| A REENCHANTED WORLD The Quest for a New Kinship with Nature James William Gibson New York: Henry Holt & Company, 2009 |
Rating: 5.0 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-0-8050-7835-0 | ||||
| ISBN-10 0-8050-7835-5 | 306p. | HC | $27.00 | |
Business interests have always tended to dump on the environment, and for long have resisted any regulations aimed at getting them to clean up their act. This behavior flows from their belief that they should be free to set their own rules — a belief founded on the claim that market forces will prevent abuse. In practice, however, unfettered market forces lead to rampant misconduct. There are enlightened business executives, of course; their enterprises treat their employees as a precious resource, try to conserve energy (boosting profit thereby), and properly dispose of waste products. But, in general, business cuts as many corners as it can.
This traditional opponent of sound environmental policy has lately been joined by two others. The first is advocates of what is officially called "outdoor motorized recreation." They don't much care for hiking, but prefer to ride off-road vehicles or snowmobiles through the wilderness, and to cruise pristine lakes in jet skis or speedy motorboats. Again, I don't wish to tar an entire group as thugs.1 But off-roaders as a rule oppose designating any land as wilderness because it makes that land off limits for their vehicles, and their membership organizations lobby against such restrictions. They also oppose the Endangered Species Act, for the same reason. As the author explains:
Since 1976, the number of people using off-road vehicles such as dirt bikes, four-wheel-drive jeeps, and all-terrain vehicles has increased sevenfold, to nearly thirty-six million. By 2004, off-road industry sales totaled $4.8 billion per year. And while off-road riders and off-road industry executives and political leaders demand access to undeveloped lands, they've shown no interest in protecting these lands or the animals that live on them. On the contrary, rider-industry coalitions vehemently oppose designating any federal lands as official "wilderness" areas, because motor vehicles are prohibited in such areas under the Wilderness Act. For the same reason, off-roaders have opposed efforts to stop construction of logging roads in national forests. Building roads for logging trucks opens an area for pickup trucks and trailers carrying ATVs. Nor do the off-roaders support the Endangered Species Act. Whenever the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service lists a species as endangered, its land becomes protected as "critical habitat" and is closed to off-road vehicles. The community of off-road riders and the businesses catering to them have developed a wide range of rationales and strategies for opposing any such closure of public lands. Bill Dart, executive director of the Blue Ribbon Commission, an off-road lobbying group which claims six hundred thousand members, calls land closure undemocratic: "A tiny minority of people use wilderness, but there is a growing demand for outdoor recreation. This country is all about tolerance and diversity, but the wilderness advocates are promoting a lack of tolerance. We don't think setting aside vast landscapes for a tiny minority of the recreating public is a wise thing to do."2 – pages 148-9 |
Off-road vehicles typically have two-cycle engines that emit plumes of motor oil; this is especially a problem for lakes used by jet skis. On land, they leave ruts, promoting erosion. All types produce smog and CO2; one snowmobile equals 100 cars in this respect. And all types are noisy, disturbing the silence found in wilderness, often a big part of the reason for going there. But annoying as they are, off-roaders may not be the worst polluters among recreationers. Over 58 million people visited national parks in 2001. The exhaust from their cars cuts visibility way down, and at times becomes a health threat. Mining and drilling have encroached on some western parks, threatening to create their own pollution problems.3 Cruise ships, meanwhile, are notorious for dumping large quantities of human waste into the oceans outside territorial limits where regulations do not apply.
Robertson wrote three books developing this theme of mankind's absolute dominion. In the third, he said that God spoke to him, reinforcing the words of Genesis 1:26-27: "God gave man a sweeping and total mandate of dominion over this planet and everything in it."
Books by Christian right authors played a big part in the campaign to convince believers the End Times were at hand. It's hard to judge how successful they were, but many were popular. Hal Lindsay's 1973 The Late Great Planet Earth sold 2 million copies. Frank Peretti made the bestseller list with 1989's Piercing the Darkness, in which demons, when not wreaking havoc in a small town, relaxed by attending ecology lectures including one by a presenter modeled on folk singer John Denver. And the 12-volume Left Behind series by LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, started in 1995, sold over 50 million copies. A 2002 CNN poll showed 59 percent of Americans believed the prophecies in the Bible's Book of Revelation would come true.
"As the twenty-first century began, the enchantment culture and the environmental movement came under deliberate, organized attack from the Christian right, the Bush administration, and much of the business establishment. These simultaneous salvos—a fundamentalist Christian critique of enchantment spirituality and a corporate-driven effort to dismantle environmental protection—proved highly effective. It was not until the later years of Bush's second term that (as we shall see in the next chapter) the right's religious, political, and economic coalition lost momentum and began to disintegrate and fail." – page 192 |
But the third group, the most recently joined, may be the most pernicious. This is what I call the church-industrial complex. Their influence burgeoned during the eight years of the George W. Bush administration, due to that administration's pro-Christian and anti-regulation stances. The attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and the long-lasting anxiety that resulted, made fertile ground for apocalyptic warnings. Fundamentalist Christian leaders were not slow to take advantage of these conditions. Using political affiliations and popular media, they were able to significantly increase their influence. They preached a doctrine based on selective interpretation of Genesis and Revelation: God gave man full ownership of all that is in the Earth, so you may consume resources and exploit wild animals as you wish.4 (At the same time, jarringly, they held that Earth was the domain of Satan, and environmentalists served him by plotting to bring about a world government ruled by the Antichrist.) Also, wilderness and wild creatures need not be conserved, since the End Times are imminent, when the Earth will pass away. From these interpretations flowed the Gospel of Prosperity: "God wants you to be rich." All this, of course, delighted business, especially energy and mining companies, and they were happy to help out — behind the scenes. It added up to the worst period in U. S. history for environmental responsibility.
The fundamentalist form of Christianity espoused by these powerful, nominally Christian organizations had its spokesmen, notably Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Tim LaHaye and James Dobson. To this crowd, those who hold that any part of the Earth is sacred commit the sin of idolatry, forbidden by the Bible. This attempts a preemptive attack on the spiritual bonds with nature inspired by Native American beliefs. Fortunately, there is a long tradition of stewardship that opposes this short-sighted view. It has lately been reinvoked by the Evangelical Environmental Network.5 As Pat Robertson discredited himself by increasingly bizarre pronouncements, the right-wing Christianist movement began to fall apart.
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