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["Toni Hawryluk" <tonihawr AT msn.com>]

http://www.alternet.org/story/20666/<http://www.alternet.org/story/20666/>

Battlefield Earth

By Bill Moyers<http://www.alternet.org/authors/4498/>, 
AlterNet<http://www.alternet.org/>. Posted December 4, 
2004<http://www.alternet.org/ts/archives/?date%5bF%5d=12&date%5bY%5d=2004&date%5bd%5d=04&act=Go/>.

 

The environment is in trouble and the religious right doesn't care. 

 

It's time to act as if the future depends on us - because it does. 

 

This week the Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard Medical 
School presented its fourth annual Global Environment Citizen Award to Bill 
Moyers. In presenting the award, Meryl Streep, a member of the Center board, 
said, "Through resourceful, intrepid reportage and perceptive voices from the 
forward edge of the debate, Moyers has examined an environment under siege 
with the aim of engaging citizens." Following is the text of Bill Moyers' 
response to Ms. Streep's presentation of the award.

 

I accept this award on behalf of all the people behind the camera whom you 
never see. And for all those scientists, advocates, activists, and just plain 
citizens whose stories we have covered in reporting on how environmental 
change affects our daily lives. We journalists are simply beachcombers on the 
shores of other people's knowledge, other people's experience, and other 
people's wisdom. We tell their stories.

 

The journalist who truly deserves this award is my friend, Bill McKibben. He 
enjoys the most conspicuous place in my own pantheon of journalistic heroes 
for his pioneer work in writing about the environment. His best seller "The 
End of Nature" carried on where Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring" left off.

 

Writing in Mother Jones recently, Bill described how the problems we 
journalists routinely cover - conventional, manageable programs like budget 
shortfalls and pollution - may be about to convert to chaotic, unpredictable, 
unmanageable situations. The most unmanageable of all, he writes, could be 
the accelerating deterioration of the environment, creating perils with huge 
momentum like the greenhouse effect that is causing the melting of the Arctic 
to release so much freshwater into the North Atlantic that even the Pentagon 
is growing alarmed that a weakening gulf stream could yield abrupt and 
overwhelming changes, the kind of changes that could radically alter 
civilizations.

 

That's one challenge we journalists face - how to tell such a story without 
coming across as Cassandras, without turning off the people we most want to 
understand what's happening, who must act on what they read and hear.

 

As difficult as it is, however, for journalists to fashion a readable 
narrative for complex issues without depressing our readers and viewers, 
there is an even harder challenge - to pierce the ideology that governs 
official policy today. One of the biggest changes in politics in my lifetime 
is that the delusional is no longer marginal. It has come in from the fringe, 
to sit in the seat of power in the Oval Office and in Congress. For the first 
time in our history, ideology and theology hold a monopoly of power in 
Washington. Theology asserts propositions that cannot be proven true; 
ideologues hold stoutly to a world view despite being contradicted by what is 
generally accepted as reality. When ideology and theology couple, their 
offspring are not always bad but they are always blind. And there is the 
danger: voters and politicians alike, oblivious to the facts.

 

Remember James Watt, President Reagan's first secretary of the Interior? My 
favorite online environmental journal, the ever-engaging Grist, reminded us 
recently of how James Watt told the U.S. Congress that protecting natural 
resources was unimportant in light of the imminent return of Jesus Christ. In 
public testimony he said, "after the last tree is felled, Christ will come 
back."

 

Beltway elites snickered. The press corps didn't know what he was talking 
about. But James Watt was serious. So were his compatriots out across the 
country. They are the people who believe the bible is literally true - 
one-third of the American electorate, if a recent Gallup poll is accurate. In 
this past election several million good and decent citizens went to the polls 
believing in the rapture index. That's right - the rapture index. Google it 
and you will find that the best-selling books in America today are the 12 
volumes of the left-behind series written by the Christian fundamentalist and 
religious right warrior, Timothy LaHaye. These true believers subscribe to a 
fantastical theology concocted in the 19th century by a couple of immigrant 
preachers who took disparate passages from the Bible and wove them into a 
narrative that has captivated the imagination of millions of Americans.

