Is Environmentalism The New Religion?

[cmotherofpirl]

The green fervour
Is environmentalism the new religion?

Joseph Brean
National Post

Saturday, February 10, 2007

In his new book Apollo’s Arrow, ambitiously subtitled The Science of Prediction and the Future of Everything, Vancouver-based author and mathematician David Orrell set out to explain why the mathematical models scientists use to predict the weather, the climate and the economy are not getting any better, just more refined in their uncertainty.

What he discovered, in trying to sketch the first principles of prophecy, was the religious nature of modern e nviron-mentalism.

This is not to say that fearing for the future of the planet is irrational in the way supernatural belief arguably is, just that — in its myths of the Fall and the Apocalypse, its saints and heretics, its iconography and tithing, its reliance on prophecy, even its schisms — the green movement now exhibits the same psychology of compliance as religion.

Dr. Orrell is no climate-change denier. He calls himself green. But he understands the unjustified faith that arises from the psychological need tomake predictions.

“The track record of any kind of long-distance prediction is really bad, but everyone’s still really interested in it. It’s sort of a way of picturing the future. But we can’t make long-term predictions of the economy, and we can’t make long-term predictions of the climate,” Dr. Orrell said in an interview. After all, he said, scientists cannot even write the equation of a cloud, let alone make a workable model of the climate.

Formerly of University College London, Dr. Orrell is best known among scientists for arguing that the failures of weather forecasting are not due to chaotic effects — as in the butterfly that causes the hurricane — but to errors of modelling. He sees the same problems in the predictions of the recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, which he calls “extremely vague,” and says there is no scientific reason to think the climate is more predictable than the weather.

“Models will cheerfully boil away all the water in the oceans or cover the world in ice, even with pre-industrial levels of Co2,” he writes in Apollo’s Arrow . And so scientists use theoretical concepts like “flux adjustments” to make the models agree with reality. When models about the future climate are in agreement, “it says more about the self-regulating group psychology of the modelling community than it does about global warming and the economy.”

In explaining such an arcane topic for a general audience, he found himself returning again and again to religious metaphors to explain our faith in predictions, referring to the “weather gods” and the “images of almost biblical wrath” in the literature. He sketched the rise of “the gospel of deterministic science,” a faith system that was born with Isaac Newton and died with Albert Einstein. He said his own physics education felt like an “indoctrination” into the use of models, and that scientists in his field, “like priests... feel they are answering a higher calling.”

“If you go back to the oracles of ancient Greece, prediction has always been one function of religion,” he said. “This role is coveted, and so there’s not very much work done at questioning the prediction, because it’s almost as if you were going to the priest and saying, ‘Look, I’m not sure about the Second Coming of Christ.’ ”

He is not the first to make this link. Forty years ago, shortly after Rachel Carson launched modern environmentalism by publishing leading to the first Earth Day in 1970, a Princeton history professor named LynnWhite wrote a seminal essay called “The Historical Roots of our Ecological Crisis.”

“By destroying pagan animism [the belief that natural objects have souls], Christianity made it possible to exploit nature in a mood of indifference to the feelings of natural objects,” he wrote in a 1967 issue of . “Since the roots of our trouble are so largely religious, the remedy must also be essentially religious, whether we call it that or not.” It was a prescient claim. In a 2003 speech in San Francisco, best-selling author Michael Crichton was among the first to explicitly close the circle, calling modern environmentalism “the religion of choice for urban atheists ... a perfect 21st century re-mapping of traditional JudeoChristian beliefs andmyths.”

Today, the popularity of British author James Lovelock’s Gaia Hypothesis — that the Earth itself functions as a living organism — confirms the return of a sort of idolatrous animism, a religion of nature. The recent IPCC report, and a week’s worth of turgid headlines, did not create this faith, but certainly made it more evident.

It can be felt in the frisson of piety that comes with lighting an energy-saving light bulb, a modern votive candle.

It is there in the pious propaganda of media outlets like the, Toronto Star, which on Jan. 28 made the completely implausible claim that, “The debate about greenhouse gas emissions appears to be over.”

