Radical Environmentalists, Like Biblical Millenarians, Scan the News and Popular Science Journals Eagerly for Every Scrap of Evidence that the Ecological End of Days Is Upon Us

Naively, one would think that environmentalists should welcome news that the planet is, in some respects, not in quite as much danger as we might have thought. This neglects, however, to allow for the psychodynamics of an apocalyptic vision. Radical environmentalists scan the news pages and the popular science journals eagerly for every scrap of evidence that the ecological End of Days is upon us. As with biblical millenarians, objections of logic and fact have little effect. They are already convinced that the world is in calamitous decline. They believe, and seem to enjoy believing, that nature is being violated—blasphemously—by their neighbors, and that ultimate retribution is on the way. Evidence to the contrary is viewed as a terrible letdown, not as a reprieve.

Similarly, inasmuch as ecoradicalism is a movement with a worshipful view of the primal, it takes little heed of sober findings that, in many cases, uncorrupted, nonwhite, primitive peoples have been just as contemptuous of what we call environmental values as are greedy Euro-American industrialists. As the geographer Martin Lewis notes in Green Delusions, “a large proportion of eco-radicals fervently believes that human social and ecological problems could be solved if only we would return to a primal way of life. Ultimately, this proves to be an article of faith that receives little support from the historical and anthropological record.”

--Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt, Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), e-book.