Of Ants and Men: A Greener Daydream

Reading A Greener Faith: Religious Environmentalism and Our Planet’s Future (Oxford University Press, 2006, 288pp.) reminds one of the advocates of civil religion: it’s important that Americans believe in God, whichever one they choose. Roger S. Gottlieb, a philosophy professor, wants believers to be green, and Greens to be believers, whichever God they choose. The book offers a read that is simultaneously entertaining and surreal.

Perhaps no surprise, Gottlieb is suffused with all of the usual liberal nostrums. The environment is under catastrophic attack; capitalism is environmentally destructive; globalization wreaks havoc around the world; only draconian regulatory mandates can save us.

Yet these all are standard fare on the left. Other people have made the same arguments—which are perfectly legitimate, if not terribly persuasive—in the past and will do so again in the future. Gottlieb adds a spiritual twist, one that is fundamentally anti-human. At least, it rejects the belief that there is anything particularly unique about mankind, recognized as the central element in God’s creation by Christians and Jews.

Gottlieb complains of “an unthinking and unprincipled anthropocentrism in which only human beings have any moral value.” More specifically, he writes:

It seems that when almost all ecotheologians talk about reverence for life or rejecting anthropocentrism, they generally mean that all species, all arrangements or collections of life, have value. Yet, when they apply these ideas of reverence to human beings, it seems that it is each individual, and not the species as a whole, that is the focus. Even if animal rights are defended and veganism proposed, our buildings, transportation, and production dislocate and devastate countless other beings. This is accepted as a matter of course, or, if it is lamented, there still remains a critical difference betwen our concern with people and our concerns with nature. Running over a human child will always provoke more distress than running over ants. As it should, of course.

Although Gottlieb doesn’t actually advocate treating children and ants on the same moral level, it’s not entirely clear how he would distinguish between them. He advocates “communion” with natural things and hopes to “help establish the expectation that hurting or using other beings is a moral matter that requires reflection, honest self-assessment, and at times public justification.” What would this mean in practice?

At the very least it presumes accepting the Democratic Party platform. The Catholic church should treat politicians who “gut” the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) the same as it does those who support abortion; “CEOs of clear-cutting logging companies or pesticide manufacturers” should be “turned away by
religious institutions.” Drilling should not be permitted in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). Etc.

By succumbing to the temptation to turn prudential policy issues into theological matters, Gottlieb undercuts his own case. Is the EPA an effective, let alone the most effective, means to protect the environment? How big should its budget be? What should its regulations say?

Are all man-made pesticides verboten, even though natural pesticides are a common mechanism by which plants protect themselves from insects? Is clear-cutting prohibited even on lands where the trees have been planted and cultivated?

Is every existing wildlife refuge sacred? And every inch of every existing sanctuary (only a very small percentage of ANWR’s land would be explored and developed, for instance)? Do ecoreligious principles require that we double, triple, or quadruple the number of reserves?

Which sacred religious texts give us Gottlieb’s specific environmental policy agenda?

It is quite easy to speak generally about the spiritual nature of the world around us. But unless one is willing to claim that ants are man’s moral equal, then there is no predetermined “right” environmental policy. Some approaches are manifestly better than others, at least in the sense of delivering greater environmental protection at less cost. But they can be discovered and implemented only by assessing often complex facts and balancing competing desires.

Here Gottlieb fails, rather dramatically. His rhetoricmirrors that of the usual “the world is ending” activists.

Everywhere he sees crises, crises threatening to overwhelm the planet.

He approvingly cites the list offered by a Protestant theologian: “Global warming, holes in the ozone, toxic wastes, oil spills, acid rain, drinking water contamination, overflowing landfills, top-soil erosion, species extinction, destruction of the rain forests, leakage of nuclear waste, lead poisoning, desertification, smog.”

One of the characteristics of eco-alarmism is to mislead by mixing very different issues together into one apocalyptic whole. American air has gotten cleaner, scientists disagree over the rate of species extinction, there is plenty of land for landfills, CFCs have long been banned out of concern for the ozone layer, toxic wastes can, and usually are, disposed of properly, and so on. Gottlieb’s credulity also is on display when he cites the three decades-old Club of Rome report, which incorrectly predicted imminent shortages of numerous resources, ranging from oil to gold, which remain in abundant supply.

Doug Bandow is Vice President of Policy at Citizen Outreach and a former Special Assistant to President Ronald Reagan. He is the author of Leviathan Unchained: Washington’s Bipartisan Big Government Consensus (Xulon Press). He is also an adjunct scholar at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which arranged the publication of this review.

Editor’s note: The full version of this article can be found on https://www.academia.org.