Environmentalism the New Religion

I watched a debate recently on a common and hackneyed subject, that Religion is a force for good in the world. The first speaker tried a pre-emptive strike by making a case that his opponents were all members of the environmental religion. I assumed that this was going to be one of those lame attacks on the sincerity and credulity of tree huggers, scientists and religious fundamentalists alike.

However, I soon found the parallels to be quite compelling and even fascinating. I did a bit of googling and discovered that this is a serious notion that has been gaining ground for a long time. See "Freeman Dyson – Environmentalism: The New Secular Religion; Vancouver-based author and mathematician David Orrell explains an environmental religion in his new book "Apollo’s Arrow", subtitled The Science of Prediction and the Future of Everything which is reviewed by Joseph Brean, of the National Post.

Some of the similarities between Environmentalism and Christianity include:

• in its myths of the Fall and the Apocalypse, its saints and heretics, its iconography and tithing, its reliance on prophecy, even its schisms — the green movement now exhibits the same psychology of compliance as religion.
  All the essentials of judeo christian religion are all there in the new environmentalism: man has sinned, retribution is comming , he must repent and do penance, non believers are heretics or deluded fools.

• "…. he found himself returning again and again to religious metaphors to explain our faith in predictions, referring to the “weather gods” and the “images of almost biblical wrath” in the literature. He sketched the rise of “the gospel of deterministic science,” a faith system that was born with Isaac Newton and died with Albert Einstein. He said his own physics education felt like an “indoctrination” into the use of models, and that scientists in his field, “like priests… feel they are answering a higher calling.”
  Michael Crichton called modern environmentalism “the religion of choice for urban atheists … a perfect 21st century re-mapping of traditional JudeoChristian beliefs and myths.” British author James Lovelock’s Gaia Hypothesis — that the Earth itself functions as a living organism — echoes a sort of idolatrous animism, a religion of nature. Modern devotees turn on an energy-saving light bulb with the same piety as a catholic peasant lighting a candle in a cathedral. David Suzuki and Al Gore are saintly preachers imitating Peter and Paul as they roam the world spreading the faith. The faithful make arduous pilgrimages and call them ecotourism.

• John Kay of the Financial Times wrote last month, about future climate chaos: “Christians look to the Second Coming, Marxists look to the collapse of capitalism, with the same mixture of fear and longing … The discovery of global warming filled a gap in the canon … [and] provides justification for the link between the sins of our past and the catastrophe of our future.”
  What was once called salvation — a nebulous state of grace — is now known as sustainability, a word that is equally resistant to precise definition.

RELAX religious and scientific skeptic nerds! I make this comparison not to insult or inflame the religious or the scientific or the environmentally conscious among you. I merely observe that the similarities are interesting. Perhaps they indicate that a very real environmental danger is becoming a unifying force for science and religion. Having elements of both, it brings ostensibly divergent ways of looking at the world into focus on the same problem, and finds them to be not so different at all.
Perhaps this will be a good thing – if it is not already too late.