Environmental Wackos

March 3, 2005

My Dear Clarence,

I listened to another one of your sermons over the web yesterday and thought it far superior to the first one I heard, but as I mentioned in my last letter, I had planned to take you to task for your use of the term “environmental wackos,” a phrase one would expect to hear from Rush Limbaugh or Michael Savage, rather than from a pulpit. I’m sure that you intended it as a humorous statement and meant no harm, but it struck me that a phrase like that ordinarily doesn't appear in sermons, at least in the sermons I'm used to hearing.

Sometimes one’s quiet asides, often made on the spur of the moment, tell more about a speaker and, more importantly, his audience, than a deeply-pondered and carefully-worded sermon lasting forty minutes. Your congregation audibly chuckled when you compared John the Baptist’s eating of locusts and wild honey to environmental wackos, demonstrating that you and the audience shared not only a common understanding of what the phrase meant, but a similar attitude towards environmentalism in general.

What was that shared understanding and attitude? Isn’t it the belief that people who are concerned about the environment are cranks, out of touch with reality, concentrating upon such trivial matters as saving the spotted owl and the snail-darter minnow or engaged in a futile effort to force us back to a primitive existence, bereft of the advantages gained by hundreds of years of technological advance? Weren't you implying that persons concerned about environmental damage are no more than chicken littles, attempting to scare us all into adapting radical measures that would turn out to be economically disastrous? I think so.

You would answer my charge predictably. You would reply that you were really referring only to a radical fringe of the otherwise-respectable environmental movement and that you in no way meant to imply that all environmentalists are wackos—fanatics, in other words. You might reply that some of your best friends are environmentalists, and that I am taking offense over a harmless phrase meant only in jest.

If you gave this answer, I would not accuse you of being disingenuous; on the contrary, I am sure that you would be quite sincere. In polite company, I would let the matter drop. But this is a letter, and a serious one at that, and you will not get off so lightly. As I wrote above, casual phrases made on the spur of the moment often reveal more about the speaker's beliefs than a forty-minute sermon, and although you might be perfectly sincere when you say that no harm was meant, the mere fact that you could say what you did and elicit chuckles means that you feel comfortable using the term “environmental wackos” and that it has passed into common usage, at least among your congregation.

If I were to use the term “Christian wackos” before a public assembly, you would be offended, even though you know as well as I that the world abounds in religious nuts, many of whom claim to be Christians. If my audience chuckled like yours at that phrase you would be highly concerned that this was a shared underestanding about Christians in general. How would you react if I used more particular terms, like “Baptist wackos” or “immersion freaks?” You would become hot under the collar, wouldn’t you? And the reason you would react that way is because I would be using those phrases the same way you used the phrase “environmental wackos.”

I’m old enough to remember when the effects of environmental deterioration came to the attention of the general public. Rachel Carson’s book about the effects of agricultural poisons, Silent Spring, had much to do with this awakening. For a time the issue was not conservative versus liberal or left wing versus right wing, but a common concern that we humans were beginning to soil our own nest and exhaust our resources at a rate far too rapid for nature to regenerate. For the first time, many people looked carefully at the rivers, the oceans, the forests, lakes, and aquifers and they didn’t like what they saw. Everywhere it seemed that the heavy hand of modern civilization was threatening the physical and biological systems that sustain human life on Earth.

Our government reacted to this concern with a series of measures designed to retard and in some case to reverse the process of environmental degradation. The Environmental Protection Agency was established by Congress during the Nixon administration. Automobile manufacturers were put on a schedule for reducing vehicle emissions. Factories were forbidden to dump toxic wastes into lakes and rivers and required to curb atmospheric emissions that were killing forests and creating acid lakes. When the energy crisis hit in 1971, Congress required Detroit to start building more fuel-efficient autos and enacted a series of laws designed to reduce needless consumption of petroleum and other non-renewable sources energy.

In many respects, this was our finest hour. For a few years, we, as a nation, seriously discussed how we could do with less. It was a challenge and we rose to it. Mileage improved drastically on automobiles. People refurbished their houses to be energy-efficient and purchased energy-efficient appliances now bearing a required label that rated appliances by energy efficiency.

We were beginning to get on the right track. The public was sold on the importance of preserving the environment. That the matter was even more urgent than we had realized came from a study by MIT scientists commissioned by the Club of Rome and published in 1972 under the title, The Limits to Growth. In preparing the report the authors, using computer modeling techniques, extrapolated recent historical trends into the future to see what would happen to human life and society if these trends continued as they had in the past. The trends they chose to examine were the obvious ones: population, food supply, fertilizer production, energy production, natural resources, access to clean water, etc. Using their model, called World3, they projected a surprisingly dismal—and possibly catastrophic—future for humankind if the trends continued as they had in the past.

The report caused a stir. Some critics lambasted it as unrealistically pessimistic, others as lacking scientific rigor. It also motivated many persons, here and abroad, to scrutinize our modern industrial/technological civilization to determine whether it could be sustained in the long run.

In the mid-seventies, however, a different trend started, an undercurrent not considered at the time to be significant by people who counted. It began to make itself felt at the founding in Washington, D.C., of three right-wing propaganda mills posing as think tanks: the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, and the Cato Institute. Funded by a few very wealthy donors, these three institutions immediately began to publish a torrent of well-written, scholarly-sounding right-wing propaganda, inundating both politicians and the public. One of their principal targets was the environmental movement.

Why would a conservative think-tank target the environmental movement? It would seem that the idea of conserving the earth would attract conservatives. Perhaps because I have always naively trusted people to accept scientific evidence and act in good faith, it took me many years to realize that willingness among intellectuals to sell their testimony to the highest bidder and to betray the truth for money is at least as common as the more traditional kind of prostitution, but far more insidious.