 

Its outline is rather simple, if bizarre (the British writer George Monbiot 
recently did a brilliant dissection of it and I am indebted to him for adding 
to my own understanding): once Israel has occupied the rest of its "biblical 
lands," legions of the anti-Christ will attack it, triggering a final 
showdown in the valley of Armageddon. As the Jews who have not been converted 
are burned, the Messiah will return for the rapture. True believers will be 
lifted out of their clothes and transported to heaven, where, seated next to 
the right hand of God, they will watch their political and religious 
opponents suffer plagues of boils, sores, locusts, and frogs during the 
several years of tribulation that follow.

 

I'm not making this up. Like Monbiot, I've read the literature. I've reported 
on these people, following some of them from Texas to the West Bank. They are 
sincere, serious and polite as they tell you they feel called to help bring 
the rapture on as fulfillment of biblical prophecy. That's why they have 
declared solidarity with Israel and the Jewish settlements and backed up 
their support with money and volunteers. It's why the invasion of Iraq for 
them was a warm-up act, predicted in the Book of Revelations where four 
angels "which are bound in the great river Euphrates will be released to slay 
the third part of man." A war with Islam in the Middle East is not something 
to be feared but welcomed - an essential conflagration on the road to 
redemption. The last time I Googled it, the rapture index stood at 144 - just 
one point below the critical threshold when the whole thing will blow, the 
son of god will return, the righteous will enter heaven and sinners will be 
condemned to eternal hellfire.

 

So what does this mean for public policy and the environment? Go to Grist to 
read a remarkable work of reporting by the journalist, Glenn Scherer - "The 
Road to Environmental Apocalypse." Read it and you will see how millions of 
Christian fundamentalists may believe that environmental destruction is not 
only to be disregarded but actually welcomed - even hastened - as a sign of 
the coming apocalypse.

 

As Grist makes clear, we're not talking about a handful of fringe lawmakers 
who hold or are beholden to these beliefs. Nearly half the U.S. Congress 
before the recent election - 231 legislators in total - more since the 
election - are backed by the religious right. Forty-five senators and 186 
members of the 108th congress earned 80 to 100 percent approval ratings from 
the three most influential Christian right advocacy groups. They include 
Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, Assistant Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, 
Conference Chair Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, Policy Chair Jon Kyl of 
Arizona, House Speaker Dennis Hastert, and Majority Whip Roy Blunt. The only 
Democrat to score 100 percent with the Christian coalition was Senator Zell 
Miller of Georgia, who recently quoted from the biblical book of Amos on the 
senate floor: "the days will come, sayeth the Lord God, that I will send a 
famine in the land." he seemed to be relishing the thought.

 

And why not? There's a constituency for it. A 2002 TIME/CNN poll found that 
59 percent of Americans believe that the prophecies found in the book of 
Revelations are going to come true. Nearly one-quarter think the Bible 
predicted the 9/11 attacks. Drive across the country with your radio tuned to 
the more than 1,600 Christian radio stations or in the motel turn some of the 
250 Christian TV stations and you can hear some of this end-time gospel. And 
you will come to understand why people under the spell of such potent 
prophecies cannot be expected, as Grist puts it, "to worry about the 
environment. Why care about the earth when the droughts, floods, famine 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?"

 

Because these people believe that until Christ does return, the lord will 
provide. One of their texts is a high school history book, America's 
providential history. You'll find there these words: "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." However, "[t]he 
Christian knows that the potential in god is unlimited and that there is no 
shortage of resources in god's earth ... while many secularists view the 
world as overpopulated, Christians know that god has made the earth 
sufficiently large with plenty of resources to accommodate all of the 
people." No wonder Karl Rove goes around the White House whistling that 
militant hymn, "Onward Christian Soldiers." He turned out millions of the 
foot soldiers on Nov. 2, including many who have made the apocalypse a 
powerful driving force in modern American politics.