It can be seen in the public ritual of cycling to work, in the veneer of saintliness on David Suzuki and Al Gore (the rush for tickets to the former vice-president’s upcoming appearance crashed the server at the University of Toronto this week), in the high-profile conversion (honest or craven) of GeorgeW. Bush, and in the sinful guilt of throwing a plastic bottle in the garbage.

Adherents make arduous pilgrimages and call them ecotourism. Newspapers publish the iconography of polar bears. The IPCC reports carry the weight of scripture.

John Kay of the Financial Times wrote last month, about future climate chaos: “Christians look to the Second Coming, Marxists look to the collapse of capitalism, with the same mixture of fear and longing ... The discovery of global warming filled a gap in the canon ... [and] provides justification for the link between the sins of our past and the catastrophe of our future.”

Like the tithe in Judaism and Christianity, the religiosity of green is seen in the suspiciously precise mathematics that allow companies such as Bullfrog Power or Offsetters to sell the supposed neutralization of the harmful emissions from household heating, air travel or transportation to a concert.

It is in the schism that has arisen over whether to renew or replace Kyoto, which, even if the scientific skeptics are completely discounted, has been a divisive force for environmentalists.

What was once called salvation — a nebulous state of grace — is now known as sustainability, a word that is equally resistant to precise definition. There is even a hymn, When the North Pole Melts, by James G. Titus, a scientist with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which is not exactly How Great Thou Art, but serves a similar purpose.

Environmentalism even has its persecutors, embodied in the Bush White House attack dogs who have conducted no less than an Inquisition against climate scientists, which failed to bring them to heel but instead inspired potential martyrs. Of course, as religions tend to do, environmentalists commit persecution of their own, which has created heretics out of mere skeptics.

All of this might be fine if religions had a history of rational scientific inquiry and peaceful, tolerant implementation of their beliefs. As it is, however, many religions, environmentalism included, continue to struggle with the curse of literalism, and the resultant extremism.

“Maybe I’m wrong, but I think all this is wrapped up in our belief that we can predict the future,” said Dr. Orrell. “What we need is more of a sense that we’re out of our depth, and that’s more likely to promote a lasting change in behaviour.”

Projections are useful to “provoke ideas and aid thinking about the future,” but as he writes in the book, “they should not be taken literally.”

The “fundamental danger of deterministic, objective science [is that] like a corny, overformulaic film, it imagines and presents the world as a predictable object. It has no sense of the mystery, magic, or surprise of life.”

The solution, he thinks, is to adopt what the University of Toronto’s Thomas Homer-Dixon calls a “prospective mind” — an intellectual stance that is “proactive, anticipatory, comfortable with change, and not surprised by surprise.”

In short, if we are to be good, future problem solvers, we must not be blinded by prophecy.

“I think [this stance] opens up the possibility for a more emotional and therefore more effective response,” Dr. Orrell said. “There’s a sense in which uncertainty is actually scarier and more likely to make us act than if you have bureaucrats saying, ‘Well, it’s going to get warmer by about three degrees, and we know what’s going to happen.’”

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[jeffpugh]

This is an interesting topic, and I get first post . I'm sure someone could easily debate this whole thing if they took the time. Example, the whole idea that paganism is what kept the environment. Pah... We're stewards of the earth... doesn't mean we have to worship the earth. I heard someone say once, that this is not 'mother earth' but 'sister earth'. I think it was Fr Corapi, but I'm not sure. That's all I gotta say.

[SJRod55]

We were placed here as stewards of the environment. With that in mind we must reflect upon how we use as well as protect the resources our God gave us. In the past we have not done a great job. We must balance the stewardship with natural trends. Learning from history including geology and environmental history indicates the earth has cycles with regard climate and resources. We must learn how to balance those cycles with how we use and maintain what we have.

It is unfortunate that in my lifetime many animals have become extinct - NOT because we built a highway through their lands or over their territories but because we failed to protect them against ignorance and abuse. There has to be a balance and it is our responsibility to determine what that is without giving a 'shoot from the hip' response.

[thessalonian]

Yes, enviromentalism is going to greatly shape religion in the next 10 years. It is going to be the new fuel for population control.

