Polluters will have to answer to God, not just government, says Richard Cizik. Vice president of governmental affairs for the National Association of Evangelicals, Cizik is a pro-Bush Bible-brandishing reverend zealously opposed to abortion, gay marriage and embryonic stem-cell research. He is also on a mission to convert tens of millions of Americans to the cause of conservation, using a right-to-life framework. Cizik has been crisscrossing the United States in recent months, spreading the doctrine of "creation care" to evangelical Christians.Verbum Ipsum cites the same story and comments a bit on it, feeling uneasy about religionizing everything.Citing the Bible, Cizik says "it is sinfully wrong - it is a tragedy of enormous proportions - to destroy, degrade, or despoil the earth." And he maintains that subscribing to the "creation care" agenda does not mean people "have to become liberal weirdoes."
One thing I've spent a lot of time studying and teaching is environmental ethics and policy. I think -- such as my colleagues the ecological economist Herman Daly and the environmental ethicist Mark Sagoff -- that it really truly is fundamentally a religious issue. Yes, there are very good instrumentalist reasons for conserving the natural environment, trying to save the human species from its own destruction, having obligations to future generations, and so on. But when it comes to the question of how we value the natural environment in terms other than human self-interest, the question is a very deep and intricate one fundamentally based in religion-like beliefs about nature. See my earlier post about this here. It wasn't only a personal obsession when John Muir called Yosemite his "cathedral."
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