The obvious reasons behind Republican anti-environmentalism have been often stated but deserve review: George Bush and Dick Cheney come from old-line industry and possess an old-line industrial worldview. They are oilmen who believe in the efficiency of the marketplace, an efficiency that for them is synonymous with virtue. They are unreconstructed capitalists -- that's their operating system, as surely as Windows drives most personal computers.
Such marketplace-minded Republicans tend to label environmentalists as either frivolous tree-huggers or dangerous monkey-wrenching eco-terrorists. They dismiss good environmental science as the doomsaying of the loony left. Almost by definition, they lack an understanding of such concepts as sustainability, carrying capacity, biodiversity, or webs of interdependence, all crucial ideas for ecologists.
Even if Bush and his allies were to understand these principles, economic and political factors are a heavy counterweight. Republicans, for example, see lower oil prices as good for the economy, and a strong economy as improving chances for reelection. For that reason, low gas prices in the short term become a primary public-policy goal above long-term health and environmental considerations.
And of course, promoting any policies that go against immediate economic goals would pit the administration against strong corporate interests. The American auto industry, for example, remains a powerful economic engine in many states; if SUV sales are keeping domestic automakers afloat, the automakers will resist spending millions to impose tough new fuel-efficiency standards on SUVs.
Hence the power of corporate campaign contributions. Earthjustice, a nonprofit public-interest law group, reports that in the 2000 campaign, Bush-Cheney and the Republican National Committee received $44 million in contributions from the fossil-fuel, chemical, timber and mining industries -- more than was offered by these interests to all federal Democratic candidates and party committees combined. "The Bush administration's anti-environmental agenda doesn't just appear to be made-to-order for polluting and extractive industry interests," said Earthjustice. "It is." In 2002, the bond between polluters, extractors and Republicans persisted: GOP candidates received $14.6 million from oil and gas companies, for example, while Democrats got just $3.7 million, says the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics.
However, beyond all these more obvious anti-environmental motivations lies a more deep-seated cause, one tougher for the secular mind to grasp -- especially for those who trust in unbiased science as a guiding principle of environmental policy. Difficult as it may be to believe, many of the right-wing conservatives who have great influence in the Bush administration and now in Congress are governed by a higher power.
In his book "The Carbon Wars," Greenpeace activist Jeremy Leggett tells how he stumbled upon this otherworldly agenda. During Kyoto Protocol climate change negotiations, Leggett candidly asks Ford Motor Co. executive John Schiller how opponents of the pact could believe there is no problem with "a world of a billion cars intent on burning all the oil and gas available on the planet." The executive asserts first that scientists get it wrong when they say fossil fuels have been sequestered underground for eons. The earth, he says, is just 10,000 years old -- not 4.5 billion years old, the age widely accepted by scientists.
Then Schiller drops the bomb: "You know, the more I look, the more it is just as it says in the Bible." The Book of Daniel, he tells Leggett, predicts that increased earthly devastation will mark the End Time and return of Christ. Paradoxically, Leggett notes, many fundamentalists see dying coral reefs, melting ice caps and other environmental destruction not as an urgent call to action but as God's will. Within the religious right worldview, the wreck of the earth is Good News!
Some true believers, interpreting biblical prophecy, are sure they will be saved from the horrific destruction brought by ecosystem collapse. They'll be raptured: rescued from earth by God, who will then rain down seven ghastly years of misery on unbelieving humanity. During this tribulation, a powerful ruler led by Satan and called the antichrist will rule the world. Then Jesus will come in glory to defeat Satan's forces at the battle of Armageddon. His return marks the Millennium, when the Lord restores the earth to its green pristine condition, and the faithful enjoy a thousand years of peace and prosperity.
U.S. fundamentalists number in the tens of millions, but not all of them believe literally in this apocalyptic vision, warns Joan Bokaer, an expert on the religious right, formerly of the Center for Religion, Ethics and Social Policy at Cornell University. That would be an oversimplification, she says. Some, no doubt, don't even dwell on environmental issues. But many do hold ideas antithetical to the environment.
One powerful fringe group, the Reconstructionists, don't speak of the End Time at all, Bokaer notes. They put the onus for the Lord's return not in the hands of biblical prophecy, but in their own political activism. Reconstructionists say Christ will only return when a righteous nation acts to purge unrepentant sinners and applies biblical law to its populace. They want to spread the Gospel in a political context, making the Bible the foundation of U.S. jurisprudence. That includes an end to environmental regulation.
Reconstructionists believe the Lord will provide, and their view is laid out in "America's Providential History," a religious-right high school history textbook: "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," write authors Mark Beliles and Stephen McDowell. "In contrast, the Christian knows that the potential in God is unlimited and that there is no shortage of resources in God's Earth. The resources are waiting to be tapped."
In another passage, the writers explain: "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." Fossil fuels and forests are like the loaves and fishes, Reconstructionists say, miraculously multiplying for true believers.
Such misinformed viewpoints would be of little import except that, in the 1980s, they began permeating the Republican Party. That's when Republican strategists, eager to broaden the party's narrow base of wealthy corporate supporters, partnered with religious right leaders like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson who agreed to politicize their followers and bring them into the GOP, according to Bokaer.
Working through fundamentalist, Pentecostal and charismatic churches, the Christian Coalition has promoted right-wing Republican candidates by mailing voter guides at election time -- 30 million in 1994; another 45 million in 1996; and 70 million in 2000 to support candidate Bush, reported the watchdog group People for the American Way.
As it turns out, politicians who ally themselves with the religious right are also rabidly anti-environmental. Those who score high with the Christian Coalition almost invariably score low with the League of Conservation Voters.
According to the Washington-based People United for Separation of Church and State, 178 House members in the last Congress allied themselves with the religious right, earning barely a 15 percent average approval rating with the League of Conservation Voters. In the 108th Congress, Republican leadership hails almost exclusively from the religious right, scoring a perfect 100 percent with the Christian Coalition, but getting barely a 4 percent average approval rating from the conservation group.
Among them are Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist and Assistant Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert, and Majority Whip Roy Blunt. These leaders seem ready to aggressively move the religious right agenda forward: DeLay has bluntly said that the Almighty is using him to promote "a biblical worldview" in American politics, according to Paul Krugman in the New York Times.
Also among those holding an extreme fundamentalist perspective is Inhofe, reports Americans United for Separation of Church and State. "When we win this revolution in November, you'll be doing the Lord's work, and He will richly bless you for it!" Inhofe declared at the Christian Coalition's Road to Victory Conference last October.
And George W. Bush? He and Attorney General John Ashcroft make no secret of being born again. According to the Nation, Bush's "walk with Jesus" began in 1985 when Billy Graham visited him in Kennebunkport, Maine. While Graham doesn't support the politicizing of Christianity, one has to wonder how Bush's conversion (whether real or a ploy) has helped him justify anti-environmental positions to himself and others.
The Republican Party platform in Bush's home state warns of what to expect from a federal government guided by religious-right radicalism. "The Republican Party of Texas reaffirms the United States of America as a Christian Nation," the platform says, and seeks to nullify the separation between church and state. It would abolish the Environmental Protection Agency, Department of Energy and Department of Education. It dismisses global warming as "myth." And it promotes public school education "based upon biblical principles," not upon secular humanism, which teaches Darwinian evolution theory and a scientific worldview. If the Texas Republican Party platform became the law of the land, America would become a very different place.
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