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Environmentalism

By Dara Macdonald - posted Tuesday, 27 July 2021


It is no accident that this movement looks and sounds like a religion, to have it cut through today it must do. People are lacking meaning and community and that is something that those that want to battle the ‘culture wars’ ought to understand is that the appeal of joining something like ER goes beyond mere political interest. You gain a community and have the feeling of participating in something that has a higher purpose. 

The problem is that ER’s extremely constrained religious vision spills out into politics in ways that look like they rhyme with history but go far beyond. 

ER and the Unconstrained Political Vision of the Green New Deal 

The Green New Deal is the policy that is coming from extreme concern about climate change, and, unlike its religious roots, could not be more unconstrained. This highly constrained religious vision of ER giving rise to a highly unconstrained political vision is no accident. If the goal is to arrest mass extinction and doom everything is on the table. Why wouldn’t it be? 

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The measures that were taken in response to COVID-19 were already extreme. Locking down entire populations with stay-at-home orders, shutting business, curbing all manner of civil liberties. If we are willing and even applaud governments for taking these measures for a comparatively minor threat compared to mass extinction, what will the policy response be if the entire planet is on the line?

Enter the “Green New Deal '' a policy that is designed to rhyme with history by evoking FDR's New Deal, his policy response to the Great Depression. 

There are many iterations or rather competing ideas of what a ‘Green New Deal’ should incorporate and each country's proposers have adopted slightly different scope and language (in Australia it is the ‘Green Plan’) but generally there is a convergence on the idea that the economic system should be rearranged in service of preventing catastrophic climate change.

The Green New Deal Group in the UK makes it clear in their opening statement that the ideas pushing for such a radical policy are the kind that spells catastrophe and doom:

The global economy faces multiple, linked crises. It is a combination of accelerating climate breakdown driven by fossil fuel use, corrosive inequality, and debt-fuelled over-consumption by a global minority pushing us beyond planetary ecological boundaries. These overlapping factors threaten to develop into a perfect storm making social collapse highly likely. To help prevent this from happening, and to lay the foundations of the economic systems of the future, we need a Green New Deal.

Modern environmentalism and its church, ER, are the most extreme version of a constrained secular religion, and its policy fallout, being an extreme version of an unconstrained political vision. But this is not the only example that can be drawn on. Many protest movements today have a similar line - such as anti-racism.

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This article was first published at The Conservative Vagabond.



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About the Author

Dara Macdonald writes at The Conservative Vagabond.

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