Melanie Phillips denounces “secular religions” (which, she helpfully informs us, are “known as ideologies“)…

Just look at environmentalism. This defines the modern ‘progressive’ — and yet it is fundamentally irrational, illiberal and pre-modern. Based on a spiritual belief in the innate, organic harmony of the universe, it grew out of pagan and animistic ideas which not only defied reason but, in elevating emotion and subjectivity as well as downgrading mankind, were to feed directly into such regressive thinking as eugenics and fascism.

Well, that may be true of some, though everything beyond “organic harmony of the universe” is beyond me. Replace “emotion” or “subjectivity” and “eugenics” or “fascism” with just about anything – “gnosticism” and “golfing”, say – and it’d make just as much sense. By this reckoning, however, anti-environmentalism could also be viewed as a “secular faith“. Many of its disciples have asserted a similar “harmony“; speaking as if our environment must be suited to any soaring level of human growth and consumption.

Sometimes this isn’t secular: Rush Limbaugh, for example, crippled logic with his gruff expostulation that he “simply cannot accept that we would be created to destroy our own environment“. Presumably, then ol’ Rush would be calm in the face of, say, a nuclear Iran; he couldn’t, after all, accept that we’d be created to be destroyed. Better swot up on free will, RL.

Other anti-environmentalists can’t even offer half-chewed theology. James Delingpole,  still combusting at his Telegraph blog, has shared his earnest belief that “the richer we get, the more advanced our economies, the more money we shall have to spend on conserving our environment“. This, he claims, proves that “the end of the world is not nigh“. What a consummate consumer! It hasn’t occurred to him, presumably, that the cure to an environmental ill might not be there to buy. If the oil runs out, for example, we can’t pop down to a retail store and pool our funds for a quick replacement. If overpopulation were to drain our resources, we couldn’t just apply for an extension. Brendan O’Neill might disagree. He thinks “population scaremongering is a fatal distraction“, as we should be seeing “what we can do collectively to make the planet a better, wealthier, more fruitful place for hundreds of billions of human beings“. Well, Brendan, allow me to clip  you round the chops with a copy of The Ingenuity Gap and ask, “What if we can’t?” The possibility isn’t even acknowledged, and that’s where reason splutters out and faith kicks into gear.

Anonymous hippie: Chronicle/Deanne Fitzmaurice