Major Scholar on Environmental Movement Defends Resisting the Green Dragon

by E. Calvin Beisner, Ph.D.
Founder and National Spokesman, Cornwall Alliance

Recently we reported that Left-wing bloggers (at RightWingwatch.org, Mother Jones, Huffington Post, Care2 make a difference, Mother Nature Network, Southern California Public Radio, and Good Culture) have attacked Cornwall’s Resisting the Green Dragon. Even RT.com (which is Russian TV) has attacked us on The Alyona Show. We must be doing something right!

One thing characterizes all of these attacks. Relying on RightWingWatch’s pirated, edited-down, 3-minute version of our promo video rather than carefully assessing the full series, they misrepresent us as pitting people against nature, while our actual message is that human prosperity enables good environmental stewardship. Portraying the environmental movement as religiously neutral, they also protest our insistence that much of it is driven by a revival of Gnostic, pantheistic, polytheistic, or animistic religions.

That won’t play among serious thinkers. Real scholars on environmentalism are well aware of the heavily religious nature of environmentalism. One of the foremost, Bron Taylor, Professor of Religion and Nature at the University of Florida, author of Dark Green Religion: Nature Spirituality and the Planetary Future, and editor-in-chief of the multi-volume Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature, came to our defense in response to Huffington Post’s attack, writing, in Huffington Post itself:

Progressives may ridicule those who claim that there is now a cultural ‘War on Christmas’ but Christian conservatives do have reason to worry. They know that their cultural influence has been waning, and that those with evolutionary and ecological worldviews are growing in number and influence. A DVD series released by a group of conservative Christians entitled “Resisting the Green Dragon,” provides one recent example of such fears. These fears are based on an accurate perception that there is a religious dimension to much environmentalism. Those expressing such fears understand, accurately, that those engaged in nature-based spiritualities, both overtly and in subtle ways, are converting many to an evolutionary worldview and an environmentalist spirituality and ethics. They know that this is one reason they are having trouble even keeping their own children in the fold. [emphasis added]

A few days later the New York Times’s Green blog did a somewhat even-handed review. But the biased, ad hominem, poorly researched attacks continue.

Environmental political activist blogger Timothy Hurst, who represents himself as a journalist and the executive editor of LiveOak Media and publisher of its blog ecopolitology, first took a crack at us on October 18, three days after we appeared on Fox News Channel’s Glenn Beck Show. Last week, having seen Mother Jones’s attack (almost eight weeks after it appeared), he decided to have another go at us, saying that in his first attempt he “didn’t really pursue the story with much journalistic rigor or enthusiasm.” Now, it seems, he wanted to do a more thorough job.

So, describing us as “scary,” our language as so “incendiary,” “revisionist,” and “outlandish” that he wondered if we were joking, he concluded that Resisting the Green Dragon “is dangerously misguided propaganda aimed at mobilizing political action and hate-filled mistrust toward people of all walks of life—shrouding that hate and intolerance by depersonalizing it and directing it towards a constructed, mythical enemy, ‘The Green Dragon.’”

What new exercise of “journalistic rigor” led him to this more enthusiastic attack—and misrepresentation? “… now that I've watched … the full 12-minute preview* of the 12-DVD set, ‘Resisting the Green Dragon, I can honestly say ….”

Well. Isn’t that interesting? First he admits that before his first blog about us his research amounted to nothing more than watching a pirated, edited-down, 3-minute version of a trailer. Now this “journalist” has watched a full 12 minutes out of what he describes as a “12-DVD set.” And on that basis he draws his conclusions.

As a former newspaper reporter, then editor, then publisher, as a former magazine editor, and as one who has written scores of published book reviews, I can only say that Mr. Hurst still hasn’t pursued the story with journalistic rigor. He is careless enough to refer to Resisting the Green Dragon as a 12-DVD set when it’s a 12-part lecture series on 4 DVDs—something he’d have discovered had he had the journalistic rigor to obtain the set and view it all. (We’d have sent a free review set to him as a journalist had he asked.) And apparently he thinks a 12-minute preview is enough to go on to write a critical review of a “12-DVD set” (actually 12 lectures plus a documentary introduction adding up to nearly seven hours).

