{"id":27879,"date":"2015-08-11T01:00:52","date_gmt":"2015-08-11T05:00:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=27879"},"modified":"2015-08-05T09:23:22","modified_gmt":"2015-08-05T13:23:22","slug":"qotd-the-environmentalist-religion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2015\/08\/11\/qotd-the-environmentalist-religion\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: The Environmentalist religion"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>Environmentalism does indeed tell its adherents \u201cwhat to eat\u201d (pesticide-free organic food, preferably grown nearby to cut down on trucking) and \u201chow to travel\u201d (by public transportation or, better yet, bicycle). But it also lays down rules on nearly every aspect of life in a consumer economy: how to wash your clothes (seldom); how to wash yourself (take a shower, not a bath, and use a low-flow showerhead); how to light your house (with fluorescent bulbs); how to choose your TV (look for the Energy Star logo!); how to go to the bathroom (with high-efficiency toilets and recycled paper); how to invest, clean, sleep, and dress (in environmentally friendly companies, with nontoxic chemicals, on sheets made of \u201csustainable fibers,\u201d and in clothes made of the same); and even how to procreate (Greenpeace has issued a guide to \u201cenvironmentally friendly sex\u201d).<\/p>\n<p>Think about the life that a truly conscientious environmentalist must lead! Compared with it, the devout Muslim\u2019s five daily prayers and the pious Jew\u2019s carefully regulated diet are a cakewalk. What the British historian Alfred Cobban wrote about totalitarianism \u2014 that it \u201ctakes the spiritual discipline of a religious order and imposes it on forty or sixty or a hundred million people\u201d \u2014 applies perfectly to environmentalism, except for the part about imposition. And there, one might give Jonah Goldberg\u2019s answer in <em>Liberal Fascism<\/em>: \u201cYou may trust that environmentalists have no desire to translate these voluntary suggestions into law, but I have no such confidence given the track record of similar campaigns in the past.\u201d Recycling mandates come to mind, as does the federal law that will impose silly-looking spiral lightbulbs on us all by 2014.<\/p>\n<p>There\u2019s also a close resemblance between the environmental and biblical views of history, as the late novelist Michael Crichton pointed out in a widely reprinted speech. \u201cEnvironmentalism is in fact a perfect twenty-first-century remapping of traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths,\u201d Crichton said. \u201cThere\u2019s an initial Eden, a paradise, a state of grace and unity with nature, there\u2019s a fall from grace into a state of pollution as a result of eating from the tree of knowledge, and as a result of our actions there is a judgment day coming for us all.\u201d That judgment day currently assumes the form of various global-warming disasters that will happen unless we immediately perform still more rituals. Never mind that the science so urgently instructing us to reduce carbon emissions \u2014 thus hobbling economic growth and prosperity around the world \u2014 is so young, and so poorly understood, that it can\u2019t explain why global warming seems to have stalled over the last decade. Far more persuasive is the argument from faith: we\u2019d better repent, because the End is nigh.<\/p>\n<p>Barack Obama doubtless tapped into environmentalists\u2019 spiritual longings when he accepted the Democratic presidential nomination. \u201cGenerations from now,\u201d he proclaimed, \u201cwe will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; <em>this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal<\/em>; this was the moment when we ended a war and secured our nation and restored our image as the last, best hope on Earth.\u201d Italics mine; grandiloquent prophecy his.<\/p>\n<p>Benjamin A. Plotinsky, &#8220;The Varieties of Liberal Enthusiasm: The Left\u2019s political zealotry increasingly resembles religious experience&#8221;, <em>City Journal<\/em>, 2010-02-20.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Environmentalism does indeed tell its adherents \u201cwhat to eat\u201d (pesticide-free organic food, preferably grown nearby to cut down on trucking) and \u201chow to travel\u201d (by public transportation or, better yet, bicycle). But it also lays down rules on nearly every aspect of life in a consumer economy: how to wash your clothes (seldom); how to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[65,28,53,41,11],"tags":[640,158,443],"class_list":["post-27879","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","category-media","category-politics","category-quotations","category-religion","tag-alternativeenergy","tag-barackobama","tag-pollution"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-7fF","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27879","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27879"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27879\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27880,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27879\/revisions\/27880"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27879"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27879"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27879"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}