OF GAIA AND THE GODLY

Why Ecocide Is 'Good News' for the GOP (Glenn Scherer, May 2, 2003, E Magazine)

Difficult as it may be to believe, many of the conservatives who have great influence in the Bush administration and now in Congress are governed by a Higher Power.

In his book "The Carbon Wars," Greenpeace activist Jeremy Leggett tells how he stumbled upon this otherworldly agenda. During the Kyoto climate change negotiations, Leggett candidly asked Ford Motor Company executive John Schiller how opponents of the pact could believe there is no problem with "a world of a billion cars intent on burning all the oil and gas available on the planet?" The executive asserted first that scientists get it wrong when they say fossil fuels have been sequestered underground for eons. The Earth, he said, is just 10,000, not 4.5 billion years old, the age widely accepted by scientists.

Then Schiller confidently declared, "You know, the more I look, the more it is just as it says in the Bible." The Book of Daniel, he told Leggett, predicts that increased earthly devastation will mark the "End Time" and return of Christ. Paradoxically, Leggett notes, many fundamentalists see dying coral reefs, melting ice caps and other environmental destruction not as an urgent call to action, but as God's will. In the religious right worldview, the wreck of the Earth can be seen as Good News!

Some true believers, interpreting biblical prophecy, are sure they will be saved from the horrific destruction brought by ecosystem collapse. They'll be raptured: rescued from Earth by God, who will then rain down seven ghastly years of misery on unbelieving humanity. Jesus' return will mark the Millennium, when the Lord restores the Earth to its green pristine condition, and the faithful enjoy a thousand years of peace and prosperity.

American fundamentalists number in the tens of millions, but not all of them believe literally in this apocalyptic vision, cautions Joan Bokaer, an expert on the religious right and formerly of the Center for Religion, Ethics and Social Policy at Cornell University. Some, no doubt, don't dwell on environmental issues, but many do hold views antithetical to environmental protection.

One powerful fringe group, the Reconstructionists, doesn't speak of the "End Time" at all, Bokaer notes. They put the onus for the Lord's return on their own political activism. Reconstructionists say that Christ will return only when a righteous nation acts to purge unrepentant sinners and applies biblical law to its populace. They want to spread the Gospel in a political context, making the Bible the foundation of U.S. jurisprudence. That includes an end to environmental regulation.

Reconstructionists believe the Lord will provide, and their view is laid out in "America's Providential History," a religious right high school history textbook: "The secular or socialist has a limited resource mentality and views the world as a pie... that needs to be cut up so everyone can get a piece," write authors Mark Beliles and Stephen McDowell. "In contrast, the Christian knows that the potential in God is unlimited and that there is no shortage of resources in God's Earth. The resources are waiting to be tapped."

In another passage, the writers explain: "While many secularists view the world as overpopulated, Christians know that God has made the Earth sufficiently large with plenty of resources to accommodate all of the people." Fossil fuels and forests are like the loaves and fishes, Reconstructionists say, miraculously multiplying for true believers.

Such misinformed viewpoints would be of little import except that, in the 1980s, they began permeating the Republican Party.

Personally, the End Time schtick strikes me as nonsense, but then so too does what the author, seemingly unaware that he's virtually confessing faith, keeps calling "good science". Where evolution and global warming have the advantage of at least potentially being real, the idea that we've a problem with over-population or with dwindling resources is so descreditted that it's hard to see the difference between continued belief in it and in the idea of the Rapture.

There's plenty of reason and room for a serious conservative environmentalism, but fanatic faith in untenable scientific propositions and a kind of enviro-idolatry can't be the basis for it.

MORE:
Here's what was said last Fall about the possibility of Greening the Right:

HUBRIS & HUMIDITY:
Antarctic Ozone Hole Could Close by 2050-Scientist (Michael Perry, September 17, 2002, Reuters)

The hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica may close within 50 years as the level of destructive ozone-depleting CFCs in the atmosphere is now declining, one of the world's leading atmospheric scientists said Tuesday.

Paul Fraser with the Australian government's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) said he had measured a decline in ozone-destroying gases since 2000.

"The major culprit in the production of the ozone hole is CFCs and they have started to decline in the lower atmosphere," Fraser told Reuters in an interview.

"We think the ozone hole will recover by about 2050," said Fraser, from CSIRO's atmospheric division and a lead author on a U.N. report on the ozone layer released Monday.