Readers of ecopolitology and LiveOak Media should read with caution if this is representative of Hurst’s journalistic standards.

For more in-depth analysis of the religious underpinnings of the environmental movement, see James Wanliss’s Resisting the Green Dragon: Dominion, Not Death (2010) and Robert Nelson’s The New Holy Wars: Economic Religion vs. Environmental Religion in Contemporary America (2009).

Meanwhile, the Cornwall Alliance will continue to bring you well-researched information carefully analyzed from the perspective of Biblical worldview, theology, and ethics, using sound science and economics, to promote simultaneously economic development for the poor and wise stewardship of God’s beautiful Earth.

Recent Significant Developments

Science & Ecology

UAH Update for January 2011: Global Temperatures in Freefall (Roy Spencer; DrRoySpencer.com)
“… although this, too, shall pass, when La Nina goes away.” For more analysis, see Chip Knappenberger’s “A Cherry-Picker’s Guide to Temperature Trends Update: Warming Crisis Not.” Gist: Slight warming falls way behind IPCC computer models’ projections, is more beneficial than harmful. It’s time to focus on more important, and solvable, problems.

Magnitude and Rate of Climate Changes (Don Easterbrook; Science and Public Policy Institute)
“… the magnitude of global warming experienced during the past century is insignificant compared to the magnitude of the profound natural climate reversals over the past 25,000 years …. If so many much more intense periods of warming occurred naturally in the past without increase in CO2, why should the mere coincidence of a small period of low magnitude warming this century be blamed on CO2?”

Economics & Energy

The Population Timebomb is a Myth (Dominic Lawson; The Independent)
The world is not being overpopulated, as many environmentalists predict.

Listening to the Shale Revolution (Holman Jenkins; The Wall Street Journal)
The quality on display here is freedom to innovate, also known as freedom to disrupt the rich and powerful who would prefer not to be disrupted.

Religion & Ethics

Lessons in Environmental Stewardship: From Yellowstone to the Nation and Beyond (John Baden; Foundation for Research on Economics and the Environment)
Dr. John Baden and the Foundation for Research on Economics and the Environment are good friends of the Cornwall Alliance. I have attended several of their conferences and found them fascinating and enlightening. We encourage other religious leaders interested in environmental ethics and policy to consider attending.

Greens Lie, Africans Die (Paul Driessen and Robert Novak; Townhall)
Falsehoods about insecticides and bed nets continue to leave a path of death and destruction among Africans left vulnerable to malaria. But reintroducing DDT would be “like putting a bed net over an entire house 24/7/365, and it protects everybody in the home instead of just one or two people who are lucky enough to have a net they can sleep under.”

Law, Regulation, & Litigation

"EPA Expands Climate Agenda to the Current Fleet of Power Plants and Refineries" –VanNess Feldman (Marlo Lewis; Globalwarming.org)
“EPA, in cahoots with the usual pro-Kyoto State attorneys general and eco-litigation groups, is engaged in an end-run around democracy. The Clean Air Act … does not even mention ‘greenhouse gases’ …. The Act as amended in 1990 [includes] a caveat instructing EPA not to jump to regulatory conclusions. That admonitory language would have no legal effect, and would have been pointless for Congress to include, if … the agency has separate authority under other provisions to ‘enact’ regulatory global warming policy.

Put Up or Shut Up on Global Warming (The Orange County Register)
It’s time for transparency, accountability, and house cleaning in tax-funded global warming research.

Politics & Debate

Queensland Floods: But At Least the "Endangered" Mary River Cod is Safe, Eh? (James Delingpole; The Telegraph)
Just as environmental activists blocked the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers from preventing Katrina’s disastrous impact on New Orleans, so they kept Australia from preventing the disastrous floods in Queensland this winter.

Another Triumph for the Greens (Jonathan Last; The Weekly Standard)
If ever there were an environmental law that needed reversal, the law limiting phosphate in dishwashing detergents is it. This article is long, but the lesson it teaches is priceless. And a better illustration of Henry Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson can hardly be imagined: “The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups.”

Meet the Critics: Alexandre Amaral de Aguiar

Landmark Documents from the Cornwall Alliance

E. Calvin Beisner, Ph.D., Founder and National Spokesman
Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation

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