GOD, NOT GAIA:

The heart of environmentalism (ELIZABETH GUDRAIS, 4/20/06, Providence Journal)

The Sierra Club's executive director entreated a Brown University crowd yesterday to resort to "the language of the heart" in making environmental arguments.

"Most people who listen to environmental discourse do not understand that it's about ethics, and it therefore does not touch their hearts," Carl Pope said, in a talk titled "The Future of Environmentalism."

"I think we can't treat ethics, any longer, as something we tag on to the end of a scientific or a policy conversation," Pope said.

A Sierra Club survey found that 75 percent of people agree with the group's principles, but just 30 percent would identify themselves as environmentalists, Pope said.

The reason for that gulf, he said, is that people "feel the Sierra Club is culturally different than they are."

He proceeded to lay out stereotypes that he said fit most of the group's members -- people who are white and well to do, who are liberal when it comes to politics and religion, who live on the coasts or along the Great Lakes but nowhere in between. [...]

Pope peppered his talk -- the first in a series by several speakers at Brown, titled "Envisioning Alternative Environmental Futures" -- with religious references, quoting from the Bible and the Koran, and invoking piety as one of the core principles of environmentalism. "Man is not the center of the universe," he said. "We are part of something much larger, to which we have obligations and duties."

The problem for Mr Pope and his liberal coastal cohort is that it is not the environment that is at the center of the Universe nor the environment to which man has obligations and duties and to speak of piety in the context that he does is to try to replace God, who is due such piety, with Nature, which is not.

Meanwhile, 25 years of conservatism has done the environment rather well, On Earth Day, hope for the environment (Brad Knickerbocker, 4/21/06, The Christian Science Monitor)

"The facts speak for themselves," says Steven Hayward, author of the 2006 Index of Leading Environmental Indicators, released last week by the Pacific Research Institute in San Francisco and the American Enterprise Institute in Washington. "It's impossible to deny the environmental improvements we've made and the certain progress we'll continue to make over time."

Among the indicators included in the report: A steady increase in the percentage of toxic waste superfund sites where contaminated groundwater has been controlled; a large drop in the rate of automobile hydrocarbon emissions; while the number of cars and miles driven has more than doubled since 1970, smog levels have dropped, resulting in far fewer "code red" days in Los Angeles, Washington, and other cities.

In the context of economic and social trends, such improvements may be more impressive.

Posted by Orrin Judd at April 20, 2006 5:34 PM