Les Jones

Environment > Environmentalism as a Religion, Part 2

From Steven E. Landsburg's Why I Am Not An Environmentalist:

Perhaps that same sort of honest naïveté is what underlies the problems we've had at the JCC this year. Just as Cayley's teachers in Colorado were honestly oblivious to the fact that there is diversity in religion, it may be that her teachers at the JCC have been honestly oblivious that there is diversity in politics.

Let me then make that diversity clear. We are not environmentalists. We ardently oppose environmentalists. We consider environmentalism a form of mass hysteria akin to Islamic fundamentalism or the War on Drugs. We do not recycle. We teach our daughter not to recycle. We teach her that people who try to convince her to recycle, or who try to force her to recycle, are intruding on her rights.

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I view the current situation as far more serious than what we encountered in Colorado for several reasons. First, in Colorado we were dealing with a few isolated remarks here and there, whereas at the JCC we have been dealing with a systematic attempt to inculcate a doctrine and to quite literally put words in children's mouths. Second, I do not sense on your part any acknowledgment that there may be people in the world who do not share your views. Third, I am frankly a lot more worried about my daughter's becoming an environmentalist than about her becoming a Christian. Fourth, we face no current threat of having Christianity imposed on us by petty tyrants; the same can not be said of environmentalism. My county government never tried to send me a New Testament, but it did send me a recycling bin.

Incidentally, I don't agree with everything Landsburg says. For instance, I think he has an insufficient counterargument to the environmentalist argument that some forms of development are irreversible and we should proceed with caution. I also think his reverence for the science of economics (as he likes to phrase it) is a bit inflated. I gather there's quite a lot that economists haven't figured out. More, even, than in the physical sciences. I also think his attitude to at least a little environmentalism is antagonistic.

I do think it's true that environmentalism serves the purpose of a secular religion for some people. Through the good works of recycling and the abstension of not using disposable items the environmentalist hopes to achieve something like a state of grace. Furthermore, unsettled scientific topics like anthropogenic global warming are treated with absolute certainty as a sign of the true believer's faith.

See also:
- Environmentalism as a Religion, Part 1