Is Environmentalism Turning Into Religion?
In remarks to the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco, Michael Crichton, the best-selling author of Jurassic Park, Sphere, and The Andromeda Strain, discussed what he feels is the greatest challenge facing mankind – the challenge of distinguishing reality from fantasy and truth from propaganda. To expound on his thesis, Mr. Crichton focused on the subject of environmentalism, unequivocally stating: "Today, one of the most powerful religions in the Western World is environmentalism", adding, "Environmentalism seems to be the religion of choice for urban atheists."
In this essay, he likens environmentalism to religion, stating that both are issues of faith. Crichton states, "Increasingly it seems facts aren’t necessary, because the tenets of environmentalism are all about belief." Crichton makes clear that he believes we must conduct our lives in a way that takes into account all the consequences of our actions, including the consequences to other people, and the consequences to the environment. However, he also sets forth that we must "daily decide whether the threats we face are real, whether the solutions we are offered will do any good, whether the problems we’re told exist are in fact real problems".
Crichton posits that there is and never was an "environmental" Eden. "What was that Eden of the wonderful mythic past? Is it the time when infant mortality was 80%, when four children in five died of disease before the age of five? When one woman in six died in childbirth? When the average lifespan was 40, as it was in America a century ago. When plagues swept across the planet, killing millions in a stroke. Was it when millions starved to death? Is that when it was Eden?"
"In short, the romantic view of the natural world as a blissful Eden is only held by people who have no actual experience of nature. People who live in nature are not romantic about it at all. They may hold spiritual beliefs about the world around them, they may have a sense of the unity of nature or the aliveness of all things, but they still kill the animals and uproot the plants in order to eat, to live. If they don’t, they will die."
"The truth is, almost nobody wants to experience real nature. What people want is to spend a week or two in a cabin in the woods, with screens on the windows . . . Nobody wants to go back to nature in any real way, and nobody does. It’s all talk-and as the years go on, and the world population grows increasingly urban, it’s uninformed talk. Farmers know what they’re talking about. City people don’t. It’s all fantasy."
Crichton argues, "[I]t is now time for us to make a major shift in our thinking about the environment, similar to the shift that occurred around the first Earth Day in 1970, when this awareness was first heightened. But this time around, we need to get environmentalism out of the sphere of religion. We need to stop the mythic fantasies, and we need to stop the doomsday predictions. We need to start doing hard science instead.
"Environmentalism needs to be absolutely based in objective and verifiable science, it needs to be rational, and it needs to be flexible. And it needs to be apolitical.
"[T]he unhappy truth of the environment is that we are dealing with incredibly complex, evolving systems, and we usually are not certain how best to proceed."
As such, Crichton proposes that " . . . we must institute far more stringent requirements for what constitutes knowledge in the environmental realm." He states that he is "thoroughly sick of politicized so-called facts that simply aren’t true. It isn’t that these ‘facts’ are exaggerations of an underlying truth. Nor is it that certain organizations are spinning their case to present it in the strongest way. Not at all—what more and more groups are doing is putting out lies, pure and simple. Falsehoods that they know to be false."
Crichton asserts that "[w]e need an organization that will be ruthless about acquiring verifiable results, that will fund identical research projects to more than one group, and that will make everybody in this field get honest fast."
In closing, Crichton posits that "it’s time to abandon the religion of environmentalism, and return to the science of environmentalism, and base our public policy decisions firmly on that."
Family Water Alliance concurs with these sentiments. Honesty, common sense, dependable science, and prudent policy is long overdue in the regulatory scheme in regard to our natural resources. Three cheers to Michael Crichton. #