There is nothing wrong with wanting clean air and clean water. The environmental movement has moved well beyond those reasonable goals to become a religion that demands irrational behavior to please unnamed, but clearly assumed, gods of nature. It’s time to sort out the unfounded religious beliefs and recognize them for what they are. If a traditional religion tried to impose their religious practices upon us, we would rebel in outrage, but it seems that eco-religion has no bounds in forcing us to bow to their gods.

What is a religion? Wikipedia provides the classic academic definition¹: “A religion is a set of conducts resulted from tenets (or a belief system) about the ultimate power.” It goes on to explain that, “It is generally expressed as prayers, rituals, or other practices, often centered upon specific supernatural and moral claims about reality (the cosmos, and human nature) which may yield a set of religious laws.” Religion causes the believer to do something, the set of conducts as a result of the religious tenets or belief system. The beliefs are related to ultimate power.

Why ultimate power rather than God or gods? That is because not all religions include gods. Buddhism has a number of variations, of which some do not require gods. The Buddha advised that it was not profitable to consider the question of whether or not God exists. Jainism is another godless religion. The Jains are a large sect in India known for their belief that no living creature, not even insects, should be harmed. Their beliefs derive from mystical sages, not gods.

Pantheism is perhaps most relevant to the environmental movement. Pantheism merges the concept of nature with God. Eco-religion does not explicitly call out nature as God, but the belief system provides that inescapable connection.

Here is partial list of the irrational beliefs that define the environmental movement. Followers of the movement believe:

1. That smoking has substantial monetary health-care costs. Four independent studies have shown that smokers die young, saving as much in later health care costs as their acute illness from smoking costs. Yet, legislation has been enacted to recover non-existent costs.²

2. That there can be no standard for the cleanliness of air by which it can be said to be safe for non-smokers to breathe. California bans cigar bars even if clean room technology is used to make the air cleaner than outdoors.

3. That there is an absolute virtue in saving water, even when there is no water shortage. We must always have toilets that don’t flush and showers that dribble, because doing so is “good for the environment.”

4. That anyone who does not believe in human-caused global warming is not just wrong, but is by denial a sinner and ought to be treated as a sinner. For example, MIT’s Alfred P. Sloan professor of meteorology Richard Lindzen, an expert on convection models in the atmosphere, need not be taken seriously because he has reached the wrong conclusions. The science is subordinate to honoring eco-faith. ³

5. That development of coal-to-oil conversion, drilling offshore and in ANWR, and of oil shale resources in the United states must be prohibited because bringing forth domestic carbon is sinful, whereas importing carbon is less sinful and should be permitted.

6. That morality demands that each person sort their garbage. For example, glass bottles must be carefully sorted at significant time and expense, even though they are ultimately buried. It is done as a symbolic act in deference to eco-gods.

7. That it is improper and immoral to mention that if a 100 megawatts of solar or wind power is brought on line, and equal amount of conventional power must be built at the same time, because the sun shines less than half the time and the wind blows about a third of the time. Counting the extra expense is even more immoral than talking about it.

8. That mass transit should be implemented even if it uses more energy and costs more money than automobiles.

9. That lights should always be shut off in unused rooms, even in winter when the heat from the lighting is exactly compensated by the room heater running less, so there is no energy savings. Mentioning this obvious fact is deemed sinful.

10. That it should be illegal to build flood gates to save the city of New Orleans, because when for the brief period the gates are closed, it would interfere with the breeding habits of a small fish.

11. That irradiated food is dangerous. Irradiation is done with electron beams and can completely sterilize eggs, hamburger, and spinach. If widely used it would prevent e coli outbreaks that sicken and kill people. There is no residual radiation.

12. That Western-designed nuclear power plants can explode or cause a Chernobyl-type radiation disaster. It is physical impossibility for a nuclear explosion to occur from a power plant. Chernobyl was a disaster because the graphite in the reactor caught fire and spread radiation in the smoke. Western power plants do not use graphite or anything else than burns, the reactors have containment vessels, and they shut down if coolant is lost.

13. That nuclear waste cannot be safely stored and must be stored for tens of thousands of years. In Europe and Japan, waste is converted to a glass and stored on site. The US DOE designed a reprocessing plant to convert the long-lived radioisotopes to short-lived ones, but Congress has not funded construction of the plant.

14. That DDT is dangerous to humans. It is not a threat to humans, only to birds. Banning DDT in Africa cost millions of lives from increased malaria epidemics. DDT is now being reintroduced. Careful spraying minimizes the impact on bird life.

15. That genetically engineered food is dangerous. The dramatically improved crop yields keep the human population of the world alive, and not a single case of harm caused by genetically engineered food has ever been discovered. However, the belief is that it sould all be banned.

Of course, not all followers believe every tenet of the religion, just as not every Catholic is opposed to abortion. The pattern is nonetheless clear.

If a traditional religion attempted to impose its irrational religious beliefs upon the public, it would be rejected as an outrage. Suppose some branch of Christianity declared that as a matter of public policy we should have toilets that don’t flush or that glass bottles should be sorted for separate burial — for the pleasure of God. The public would rebel at the imposition. However, the ecology movement is embraced so thoroughly that mandates having no purpose other than pleasing the eco-gods are accepted as ordinary.

The ecology movement should be recognized for what it is, a religion. Recognizing Christianity as a religion does nothing to diminish the value of “love thy neighbor.” Recognizing the environmental movement as a religion does nothing to dimish the goal of having clean air and water. What recognizing a religion does is help us to critically distinguish symbolic acts of faith from rational acts that should govern public policy. We should defend the right of individuals to take cold showers and bury their glass bottles separately, just as we ought to defend the individual acts of faith of other religions. However, we should not have a government-enforced state religion.

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1. Religion, Wikipedia

2.Barendregt, Jan J., et al, The Health Care Costs of Smoking, New England Journal of Medicine 1997

3. Bream, Alex, MIT’s inconvenient scientist, Boston Globe 2006