The Environment

someone’s been reading his von Mises

By J. L. Bastiat ⋅ May 21, 2008 ⋅  Email This Post ⋅  Print This Post ⋅ Post a comment

This cuts several ways, but the sheer anti-rational policymongering of our crunchy green fellowbeings is clearly akin to religion. Jonah Goldberg provides an excellent swift summary in the course of a polemic against “environmentalism” which still pauses to acknowledge “conservation” as desireable.

Plastic grocery bags are being banned, even though they require less energy to make and recycle than paper ones. The country is being forced to subscribe to a modern version of transubstantiation, whereby corn is miraculously transformed into sinless energy even as it does worse damage than oil.
Conservation, which shares roots and meaning with conservatism, stands athwart this mass hysteria. Yes, conservationism can have a religious element as well, but that stems from the biblical injunction to be a good steward of the Earth, rather than a worshiper of it. But stewardship involves economics, not mysticism.
Economics is the study of choosing between competing goods.

(Jonah Goldberg, Environmentalism vs. Conservation on NRO

I said it cuts several ways. Two, I hope, will be obvious enough:

1. A nation which claims to separate Church and State, and especially one in which “secular” has become a club to swing against public religiosity, had better be careful which new religions it crowns; and
2. Christians ought to be willing to identify and criticize publicly, and to identify and state true and faithful alternatives to, the religious elements of faux secularism and laicite.