The New Religion

[there buster]

Quote:

I HAD BARELY SETTLED INTO MY SEAT ON THE OVERNIGHT QANTAS flight from Bangkok to London when the card fell out of the airline magazine.

For a mere $23 (Australian), the card informed me, I could erase my “carbon footprint” on this flight by contributing to a fund to plant eucalyptus trees in the Australian outback.

Contrarian that I sometimes am, I found myself challenging the airline’s “green” assumptions. Did my “footprint” in fact require erasing? Did Qantas itself bear no moral responsibility for flying a half-empty superliner halfway round the world? And how did they arrive at $23 (Australian) anyway? If that sum was based on an average passenger weight of, say, 160 pounds, it would take several more Australian dollars—even before the recent currency fluctuations—to purge my presence on the overnight flight.

I looked at the sleeping college student slumped in the window seat. Could I erase her carbon footprint by giving on her behalf, even if she didn’t wish it? Could I atone for flights that I might someday take by one large contribution now? Was the moral culpability of my ecological sin transferable to another, or would only monetary atonement do?

There can be little doubt that we are witnessing the emergence of the first moral system in the Western world to be based on a color—“green.” In a post-Christian and postmodern world some system of morality will ultimately hold sway, and environmentalism at times seems poised to outshine systems built on Moses, Marx, Mohammed, or Jesus.

The evidences of this shift are all about us. Hummer and SUV owners report their shame for driving gas-guzzling vehicles that only five years ago were celebrated cultural icons.

Suburbanites grow more anxious about the thought of diapers in our landfills than of the fact that thousands of undiapered and unfed children will die before the morrow. Industries trade or barter conservation credits, in some places auctioning their surpluses for good “green” behavior to competitors more ecologically guilty than themselves. Politicians and celebrities find it necessary to announce that the lavish energy consumption required to power the places they live and play is atoned for by green investments made half a world away.

Beneath all such trendy moral reckoning is a galloping legalism that, 500 years after Luther, still asserts human ability to access a treasury of merit. If I may purchase my way into moral favor with Mother Earth—or public opinion—by cancelling my carbon footprint, picking up ever more roadside trash, or driving a tiny hybrid, then I have found yet another system for saving myself, even while I speak loftily of “saving the planet.”

And this is alive and well within certain circles of Adventism.

Quote:

No 'lofty ideals' about it. Our lifestyle is unsustainable. It's going to kill us. It's just a matter of time. Hard science says unless we get our act together and cut greenhouse gas emissions he consequences are going to be catastrophic for generations. When 80% of people on the planet die, whinging that a tax cut doesn't exactly compensate for an approach to doing something to prevent that is going to sound exactly as petty as it is.

The rest is here: Good and Green

I only differ with him on a small detail. Environmentalism is in fact founded on Marxism.

[Woody]

interesting there buster ...