The decade of the green meanies....

The second half of the Robert Sibley article...

The "return of religion," including a new secular religion like environmentalism, reflects a crisis of meaning in the sense that many people have turned to religion because the modern project, the Enlightenment project of scientific progress and material betterment, no longer satisfies our desire for meaning and purpose.

Behind our "spiritual dis-ease," says Darby, are all the anxieties and uncertainties of our time. "People always have difficulty with change and uncertainty, and in a technological age there is a lot of change and uncertainty. So people tend to latch on to whatever promises to make sense of the world. This can take the form of religion."

Environmentalism is one of the multifarious forms by which the religious impulse has, as it were, "returned" to the modern world. As novelist Michael Crichton once sardonically remarked, "Environmentalism seems to be the religion of choice for urban atheists."

The Green ethos certainly shares much the same psychology and spiritual longing evident in religious movements. The Green prophets and all those true believers who just know that global warming is due to man's greed and rapacity (read capitalism and the United States) show all the symptoms of perfervid religious fundamentalists. Like other secular religions, environmentalism wants to remake the world according to its understanding of perfection.

In response to the spiritual crisis of our time, the Greens want to recover a lost paradise where mankind can redeem itself through the salvation of the planet, and, thereby, be restored to a state of grace. And, like every religion, environmentalism possesses a priestly elite (Bono and Cate Blanchett, for example), holy texts such as the Kyoto Accord, rituals like recycling and organic eating, and forms of public worship such as Earth Day and Earth Hour. Environmentalism also includes eschatological claims, its certainty of the end-time to come, although this end-time is referred to as catastrophic climate change rather than the Apocalypse or Judgment Day.

But, read the whole thing, please...