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Fyrefly1
Cannabis Sacrament Minister
Joined: 07 Sep 2004
Posts: 2209
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 Posted: Thu Jan 13, 2005 8:43 am Post subject: Bill Moyers: On the environment |
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Posted at the Hawaii site.
This acceptance speech taken from the Harvard.edu site outlines Moyer's fear that our current administration is unconcerned with global environmental problems and outlines his reasons why.
Pretty chilling stuff! This may seem anti-christian but I believe the Christians (and non-Christians too) on this site do not subscribe to this kind of careless thinking...at least I hope not...
Joe
| Quote: |
At a recent event in New York, the Center for Health and the Global
Environment at Harvard Medical School presented Bill Moyers with its
fourth annual Global Environment Citizen Award. Previous recipients of
the Award were Jane Goodall, E.O. Wilson, and Harrison Ford. The
presentation of the award was made by Meryl Streep, a member of the
Center’s board. Bill Moyers responded as follows.)
Thank you Meryl Streep, for those generous words. I have been in the front row
of your fan club ever since 1978 when Judith and I sat literally in the front row at the
Joseph Papp Public Theater for your extraordinary performance of “Alice in Concert.” I
have admired you not only for your acumen as an actress but because of your
commitments as a citizen. I know acting is hard work – that you have to go deep into
yourself to become someone else. But it takes a special kind of courage to live out the
calling of a citizen, to be yourself when you are not acting and to take a public stand on a
vital issue. You have set the bar for that kind of citizenship, and I thank you for it.
And the Center has set the bar, too, for taking the measure of what is happening to
human beings because of environmental changes. We journalists are simply
beachcombers on the shores of other people’s knowledge, other people’s experience, and
other people’s wisdom. There would be little good journalism about the environment if
there were no environmental scientists, advocates, and activists. 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 bestseller 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 melt 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 twelve
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
antichrist 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 Revelation
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 Senator 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 Revelation 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 to 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 put 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 November 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 hard 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 the 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 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 – $2 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 ExxonMobil and others of like
mind, have issued a new report that climate change is “a myth, sea levels are not rising,
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; Thomas, age 10; Nancy, 7; Jassie, 3;
SaraJane, nine 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 our 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.”
Why don’t we feel the world enough to save it – for our kin to come?
This brings me back to the Center, to Dr. Chivian, and to all of you gathered here
this evening. You are the antidote to despair, the cure for cynicism, the answer to the
faces of my grandchildren looking back at me from those pictures on my desk. Your
work for the science of human health is reinforced by what the ancient Israelites called
hochma – the science of the heart – the capacity to see, feel, and then to act as if the
future depended on you.
Because it does.
For your work and your witness – even more than for this beautiful award – I give
you thanks. |
_________________
Fyrefly1
"All truth passes through three stages: first it is ridiculed, second it is violently opposed, and third it is accepted as self-evident."
Arthur Schopenhauer, 19th Century Philosopher |
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