 

I can see in the look on your faces just how had it is for the journalist to 
report a story like this with any credibility. So let me put it on a personal 
level. I myself don't know how to be in this world without expecting a 
confident future and getting up every morning to do what I can to bring it 
about. So I have always been an optimist. Now, however, I think of my friend 
on Wall Street whom I once asked: "What do you think of the market?" "I'm 
optimistic," he answered. "Then why do you look so worried?" And he answered: 
"Because I am not sure my optimism is justified."

 

I'm not, either. Once upon a time I agreed with Eric Chivian and the Center 
for Health and the Global Environment that people will protect the natural 
environment when they realize its importance to their health and to the 
health and lives of their children. Now I am not so sure. It's not that I 
don't want to believe that - it's just that I read the news and connect the 
dots:

 

I read that the administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has 
declared the election a mandate for President Bush on the environment. This 
for an administration that wants to rewrite the Clean Air Act, the Clean 
Water Act and the Endangered Species Act protecting rare plant and animal 
species and their habitats, as well as the National Environmental Policy Act 
that requires the government to judge beforehand if actions might damage 
natural resources.

 

That wants to relax pollution limits for ozone; eliminate vehicle tailpipe 
inspections; and ease pollution standards for cars, sports utility vehicles 
and diesel-powered big trucks and heavy equipment.

 

That wants a new international audit law to allow corporations to keep 
certain information about environmental problems secret from the public.

 

That wants to drop all its new-source review suits against polluting 
coal-fired power plans and weaken consent decrees reached earlier with coal 
companies.

 

That wants to open the Arctic [National] Wildlife Refuge to drilling and 
increase drilling in Padre Island National Seashore, the longest stretch of 
undeveloped barrier island in the world and the last great coastal wild land 
in America.

 

I read the news just this week and learned how the Environmental Protection 
Agency had planned to spend nine million dollars - two million of it from the 
administration's friends at the American Chemistry Council - to pay poor 
families to continue to use pesticides in their homes. These pesticides have 
been linked to neurological damage in children, but instead of ordering an 
end to their use, the government and the industry were going to offer the 
families $970 each, as well as a camcorder and children's clothing, to serve 
as guinea pigs for the study.

 

I read all this in the news.

 

I read the news just last night and learned that the administration's friends 
at the international policy network, which is supported by Exxon Mobile and 
others of like mind, have issued a new report that climate change is "a myth, 
sea levels are not rising," [and] scientists who believe catastrophe is 
possible are "an embarrassment."

 

I not only read the news but the fine print of the recent appropriations bill 
passed by Congress, with the obscure (and obscene) riders attached to it: a 
clause removing all endangered species protections from pesticides; language 
prohibiting judicial review for a forest in Oregon; a waiver of environmental 
review for grazing permits on public lands; a rider pressed by developers to 
weaken protection for crucial habitats in California.

 

I read all this and look up at the pictures on my desk, next to the computer 
- pictures of my grandchildren: Henry, age 12; of Thomas, age 10; of Nancy, 
7; Jassie, 3; Sara Jane, 9 months. I see the future looking back at me from 
those photographs and I say, "Father, forgive us, for we know not what we 
do." And then I am stopped short by the thought: "That's not right. We do 
know what we are doing. We are stealing their future. Betraying their trust. 
Despoiling their world."

 

And I ask myself: Why? Is it because we don't care? Because we are greedy? 
Because we have lost our capacity for outrage, our ability to sustain 
indignation at injustice?

 

What has happened to out moral imagination?

 

On the heath Lear asks Gloucester: "How do you see the world?" And 
Gloucester, who is blind, answers: "I see it feelingly.'"

 

I see it feelingly.

 

The news is not good these days. I can tell you, though, that as a journalist 
I know the news is never the end of the story. The news can be the truth that 
sets us free - not only to feel but to fight for the future we want. And the 
will to fight is the antidote to despair, the cure for cynicism, and the 
answer to those faces looking back at me from those photographs on my desk. 
What we need to match the science of human health is what the ancient 
Israelites called "hochma" - the science of the heart ... the capacity to see 
... to feel ... and then to act ... as if the future depended on you.

 

Believe me, it does. 

 

Bill Moyers is the host of the weekly public affairs series NOW with Bill 
Moyers, which airs Friday nights on PBS.