Is environmentalism becoming a form of religion? This is a meme sometimes found on the anti-enviro right, and in some extreme cases, they have a point. There is something fundamentalist about those who think of the earth as somehow an entity to be obeyed rather than a place to be simply lived in. The totalism of some animal rights activists has the smack of rigid orthodoxy. We all know how green the roots of the Nazi party were.
But this is an extreme fringe. For the vast majority of people who care about the environment, the impulse is usually to preserve something we love. At its root, this is a conservative impulse. In America, in particular, love of the land has long been a part of patriotism. And where religious faith appears, it isn’t necessarily a paean to Gaia. "America, The Beautiful" is an environmentalist hymn. America’s greatest poets, Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, are intoxicated with the natural beauty of this continent. Part of their intoxication is their sense of the divine saturating the natural. Read Thoreau or Emerson and the same American interaction with nature is palpable. Americans, after all, forged a relationship with wilderness more recently than any Europeans. And there is, therefore, a deeply patriotic form of green thought in America that has been overly neglected by environmentalists and that can and should be reclaimed by political leaders, especially on the right.
There is also, it seems to me, an authentically religious approach to the environment that is completely orthodox and defensible. Christians believe that we have dominion over the earth, and that dominion carries with it a responsibility not just to the creatures we control but to the earth and sea and sky we inhabit. This has been on my mind this week watching the ravishing new series, Planet Earth on Discovery HD Theater. It’s a collaboration with the BBC and took five years to make. They use innovative camera techniques – floating a self-stabilizing camera from a balloon to glide across the tree-tops of rain forests or diving equipment to capture the diversity and beauty of the ocean depths. And they photograph everything in high definition. It’s lung-filling in its capacity to provoke wonder. If you want to know why this planet is worth conserving, watch it.
Mercifully, the narration (impeccably done by Sigourney Weaver) doesn’t get too preachy. Nor does it spare us the brutality of the wild. But the impact of seeing the planet in this detail is enough to drive anyone to environmentalism. I don’t believe in a neurotic resistance to all climatic and environmental change. But I do believe in responsible guardianship. The possibility that our carelessness and selfishness in carbon production could rid the world of whole species or transform rich flora into deserts, or drown delicate eco-systems, is a terrible one. And the urge to conserve, to pass the world on unharmed to the next generation is not a radical or necessarily atheist impulse. It’s also a conservative and Christian one. How we lost sight of that is a mystery to me. But technology may help us both see the danger more clearly, and give us new sources of energy to avoid it.
The Dish 