During an interesting chat with my wife this morning, she mentioned a letter in the Smithsonian Magazine in which the writer pointed out that the "sky is falling" environmentalists share many similarities to those fringe/extremist groups surrounding most mainstream religions who often share an apocalyptic or doomsday view of the future. It is a perspective that has been around for a couple of years, but this is the first time I'd actually taken time to consider it and its implications.
It became clear that, indeed, many of those engaged so passionately in the climate change debate are simply projecting a "new religion", one that may have resulted in the movement away from mainstream religions or the vacuum created in the lives of many neo-atheists (often the most technologically/scientifically focused individuals).
The writer also aptly points out that in 50 years or so, we may well look back on this type of extremism through the same retrospective lens we view other cults and fringe groups of the past. In fact, some environmental groups have even been classified as religious organizations from a legal perspective.
In any case, a stimulating and thought provoking perspective.
For the record, my personal views on the impact of human behavior on climate change are fairly straightforward. I feel that the issue is rather one of sustainability - we cannot continue to "take" from the planet's finite resources. I do not, however, think it is simply a byproduct of our lifestyle, industry, and technology - though there's plenty of room for improvement in those areas. Instead, the single most correlating metric is clearly the growth in the overall population of the planet. Unless we address this issue, everything else is a moot point. That will clearly not be an easy issue to address, as it touches so many hot buttons, so we may need to wait for mother earth (or our own misbehaviors) to correct things for us.
Rant off.
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