#142 The Church of Environmentalism

#142 The Church of Environmentalism The latest pagan form to fill the God-shaped vacuum in humans is called environmentalism.  It has its own church, high priests, and eschatology, but the economics don’t work.  Economics is the study of the production and distribution of goods and services under scarcity.  When applied to religion, we understand that people HAVE to believe something.  Even the most ardent existentialist BELIEVES only in what exists.  So here we are in the early part of the 21st century, and people are believing in new gods.  As it says in Ecclesiastes 1:9 There is nothing new under the sun.  Environmentalism is simply the latest god of some humans.  A God-Shaped Vacuum A paraphrase of Blaise Pascal’s work goes like this “There is a God-shaped vacuum in the heart of every [person] which cannot be filled by any created thing, but only by God the Creator, made known through Jesus Christ.” I just read a new book by Marian Tupy and Gale Pooley from the Cato Institute, titled Superabundance.  Their point is that increasing the world population INCREASES resources.  It does not reduce them.  My summary of the increasing population concept is written in my little book Economics and the Christian Worldview, and is as follows: There is a limited amount of land and God isn’t making any more.  But He IS making creative people who are finding more efficient ways of using it.”  The authors of Superabundance clearly state that they are writing from a secular worldview.  So you can imagine my surprise to find a section titled, “Is environmentalism becoming a secular religion?”   Environmentalism fulfills the same psychological needs as religion does, because it is transcendent.  It allows humans to be a part of something greater than themselves.   Michael Crichton in a speech in San Francisco in 2003 said, “Environmentalism is in fact a perfect 21st-century remapping of traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs.  There’s an initial Eden which is a paradise.  Then there’s a fall from grace into a state of pollution as a result of eating from the tree of knowledge, and as a result of our actions there is a judgment day coming for us all.   Mr. Crichton continues to explain that we are all energy sinners, doomed to die, unless we seek the salvation of sustainability in the church of the environment.   Deirdre McCloskey in her 2010 book Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics can’t explain the modern world, explains that environmentalism is taught now as a civic religion in American schools.  The environmental left has now worshipfully adopted Malthus.  ….”in the absences of traditional religion, the need for the transcendent is being filled by something else,