The Religion of Environmentalism

[Avatar4321]

http://www.crichton-official.com/speeches/speeches_quote05.html

Famous Writer Michael Crichton has offered some interesting dialogue in the discussion of the environment. It's an interesting read.

 

[NATO AIR]

I posted about this a few weeks ago, and I agree with you wholeheartedly that his comments are a very interesting read.

Now we have to reverse the brainwashing they've inflicted on the general populace.

We need an environmental policy that most Americans can embrace to protect and improve the environment based on hope and development, not fear and harmful exclusion.

 

[Adam's Apple]

Veeeerrrry interesting, as Arte Johnson used to say. I really liked that attention-grabbing first paragraph. It takes a novelist to recognize the work of other "novelists" and the fantasies they create.

 

[Hobbit]

I posted about this a few weeks ago, and I agree with you wholeheartedly that his comments are a very interesting read.

Now we have to reverse the brainwashing they've inflicted on the general populace.

We need an environmental policy that most Americans can embrace to protect and improve the environment based on hope and development, not fear and harmful exclusion.

I definitely agree. I was brainwashed all throughout elementary and middle school. Until about college, I truly believed that global warming was a reality, that alternative fuel sources would save the environment, and that, by now, all rainforests would be gone. Until I read that article, I thought DDT caused cancer. I really believed all that crap they told me, because I was young and vulnerable, and believed everything my teachers told me. After seeing that DDT doesn't actually cause cancer, I'm not sure I've undone even half the damage yet. I'll probably be 40 before I uncover all the lies I was told as a child.

 

[fuzzykitten99]

I definitely agree. I was brainwashed all throughout elementary and middle school. Until about college, I truly believed that global warming was a reality, that alternative fuel sources would save the environment, and that, by now, all rainforests would be gone. Until I read that article, I thought DDT caused cancer. I really believed all that crap they told me, because I was young and vulnerable, and believed everything my teachers told me. After seeing that DDT doesn't actually cause cancer, I'm not sure I've undone even half the damage yet. I'll probably be 40 before I uncover all the lies I was told as a child.

i am in the same boat.
to the tree-huggers, i was probably their ideal student. because i believed all this BS they were preaching. It wasn't until around 2001 (9/11 helped) that i stopped the preaching, and started listening to what the right had to say. i found that i actually agreed with all the points they made, because they were provable facts, and were logical conclusions from facts. I then looked at what i was told and thought, man, these people i used to identify with, and associate myself with, are nuts. all they really care about, are their own interests. all they want is for someone to 'notice' them for any stupid little thing. like they are trying to compensate because they had been wronged in some form in the past.

 

[musicman]

Tried to point you, Avatar; gotta wait awhile.

Great find! One of my favorite pasttimes is watching silly myths get blown to bits by common sense. This piece ought to be required reading in our schools.

Fat chance of THAT...

 

[American_Jihad]

The Religion of Environmentalism
Mythic longings for a non-existent paradise.
November 13, 2015
Bruce Thornton

This summer President Obama visited Alaska, where he stood in front of a shrinking glacier and said, “Climate change is no longer some far-off problem; it is happening here, it is happening now.” At a conference in Anchorage, he made the apocalyptic prediction that “submerged countries, abandoned cities . . . entire industries of people who can’t practice their livelihoods, desperate refugees seeking the sanctuary of nations not their own, and political disruptions that could trigger multiple conflicts around the globe” would be the wages of failing to act now to stop global warming.

Most environmentalists cheered the President’s statements, while some have been critical of him for betraying the cause by allowing Shell Oil to drill off Alaska’s Arctic coast. But all assume that their opinions are based on hard science. While science does play a huge role in modern environmentalism, old cultural myths influence much of what many people believe about humanity’s relationship to nature. For some, their belief system approaches a nature worship that has little value for solving the environmental problems troubling the world today.

Ancient myths about nature and our relationship to it are deeply embedded in our culture. Particularly influential has been the myth of the Golden Age, a time before civilization when humans lived in harmony with nature, “free from toil and grief,” as the Greek poet Hesiod wrote, and enjoying “all good things, for the fruitful earth unforced bore them fruit abundantly and without stint. [People] dwelt in ease and peace upon their lands and with many good things.” Hesiod establishes the key elements of the myth that have persisted until today: an imagined time without crime, sickness, war, and misery; and a maternal nature that provides sustenance without human labor.

This natural paradise, however, degenerates into the Iron Age, the world we now live in, a time of wickedness, depravity, hard work, and disease, when according to Hesiod “men never rest from labor and sorrow by day, and from dying by night, and the gods lay sore trouble upon them.” Later versions of this myth, most famously in the Roman poet Ovid’s Metamorphoses, explicitly link this dystopia to the institutions of civilization like cities, law, government, private property, seafaring, trade, mining, metallurgy, and agriculture. Moral corruption runs rampant, especially greed, the “wicked lust for possessing,” as Ovid calls it, which incites violence, crime, and war. Civilization, particularly the unnatural technologies that exploit nature, ruptures humanity’s harmonious bond with the natural world, and creates the evils that afflict us. Eventually the crimes of the human race will lead to apocalyptic destruction at the hands of the gods disgusted by our depravity.

The Golden Age myth has been one of the most long-lived and popular in Western history, for obvious reasons. It imagines a lost paradise that offers psychic refuge from the complexities and trade-offs of civilization, especially the impact of the technologies that mediate our existence. It speaks to our anxieties about the power of science and the dangers of its meddling with nature. All these attractive consolations help explain why certain strains of modern environmentalism, despite their patina of science, have echoed the motifs of this ancient myth.

Consider the case of “deep ecology,” a term popularized by environmental activists Bill Devall and George Sessions in their environmental classic Deep Ecology, which was published in 1985. Deep ecology goes beyond mere resource management, the common sense imperative to conserve resources both for the present and future, which most people assume is the core of environmentalism. Rather, deep ecology is concerned with the psychological trauma inflicted on humanity by modern technology and by a fast-paced, anxiety-ridden urban existence. It shares with the old Golden Age myth the idea of a harmony with nature, or as Devall and Sessions write in Deep Ecology, an “identification which goes beyond humanity to include the nonhuman world.”

And just as in the mythic Iron Age, the disruption of that harmony is caused by technology. “Technological society,” Devall and Sessions write, “not only alienates humans from the rest of Nature but also alienates humans from themselves and from each other. It necessarily promotes destructive values and goals which often destroy the basis for stable viable human communities interacting with the natural world.”

Once a fringe belief, the ideas of deep ecology were taken up in one of the most influential books on the environment, former Vice President Al Gore’s Earth in the Balance, published in 1992 at the moment climate change was taking off as an international crisis. Gore went on to become the most visible proponent of the need to battle climate change, and a passionate spokesman for the larger view that modernity as a whole is destroying nature and making itself miserable in the process. His book was a bestseller, and his 2006 documentary on climate change, An Inconvenient Truth, won an Academy Award.

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The Religion of Environmentalism