[Veritas]

+

Yep, it is the new religion and they're teaching it in the public schools as an unchallenged secular ideology. I was taught it myself some 15-20 years ago, but was de-programmed somewhat as I aged. However, you can see the fruits of it among the general populace all-over. This insanity of ecology. Now, don't get me wrong, appropriate stewardship has it's place, but it is not THE place.

[jeffpugh]

[quote name='thessalonian' post='1195057' date='Feb 14 2007, 03:43 PM']
Yes, enviromentalism is going to greatly shape religion in the next 10 years. It is going to be the new fuel for population control.
[/quote]
This is making too much sense... wait I think it's something I figured out a while back... just because of what other people have said and what I had been reading... Looks like we draw steel for right to life again... (as usual)

[Socrates]

[quote name='thessalonian' post='1195057' date='Feb 14 2007, 03:43 PM']
Yes, enviromentalism is going to greatly shape religion in the next 10 years. It is going to be the new fuel for population control.
[/quote]
Actually, it is hardly the [b]new[/b] fuel for population control, as "overpopulation" fears and pushing for population control has been a major part of the environmentalist agenda for decades. From the 1960s to the 1980s, overpopulation was the biggest environmental scare.
Paul Ehrlich wrote the bestselling book, [i]The Population Bomb[/i], in 1968, which predicted mass famine in the U.S. by the 1980s due to human overpopulation, along with many other dire predictions which failed to materialize. In the early '90s he wrote a sequel, [i]The Population Explosion[/i], which made many of the same predictions, but simply postponed the dates a bit.
However, many environmentalists take Ehrlich and similar people seriously.

Despite the fact that the "population bomb" has fizzled, and many countries instead face declining fertitlity and aging populations, environmentalists continue to put controlling human population growth at the top of the agenda, blaming human population growth for all the planet's real or perceived problems.

[Maggyie]

[quote name='Sacred Music Man' post='1194263' date='Feb 13 2007, 10:14 PM']
This is an interesting topic, and I get first post . I'm sure someone could easily debate this whole thing if they took the time. Example, the whole idea that paganism is what kept the environment. Pah... We're stewards of the earth... doesn't mean we have to worship the earth. I heard someone say once, that this is not 'mother earth' but 'sister earth'. I think it was Fr Corapi, but I'm not sure. That's all I gotta say.
[/quote]
In his Canticle of Creatures, St. Francis says, [quote]Praised be You, my Lord, through Sister Mother Earth[/quote]
But the entire point of his poem was praising God. He didn't invest the earth with any significance outside of its being God's creation. Not like the "Mother Gaia" stuff one sees from the really radical environmentalists.

[Nathan]

I am baffled that both the Conservative and Liberal parties in Canada are making such a big deal about the environment in preparation for the upcoming federal election. It is like they are attempting to make it the number one concern of the average Canadian, when it really isn't.

The environment is important and all... but I hold any number of issues to be greater in importance, and most people I know do as well. There is also the fact that many of the tenets of environmentalism have precious little evidence to back them. A great deal of it is smoke and mirrors. I would expect the Conservatives, at least, to understand this.

Edited February 16, 2007 by Nathan

[thessalonian]

[quote name='Socrates' post='1195492' date='Feb 14 2007, 09:18 PM']Actually, it is hardly the [b]new[/b] fuel for population control, as "overpopulation" fears and pushing for population control has been a major part of the environmentalist agenda for decades. From the 1960s to the 1980s, overpopulation was the biggest environmental scare.
Paul Ehrlich wrote the bestselling book, [i]The Population Bomb[/i], in 1968, which predicted mass famine in the U.S. by the 1980s due to human overpopulation, along with many other dire predictions which failed to materialize. In the early '90s he wrote a sequel, [i]The Population Explosion[/i], which made many of the same predictions, but simply postponed the dates a bit.
However, many environmentalists take Ehrlich and similar people seriously.

Despite the fact that the "population bomb" has fizzled, and many countries instead face declining fertitlity and aging populations, environmentalists continue to put controlling human population growth at the top of the agenda, blaming human population growth for all the planet's real or perceived problems.[/quote]


My point was not that there were not others. This is just adding some new fuel to the fire as witnessed by some recent editorials in our local paper. When I was growing up everyone was going to starve from overpopulation. I am aware of what you speak.