(The following is even less well thought out than the usual fare here, but it involves a question that''s been nagging at me and I need your help. I'd very much appreciate hearing what other folks have to say, either in the comments or by email.)

One of the most vexing issues for modern conservatism is its relationship to the environmental movement. On the one hand, no one who believes in a Created world and in the importance of conserving what has been handed to us by preceding generations can take lightly the damage Man does to Nature to no good purpose. It's easy enough to justify cutting down trees to build a house, but how justify clear cutting a forest and not replacing it? How justify punishing a common criminal who does violence to a few but not vigorously pursuing corporate polluters who do violence to the many?

If Republicans are to become the majority party again, as they were from the Civil War to the Great Depression, they will need to find ways to talk about and protect the environment. It's just too big an issue, especially among suburban voters, for the GOP to continue to ignore it.

But this story points up why the embrace will be so difficult. Even mainstream Environmentalism makes dangerous assumptions about the effect that Man can have on the environment and horribly underestimates the effect Man can have on his own society. The ideology of Environmentalism leads its adherents to advocate mammoth change to the culture in order to avert purely speculative dangers, thereby causing genuine destruction to avoid a mere specter. The dubious notion that mankind was causing a major "global warming", for instance, prompted them to call for various measures that taken together amount to a true assault on modern industry and which, most importantly, might have curtailed modernization in the Third World. It would be one thing to ban SUVs in America, we'd easily find replacements, but to try and steer a developing nation away from an economy based on fossil fuels might well sentence its people to years more poverty and suffering than they need face.

Human nature being what it is, conservatives who might support the goal of reducing Man's impact on the environment and might support reasonable steps in this direction, instead have their hackles raised by the extravagant claims and draconian solutions put forward by Environmentalists. Conservatives recognize in Environmentalism many of the traits of the other "-isms" discussed below and a genuine hatred of humanity. It doesn't take too finely tuned an ear to hear the voice of the exterminator lurking in discussions of " overpopulation" and sustainability.

What though might a conservative environmentalism look like? Here are a few ideas that might guide it (with apologies to Russell Kirk):

(1) Recognition that we are part of an eternal chain of being, that we owe a debt to those who handed our environment to us and an obligation to those we'll hand it on to, that how we discharge our duties to both ancestors and successors has moral implications.

(2) Maintenance of the variety of environments that Creation has to offer. This does not mean that every tree and blade of grass must be sacrosanct, but it does mean that every inch of space in America need not bear a strip mall.

(3) At all times, even as these goals are pursued, it must be recalled that Man has dominion over Nature and that every human life is more important than all non-human life. Only man is a moral creature and, therefore, only men have rights.

(4) Conservation must be compatible with private property rights and human freedoms. Where property is taken its owners must be fairly compensated. To the greatest extent possible, conservation should be private and allow for reasonable use. There's no inconsistency between saying that land has been preserved for the future and allowing folks to hunt, camp, fish, log, etc. on it. Nature is being saved so that it will be there for us to enjoy, not as some kind of totemic fetish.

(5) Distrust of large public works projects and commercial developments. Just as conservatives instinctively distrust those who would make sweeping changes to the culture, they should be skeptical of those who propose massive restructuring of the physical landscape.

It seems apparent that a conservative environmentalism would be much different than Environmentalism in tone and in policy, yet it should serve to alleviate the legitimate concerns of voters that conservatism is nothing more than pro-business, pro-development, and anti-environment. A conservative environmentalism would still favor economic growth, but it would seek to check human appetite. It would be just as strictly law and order when it comes to polluters as it is when it comes to drug dealing. In all of this, it would bring conservative views on environmental issues into line with conservative views on social issues and restore some coherence and consistency in place of what has all to often in recent years been a tendency to petulantly oppose anything that Environmentalism supports and to take that opposition to extremes. Just because Environmentalists think spotted owls are more important than people does not require conservatives to actively seek their extinction, but this has often been the seeming reaction. A conservative environmentalism would provide a framework for considering such issues that would be independent of the lunatic Left and allow for a proactive rather than a reactive approach.

Any thoughts?

HERE ARE SOME:
-Conservatism: Green vs. Crunch (Ben Domenech, 9/25/02)
-What the Republican Party needs (Paul Cella, September 14, 2002, Cella's Review)
-A Patriotic, Pro-Family Conservation Program for the GOP (Steve Sailer)
-I Fear the Following (James Lileks) Posted by Orrin Judd at May 6, 2003 8:02 AM