Why did these institutions bitterly oppose the goals of the environmental movement? Simple. Taking the necessary steps towards a sustainable civilization would leave many of our biggest corporations either out of business or greatly diminished in wealth and influence. Think about it; if we decided just to significantly reduce air pollution we would have to put severe limits on the use of the motorcar, a measure that would affect the interests of the major automobile manufacturers, their suppliers, the road building industry and the oil companies. The electric power industry would have to clean up the pollution belching out of its smokestacks. Chemical plants, steel mills, mass incinerators, and a host of other industries that now push significant parts of their costs onto the general public in the form of polluted air and water would be forced to make major investments in pollution control or go out of existence.

Environmental science, with its discovery that our modern consumption-based economy is pressing the limits of the ability of the earth to support a decent standard of living for the human population, represented a serious threat to a powerful industrial and financial system that requires a high level of consumption in order to function. Given a choice between preserving humanity and making a profit, there was no question how directors and managers of those corporations would choose. And thus began in the middle seventies a well-financed campaign to brainwash the public into believing that environmentalism was a fad with no scientific basis and that environmentalists were “tree-huggers,” cranks or “eco-Nazis.”

In 1980 Ronald Reagan was elected president. Big business, which strongly supported Reagan, would get its reward. The Heritage Foundation provided the administration with a detailed plan to roll back most of the regulatory institutions painstakingly built up over the previous century to protect the public from the brutal workings of monopoly capitalism. If the Reagan administration could not eliminate an agency or commission it didn't like, it merely populated it with ideologues that by their inaction would render it impotent. Reagan made an agreement with the Saudis to keep the price of oil extremely low and promptly did away with virtually all research and development projects being undertaken or funded by the Federal government on renewable energy and energy conservation. The Republicans, who only ten years before had helped to establish the Environmental Protection Agency, now regarded the environmental movement as an enemy.

At the time, I was amazed and puzzled at the venom directed by the conservative establishment towards the environmental movement. The attack, based on supposedly “scientific” findings by bogus research institutions founded only to spread disinformation, seemed utterly irrational. Silly me! The truth has always been the enemy of the powerful.

In the first half of the Sixteenth Century, the Vatican knew perfectly well that the earth went around the sun, but silenced Galileo on trumped-up charges and banned his and Copernicus’s books until 1835. The rulers of the church believed, perhaps rightly, that the heliocentric theory threatened the church’s hold over the minds of the faithful, and therefore threatened its power. Does it not seem, Clarence, that the history of human society, from Sumer to the present, teaches one certainty: there there are no evils to which the rich and powerful will not resort in order to preserve their wealth and power, and that disinformation is one of the first tools to be grasped and used. Inconvenient facts are first ignored, then denied. Today, scientific theories affirmed by virtually every reputable scientist in the world are derided as “junk science” by ignorant or cynical commentators saying just what they are told to say, or worse, by commentators who are so corrupted that they do not even need to be told what to say.

In just the last year, for instance, references to global warming, a phenomenon accepted worldwide by nearly all scientists of any stature in the field, have disappeared from government publications under the control of Bush political appointees. Global warming is an inconvenient fact and an obstacle to the administration’s plans to relax environmental laws and to promote increased consumption of energy and other nonrenewable resources.

In the early nineties, the same researchers that prepared The Limits to Growth for the Club of Rome updated the World3 model they had used some twenty years previously and found that the model held up well. They were not prepared, however, for the powerful evidence that, in spite of the world’s improved technologies, the greater awareness of the environmental issues, and the strong environmental policies adopted over the intervening years, many resource and pollution flows had grown beyond their sustainable limits, and if these trends continued, they would eventually result in a sudden and catastrophic drop in food production and population—calamity, in other words. Their book, Beyond the Limits, published in 1992, barely made a ripple in the flood of anti-environmental propaganda in which the public was then being inundated.

The campaign against the environmental movement succeeded. To win, it was not necessary to convince the public that environmentalism was invalid or bogus science; it only required weakening of the general conviction that the environment was an urgent priority. Confusion is as effective as conversion.

We are now presented with the irony of an administration that professes to be concerned over a shortfall in the Social Security Trust Fund projected to occur forty or fifty years years from now based upon highly suspect economic projections and at the same time ignores the environmental elephant in the bathtub that could render the controversy over Social Security completely irrelevant.

You are much younger than I, so I don’t expect you to know the history of the environmental movement, and a seminary education, especially at the Bible seminary you graduated from, would not have taught you much at all about environmental science. Your remark about environmental wackos, however, shows that you have adopted, with little reflection, the very message the corporations that have become rich and powerful despoiling and polluting the environment have been working to instill in you, even though the science is clearly on the other side.

From a theological standpoint, the Bible makes it clear that we humans hold this world and everything on it, including ourselves, in trust. “The Earth is the Lord’s and the fulness thereof; the world and they that dwell therein.¹” Remembering the parable of the talents,² what will we say when we are obliged to account to our principal for our stewardship? Will we present Him with a polluted, dying planet, inhabited by people ill from poisoned air and water and unable to sustain themselves by farming exhausted soil? Will we present Him with a world in which a select few are fabulously wealthy and secure, with the rest of humankind eking out a desperate existence in crushing poverty? Perhaps those environmental wackos know something that most of us don’t know or even wish to know. Perhaps they are prophets calling upon us to awaken and to start tending this Earth, the garden that He created so perfectly and so thoughtfully, a genuine paradise, our island home.

Your loving uncle,

Vincent

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1Psalm 24

2Luke 19

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