the church of global warming

Let me begin this post with a cowardly disclaimer/confession: I consider myself a closet tree-hugger. Or perhaps a wannabe closet tree hugger. I grew up in a gorgeous area in central Alabama with lots of hills and beautiful forests. Now, when I go home to visit family I am grieved to see that more trees have been cut down. In place of a luscious mixture of pines and hardwoods have been planted perfectly uniform rows of young pines. The replanting makes me almost as mad as the clear cutting. The logging companies don't replace the hardwoods, just the pines, and they make the forest look like gated communities with clone houses and yards better manicured than my mother's fingernails. (BTW, on an unrelated subject, go here to see some hilarious ridicule of gated communities - just for giggles).

Just so you know.

On the First Things web site, R. R. Reno writes:

"The 1930s was a decade when many intellectuals were convinced that revolution, either fascist or communist, was the only answer to the social crisis of the times. It was during this era of political fervor that Simone Weil penned a rebuttal: 'It is not religion but revolution which is the opium of the masses.' Like so much of what Weil wrote, it's an arresting thought. And it's also one that is true on many levels" (full article here).

It seems that the new revolutionary battle cry is coming from the environmentalists. The current political landscape can almost be divided along the lines of how people feel about global warming. If you stand by Al Gore et al, you are automatically associated with a particular set of values, which more often than not includes a secular view of things. If you question global warming, you are usually associated with a different set of values, and usually with religion. Up until recently, Christians have been relatively uninterested in the current fashionable environmentalism. This seems strange to me because the God of Christianity has redeemed the whole creation and has placed man as lord of the earth.

What also strikes me is the fervor with which many environmentalists espouse their thought and practice. They speak of nature with the eloquence of mystics and rage with the fury of Christ turning over the moneychangers' tables at anyone who actively opposes their conclusions about the global weather trends. Indeed, some people's enthusiasm and devotion to the cause of saving the environment can only be described as religious. At the end of a class recently, I threw away some papers that I wouldn't need anymore and one of my classmates solemnly crouched by the garbage can and removed them. The scene was very strange - surreal even - and I am using no hyperbole when saying he did it "solemnly." I found out later that he was taking the papers out to put them in a recycling bin.

I think this is significant because of the lines along which the debate over global warming are drawn. The less religious people are, the more likely they are to believe in global warming. I have no hard statistics to defend that statement, but I think that most anyone who has looked very long at the cultural landscape would agree with me. The point that this proves is that people need some kind of religion. The 19th and 20th centuries saw a great rise in secularism, but accompanying these were new orthodoxies. It has been eugenics, feminism, Scientology has vied for the position, but I believe that environmentalism has nearly usurped the others as the religion of the secular. As Nigel Lawson says, "The new religion of global warming . . . resembles a Da Vinci Code of environmentalism" (quote lifted from a piece in First Things, originally from Lawson's book An Appeal to Reason: A Cool Look at Global Warming).

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UPDATE: Apparently, the extreme fervor of some environmentalists is having negative psychological effects. See the diagnosis.