. Or Mike Rowe.