Environmental ‘religion’ deserves scrutiny

Just as everybody figured global warming had been forgotten about in the U.S. election campaign, which winds up Tuesday, in storms Hurricane Sandy to rewarm one of the hottest issues of our time.

Billionaire New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, the political chameleon, endorses Barack Obama for a second term, citing the President’s work on climate change. And New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, once touted as a possible running mate for Republican challenger Mitt Romney, praises Obama for his response to the so-called frankenstorm.

But believe me, all this has far less to do with science and sweet reason than with raw politics and the religion of environmentalism — as those robotic hotheads who’ve rushed in to blame Sandy on global warming have shown.

Now I took some heat the other day for saying folks are naive if they think religion isn’t present in today’s schools, and that it’s simply called environmentalism. In fact, BCIT communications instructor Derek Jamensky emailed me to say he was “a bit taken aback.”

I replied I was surprised he was taken aback, especially as this was something far greater minds than mine had pontificated about, including the late U.S. author Michael Crichton, who in 2003 labelled environmentalism “the religion of choice for urban atheists.”

Crichton outlined the ways in which it mirrored Judaeo-Christian beliefs, with “an initial Eden” or oneness with nature followed by a fall from grace into a polluted state, from which you could only escape via “sustainability,” the new form of salvation.

Jamensky replied that the issue for him was not whether we teach the Bible or climate change ... or Voodoo: “The question is really what is the moral basis on which we evaluate our behaviours and guide our society. Climate change seems to me as good a place to start as any.”

I agree. I just wish the teaching of it would be a whole lot less like fundamentalist brainwashing. Indeed, I find the active suppression of critical thought about climate change at our educational institutions to be positively alarming.

I’d invite students instead to read the new book Eco-Fascists by Gulf Islands author Elizabeth Nickson, which discusses how the study of biology has been corralled by conservationists with an “unending river of agenda-driven, politicized science.”

Nickson also talks of how the worship of the “ecosystem” is not only destroying individual rights and divorcing people from the land they once farmed, but actually damaging the land itself.

She uses her own traumatic efforts to rezone a parcel of land on Saltspring Island to show the mean spirit of the radical conservation movement.

That’s no surprise, as environmentalism is not a religion based on loving your sappy neighbour as yourself. It’s one based on loving your most remote sapling.

I think we need to scrutinize it — and its elitist sources of funding — as closely as we do governments and corporations. It’s clearly having a major impact on our world. Certainly, it’s poised to play a pivotal role in Tuesday’s U.S. presidential election.