Andrew-Come-Lately

Suddenly Andrew Sullivan is an environmentalist. (Actually, I don't know that to be true, but I'm one of his regular readers and I don't recall him making a big issue of the environment, aside from global warming.) The theme of "America the Beautiful" is one that goes back far in our history, probably to the very beginning. And environmental responsibility is another. My grandfather worked a dirt farm in Appalachia, fertilized with the products of the stable and barn. That was just the way you did it. The paintings of the great nineteenth century American landscapists are full of this kind of reverence (and are highly idealized -- they were also selling the West). Think about the novels of Jack London set in the Yukon and Alaska, or for that matter the works of James Fenimore Cooper (which actually make me cringe because of their unabashed racism, but still). And yet we've become the most environmentally destructive society ever. (Please note that there are farms in Europe that have been productive for centuries, because they follow sensible farming practices. We came up with the Dust Bowl, and now we export the same techniques to tropical forests.)

I find his comments about environmentalism becoming a religion fairly humorous. It's another blind spot: the idea that anything that someone feels passionately about (especially someone whose politics you disagree with) is a "religion" is faintly naive, although it actually smacks of being a tactic. (Vide the creationist position on evolution, although I believe they've largely given up on that one -- at least in court.) In point of fact, there are religions (like mine) in which the world is revered and that recognize the indivisibility of the world and the creatures in it. The Big Three Monotheisms are the ones who divorced nature from spirituality -- if I've heard it right, the Fall involved not only Man but Nature as well; the difference is that Man is redeemable, while Nature is not. It's kind of hard to reconcile that with any sort of environmentalism, although I see that some denominations are beginning to take the position that Sullivan mentions. Some of us have always believed that we are stewards of ther earth, not its lords.

It's sort of a pity that it took HDTV for Sullivan to figure it out. He really needs to get out and get dirty more.