Environmentalism

Extinction Rebellion, The Church of Environmentalism

Extinction Rebellion (ER) is the organisation that gives effect to the doctrine of environmentalism. 

The vision of ER is probably the most obvious version of a highly constrained secular religion. 

The Malthusian roots of the environmentalist movement have been well documented. Malthus was a promulgator of a highly constrained vision of humanity. He believed that mankind was irredeemably flawed and no law can curb the vileness of human nature:

And yet in so short a period as fifty years, violence, oppression, falsehood, misery, every hateful vice and every form of distress, which degrade and sadden the present state of society, seem to have been generated by the most imperious circumstances, by laws inherent in the nature of man, and absolutely independent of all human regulations.

Modern environmentalism tends to see humans as a scourge on the planet as parodied by this attendee at a Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez town hall event who stood up and said “we need to eat the babies” to tackle climate change.

ER, like Malthus, believes that law and science have both failed to curb global warming so we are all going to die in 12 years:

Life on Earth is in crisis. Our climate is changing faster than scientists predicted and the stakes are high. Biodiversity loss. Crop failure. Social and ecological collapse. Mass extinction. We are running out of time, and our governments have failed to act.

This is why it goes beyond a constrained political vision. It doesn’t just say that we need to do everything to restrain human nature because it is so flawed, it speaks of complete annihilation and doom. This extreme vision of climate change goes well beyond what the IPCC predicted as the worst-case scenario. 

Whereas Malthus was merely intellectualising, ER has whole communities and codes of conduct to act out their belief in doom. 

ER claims to have groups in 75 countries where people can get in contact with each other. ER says:

Our local and national groups are the core of Extinction Rebellion.

Likewise joining ER is a 3 step process where you sign up to their newsletter, join their meetups and finally undergo training or “train up” so that you can be part of coordinated mass civil disobedience.