Frightening fundamentalism: destroy the environment to save it(!!!)
During the Vietnam War, I found one slogan particularly meaningful: "Fighting for peace is like fucking for virginity." Now an article I just read posits that some of the Republican leadership/Religious Right believe they can save the world by destroying it. Their idea is that environmental science is bunk, and that God's real plan is to destroy the earth through environmental degradation in order to wipe out all the non-righteous, followed by renewal. Others believe that there will always be enough to go around -- land, food, water, fossil fuels, etc. -- no matter how large the population, so why worry? These beliefs are detailed and attributed in the frightening Religious Wrong: A Higher Power Informs the Republican Assault on the Environment by Glenn Scherer, which was reprinted in Earth Action Network's emagazine.com after being published by salon.com. Here are some of the scarier passages:

"Republican Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma... new chair of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee...is a Big Oil backer who once characterized the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as 'the Gestapo bureaucracy'...

"Bush and Inhofe will likely move to modify or overturn the National Environmental Policy Act. This Magna Carta of environmental law demands study, disclosure and public comment on the environmental impacts of federal projects. Bush has already demanded 'excessive red tape' be hacked from the law, fast-tracking road and airport construction and cutting the public out of the democratic process....

"The U.S. District Court of Appeals for Washington, D.C. holds almost exclusive jurisdiction over environmental law, hearing cases concerning federal authority, involving the powers of the EPA, for example. Senate Republicans blocked two Clinton appointments to the court, setting the stage for a bench packed with conservative judges who, appointed now, could shape environmental law for decades....

"In his book The Carbon Wars, Greenpeace activist Jeremy Leggett tells how he stumbled upon this otherworldly agenda. During the Kyoto climate change negotiations, Leggett candidly asked Ford Motor Company executive John Schiller how opponents of the pact could believe there is no problem with 'a world of a billion cars intent on burning all the oil and gas available on the planet?' The executive asserted first that scientists get it wrong when they say fossil fuels have been sequestered underground for eons. The Earth, he said, is just 10,000, not 4.5 billion years old, the age widely accepted by scientists.

"Then Schiller confidently declared, 'You know, the more I look, the more it is just as it says in the Bible.' The Book of Daniel, he told Leggett, predicts that increased earthly devastation will mark the 'End Time' and return of Christ. Paradoxically, Leggett notes, many fundamentalists see dying coral reefs, melting ice caps and other environmental destruction not as an urgent call to action, but as God's will. Within the religious right worldview, the wreck of the Earth can be seen as Good News!

"Some true believers, interpreting biblical prophecy, are sure they will be saved from the horrific destruction brought by ecosystem collapse. They'll be raptured: rescued from Earth by God, who will then rain down seven ghastly years of misery on unbelieving humanity. Jesus' return will mark the Millennium, when the Lord restores the Earth to its green pristine condition, and the faithful enjoy a thousand years of peace and prosperity....

"One powerful fringe group, the Reconstructionists, doesn't speak of the 'End Time' at all, Bokaer notes. They put the onus for the Lord's return on their own political activism. Reconstructionists say Christ will only return when a righteous nation acts to purge unrepentant sinners and applies biblical law to its populace. They want to spread the Gospel in a political context, making the Bible the foundation of U.S. jurisprudence. That includes an end to environmental regulation.

"Reconstructionists believe the Lord will provide, and their view is laid out in America's Providential History, a religious right high school history textbook: 'The secular or socialist has a limited resource mentality and views the world as a pie... that needs to be cut up so everyone can get a piece,' write authors Mark Beliles and Stephen McDowell. 'In contrast, the Christian knows that the potential in God is unlimited and that there is no shortage of resources in God's Earth. The resources are waiting to be tapped.'...

"The administration has repeatedly turned a blind eye toward good science. When the National Academy of Sciences came to Bush in 2001 with a report saying that global warming was real, serious and human-caused, he ignored it. When the EPA sent a 2002 report to the United Nations saying that global warming will result in 'rising seas, melting ice caps and glaciers, ecological system disruption, floods, heat waves and more dangerous storms,' Bush rejected it as a document 'put out by the bureaucracy.'

"Marty Jezer, writing for the online Common Dreams News Center, notes that 'One has to go back to the Stalinist Era of the Soviet Union to find such a display of political arrogance and ignorance of science.' That's when Trofim Lysenko told Josef Stalin that Charles Darwin's theory of evolution and Gregor Mendel's theory of heredity were wrongheaded 'bourgeois science' not suited to a communist state.

"Lysenko's theories were practiced on collective farms on a massive scale, displacing traditional agricultural knowledge, and killing millions in the Russian famine of 1931 to 1933. His beliefs were exported to China, says Joseph Becker, author of Hungry Ghosts: Mao's Secret Famine. Farmers were told that seeds of the same species act like 'comrades,' and wouldn't compete with each other. Chinese farmers were ordered to plant up to 15 million seedlings per 2.5 acres, rather than the scientifically proven 1.5 million, helping bring on the 20th century's worst famine. An estimated 30 million people starved to death between 1958 and 1961."

I could go on, but I'm too spooked.