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The gospel of green

By Kevin Steel ⋅ June 4, 2007 ⋅  Email this post ⋅  Print this post ⋅ Post a comment

Environmentalism may not be considered a religion by its adherents, but it’s getting easier to make that comparison all the time

If anyone has doubts that environmentalism has become a religion, then Al Gore, the failed U.S. presidential candidate who has been born again as a global warming guru, will put those doubts to rest. At the national convention of the American Institute of Architects in San Antonio on May 5, Gore continually spoke of how global warming had prompted “a new way of thinking” to save the planet. “It’s in part a spiritual crisis,” Gore preached. “It’s a crisis of our own self-definition–who we are. Are we creatures destined to destroy our own species? Clearly not.” Gore’s ideas don’t just have religious overtones, they are religious: spirituality, apocalypse, destiny, conversion, salvation.

That Gore would be talking “spiritual” about the environment, even to a crowd of yawning architects in Texas, is not surprising. His Oscar-winning documentary about global warming, An Inconvenient Truth, is itself something of a leap of faith, so poorly does it represent the science on climate. Flawed though the film was, it proved popular enough to catapult Gore onto the speaking circuit, where he now commands $125,000 an appearance to sermonize about the “spiritual crisis.” He is environmentalism’s most popular itinerant preacher.

Gore might blanch at the idea of being called a prophet because of the religious connotations, but, more and more, environmentalism has taken on the characteristics of a religion. In Canada, Green party Leader Elizabeth May has been merging environmentalism and religion. On April 29, she delivered a guest sermon on climate change at the Wesley Knox United Church in London, Ont. Introduced to the congregation by a Liberal MP as a “prophet,” May’s over-the-top sermon made instant headlines. She took aim at fundamentalist Christians in the U.S.: “They are waiting for the end time in glee, and they unfortunately include President Bush.” She said that the Harper government’s approach to climate change “represents a grievance worse than Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement of the Nazis.” Her message couldn’t have been clearer: they are evil; hers is the only road to salvation.

In the 1960s, a few environmentalists actually believed their cause could not succeed unless it became a religion first. How close they’ve come to attaining that goal in a generation is perhaps best gauged by the growing body of chroniclers and critics of the new religion.

In 2003, author Michael Crichton kick-started the criticism with a widely circulated speech to the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco. Crichton, who has written such bestselling novels as State of Fear and Jurassic Park, pinpointed the main practitioners. “Environmentalism seems to be the religion of choice for urban atheists,” Crichton said, right after ranking it as “one of the most powerful religions in the western world.” Crichton maintains the position that while an environmental movement is necessary, the conversion of the movement to religion is dangerous. His goal is to get the movement out of the “clutches of religion, and back to a scientific discipline.”

Myron Ebell, director of energy and global warming policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., doesn’t know if that’s possible. “It’s almost trite to say it because it’s quoted so much, but G.K. Chesterton said, ‘When people stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing–they believe in anything.’ The loss of connection to the practice of Christianity, and in some cases Judaism, has left a lot of people with utterly meaningless lives,” Ebell says. As they discover that, they want to find something. Environmentalism–saving the planet–fills the void.

Modern society is seeing an invasion of environmental morality. The green cause now influences what kinds of cars we drive, or even whether we should drive, what kinds of houses we buy, what we wear, what we eat, what we do each day with our garbage, and even, for some, how many children they will have. A May 7 news story in the London Sunday Times paraphrased a new report from a green think-tank, Optimum Population Trust: “Having large families should be frowned upon as an environmental misdemeanor in the same way as frequent long-haul flights, driving a big car and failing to reuse plastic bags.” Why? Because it turns out couples who had two children instead of three “could cut their family’s carbon dioxide output by the equivalent of 620 return flights a year between London and New York.”

If equating your children to the exhaust of a transatlantic jetliner doesn’t strike you as particularly religious, you might not be seeing the bigger picture. In a Jan. 9 column in the Financial Times, British economist John Kay noted that environmentalism now provided “a simple, all-encompassing narrative,” with two key myths that anthropologists point out are common to many cultures, though they appear to have developed independently: the myth of the Fall (or the Lost Eden), and an apocalypse myth.

The Fall in environmental theology is the idea that our modern, material lives have put us out of harmony with nature and that humanity needs to return to a “natural” state in order to achieve balance. It is a myth because mankind never lived in a static natural state, but has been constantly evolving and learning to use nature throughout time. Some environmentalists push this idea to the extreme and contend that the natural state of the world is one without mankind altogether.

The apocalypse myth is the one that Al Gore has been preaching: global warming doom. Kay observes that for years, the environmental movement didn’t have a successful apocalypse myth because in most cases, the environment has been getting healthier, due to greater public awareness and better technology. “The discovery of global warming filled a gap in the canon. That is why environmentalists attach so much importance to the assertion not just that the world is warming up, which is plainly true, but that this warming is our fault, which is less plainly true,” Kay writes.

It is in the global warming apocalyptic myth that many environmentalists take their leap of faith. This makes sense because prophecy has typically been the preserve of religion since the days of the Delphic Oracle and before. David Orrell, a computational scientist and author of Apollo’s Arrow: The Science of Prediction and the Future of Everything, says the science of climate change has definitely taken on some religious aspects. In particular, he sees what he calls a “priestly class” developing, a “class of people who are interested in protecting their own version of the world. That’s the sense I get with some of these scientific models of the atmosphere,” Orrell says. Most of the predictions from these models are so vague they are in fact quite useless, he contends, but nobody appears to be questioning them. “Scientists are famous for their skepticism, but when it comes to predictions, their skepticism seems to be put on hold.”

Not all who label environmentalism a religion view it harshly. Thomas Dunlap, a professor of history at Texas A&M University, in his book Faith in Nature: Environmentalism as Religious Quest, treats it with a great deal of respect. Dunlap, a devout Catholic, writes, “Environmentalists do not, generally, believe the movement constitutes a religion (and in conventional terms it does not) and they are uncomfortable with religious terms, but they ask religious questions: what purpose do humans have in the universe, and what must they do to fulfil it?” Dunlap sees environmentalism as a nascent religion, one that has not fully worked out its moral imperatives but is worthy of the same kind of respect that other great religious impulses deserve.

William Cronon, professor of history and environmental studies at the University of Wisconsin, wrote the foreword to Dunlap’s book and also defends the notion of environmentalism as religion. “If you take it as your premise that faith or belief in things in the world that cannot be proven is by definition proof of unreliability, then there are as many reasons to be doubtful of environmentalism as there are reasons to be doubtful of Christianity or Judaism or Islam or any other great religious tradition,” Cronon says. There are many things in the world that matter enormously that we can never prove with one hundred per cent certainty. Human beings always act on partial knowledge, which means we always act in part on faith. “Science believes, and I agree with this, that we should test our assumptions about the world and subject them to criticism. My own belief is that any religious practice should also subject itself to that kind of scrutiny. I would say the great religious traditions do that,” says Cronon.

How environmentalism as religion would fare when subjected to postmodern western political traditions is another thing altogether. Today, the separation of church and state is guarded jealously by secularists such as the American Civil Liberties Union. How such groups–and religions with differing views on the morality of having children–might respond to environmentalism as a new state religion is not yet known. It’s an unpredictable world. As environmentalists might say: have faith.

[This article appeared in the June 4, 2007 issue of the Western Standard.]