A recent Gallup poll found "historically low levels of public worry about environmental problems," and more than a third of those polled believe the environmental movement "has done more harm than good." Once upon a time, Americans responded to environmental disasters by passing landmark laws like the Clean Air Act. Now it seems our support for the environment decreases with each new oil spill. What happened?
The Fossil Fuel Industry/Corrupt Politicians/McMedia Complex undoubtedly deserve some credit for this surreal situation. Environmentalists may also be faulted for their continuing elitism and hypocrisy -- we tend to care far more about remote wildernesses than inner city drinking water, and are all for wind turbines until someone wants to put them in our backyard. But all these problems were around when environmental catastrophes galvanized rather than eroded the public's support for progressive environmental policies.
One thing that has changed is the rising influence of the Christian Right, which appears to have helped convince an increasing number of Americans that there is no need to worry about urgent environmental problems such as climate change because "God has the reins, and He will save us."
Such thinking is skillfully nurtured and inflamed by some powerful evangelical Christian organizations and their often well-heeled allies. For example, as detailed in a Huffington Post blog last December, several conservative Christian leaders recently joined with the Cornwall Alliance to promote Resisting The Green Dragon, a 12-part DVD series featuring prominent religious leaders bashing the environmental movement for "seducing and scaring" our children and "trumpeting exaggerations and myths." They and other Christian Right leaders also accuse environmentalists of "worshiping the creation rather than the Creator" and believing that humans should "serve the earth rather than the other way around."
Another recent article noted that the Cornwall Alliance, Focus on the Family and other conservative groups are now pushing Resisting the Green Dragon: Dominion, Not Death, a new book about environmentalists' "anti-human" and "anti-Christian" philosophies. Among many other things, this book claims that:
• Savage wolves have come to be among the church... No one can serve two masters...
• The Litany of the Green Dragon provides some certainty for people without God, who drift steadily from their rational moorings...
• Christians must resist Green overtures to recast true religion, nor allow themselves to be prey for teachers of pagan heresies...
• We humans are special creatures, in a class of our own, quite separate from, and superior to, trees and animals...
Many religious leaders and scholars within and outside the Christian church have denounced such anti-environmental theology. For instance, Fred Bahnson, a former Kellogg Food & Society Fellow and graduate of Duke Divinity School, stated that "The Cornwall Alliance is dressing up right-wing ideology and baptizing it with their own wacky brand of religiosity, a small-minded and incipient religiosity at that."
Dr. Benjamin Zeller, Professor of Religious Studies at Brevard College and author of a recent book about new religious movements, argued that this extreme anti-environmentalism within some evangelical communities stems from their belief that "sin" is a personal rather than social evil. Consequently, their theological worldview is that because "God controls history and nature, everything happens according to His plans. Their language is also less carefully developed theology than emotional attacks meant to appeal to the "us/them" thinking that is prevalent among all fundamentalists."
Yet despite such criticisms and the good work of more moderate, pro-environment Christian groups, until the larger environmental movement more effectively counters this kind of extreme anti-environmental theology, neither more tornadoes nor floods nor oil spills may awaken the Green Dragon and catalyze us into action again.
Rev. Roger Wolsey: Preaching the Green Gospel
Think of one alternative energy source without environmentalist objections. Most are non-founded!
Take for instance Fracking compared to coal mountain top removal and said to be worse by a paper out of Cornell University that was discredited. That just lubricious! Is fracking perfect? No. Is it in the same league as mountain top removal?
The environmentalist of today have gone away from science and have decided to make Environmentalism a religion like Boliva's Mother Earth's Law. People are surprised after many claims of the environmental left are found to be groundless there is a backlash?
The environmental movement has to ditch the religious aspects of it's cult followers and return to good fundamental science in it's claims or this just turns into a new type of religious war and we all lose!
You are entirely right about drainage and canals...
Take Michael Mann for instance. Here's the man who is responsible for Al Gore's scissor lift. It was his hockey stick graph that made it necessary. Once at the top of his career he now epitomizes the hypocrisy of the scientific community. You see he set out to prove that the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age never actually happened. But when his assumptions about the tree ring data didn't match up with the actual temperatures on record since 1960 he just substituted the "real temperatures" for the tree ring data. And there's your hockey stick.
Of course if his conclusions from the tree ring data were not correct from 1960 to present, there is no reason to believe that they were correct before. This is the difference between science and propaganda and Michael Mann crossed that line. Now he is a poster boy for corrupt science.
No it's not the Christian right that destroyed environmentalism, it's the environmentalists.
The hockey stick has been seen in bore-hole temperature proxies, stalagtite temperature proxies, glacial advance temperature proxies, grape-harvest temperature proxies, AND tree ring temperature proxies. How many proxies have to indicate that we are uniquely warm before you are going to believe them? And since when does a scientist switching to ACTUAL temperature measurements constitute a 'coverup'? Your entire argument is pretty thin. I would be more worried, but lately, mother nature herself is working overtime to bolster my argument. I really feel no urgency about the situation, just sadness and contempt for you and the people who swallow the swill you are peddling.
Also this is just an example, there was plenty of fraud exposed by Climategate. I don't know about the stalagtites, but whatever truth there is to AGW was critically compromised by Climategate.
My take is to stick with the facts I can trust. They say the temperature has risen 0.7C in the last 150 years, which I don't doubt because that was the end of the Little Ice Age. And CO2 has risen from 260ppm to 385ppm during that time and is rising at 2ppm/year. Sea level has risen about a foot and the glaciers are generally melting (with the exception of eastern Antarctica). All of this I believe. But I also believe that plants need CO2 to make sugar - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2qVNK6zFgE I believe in the Holocene Warm Period and the Minoan Warm Period and the Roman Warm period which would seem to indicate we are due for a warming with or without the CO2. And I believe that a few million years ago CO2 was 1200ppm and life flourished. It will take us 400 years to reach that. I don't see what all the alarm is about.
What an arrogant statement. Even God would be ashamed. It is this kind of thinking that will return us to the dark ages. It will be a 1,000 years before we are "enlightened" again. By then it will be too late to save our planet from our own foolish destructive behavior. The christian fundamentalists have stuck their heads in the sand using their religion as a call for inaction.
Such a self righteous and ironic stance to proclaim while proudly preaching their distorted world view from the bow of the titanic.
which indeed makes you easy prey for the propaganda efforts of large corporate institutions with a massive vested interest in the status quo.
Even for Jesus.