More on the environment

Aargh, I just lost my post! Here is a facimile therof!

I want to add to my discussion below of the Christian right views of environmentalism with a few quotes from the Grist article. I highly recommend the article.

"Christian politics has as its primary intent the conquest of the land -- of men, families, institutions, bureaucracies, courts, and governments for the Kingdom of Christ," writes constructionist George Grant. Christian dominion will be achieved by ending the separation of church and state, replacing U.S. democracy with a theocracy ruled by Old Testament law, and cutting all government social programs, instead turning that work over to Christian churches. Reconstructionists also would abolish government regulatory agencies, such as the U.S. EPA, because they are a distraction from their goal of Christianizing America, and subsequently, the rest of the world. "World conquest. That's what Christ has commissioned us to accomplish," says Grant. "We must win the world with the power of the Gospel. And we must never settle for anything less." Only when that conquest is complete can the Lord return.

People under the spell of such potent prophecies cannot be expected to worry about the environment. Why care about the earth when the droughts, floods, and pestilence brought by ecological collapse are signs of the Apocalypse foretold in the Bible? Why care about global climate change when you and yours will be rescued in the Rapture? And why care about converting from oil to solar when the same God who performed the miracle of the loaves and fishes can whip up a few billion barrels of light crude with a Word? Natural-resource depletion and overpopulation, then, are not concerns for End-Timers -- and nor are other ecological catastrophes, which are viewed by
dispensationalists as presaging the Great Tribulation.

We do not need politicians who believe that environmental atrocities are the route to salvation and the return of Jesus Christ. We need leadership to do the right thing for the environment – to reframe our consumerist paradigm that more is better, that a better life can only be achieved through more money and more stuff, and that our country must, at all costs, grow economically. There is no real "out" to throw things to; we will run out of oil, probably in my lifetime - we must change. Some change will happen at the grassroots level, but I know I need leadership to do the right thing, even when I know what it is – and I bet I’m not alone.