[Mb-civic] Battlefield Earth

Tue Dec 7 11:17:06 PST 2004

Battlefield Earth 

By Bill Moyers, AlterNet
 Posted on December 4, 2004, Printed on December 7, 2004
 http://www.alternet.org/story/20666/

This week the Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard
Medical School presented its fourth annual Global Environment Citizen Award
to Bill Moyers. In presenting the award, Meryl Streep, a member of the
Center board, said, "Through resourceful, intrepid reportage and perceptive
voices from the forward edge of the debate, Moyers has examined an
environment under siege with the aim of engaging citizens." Following is the
text of Bill Moyers' response to Ms. Streep's presentation of the award.

I accept this award on behalf of all the people behind the camera whom you
never see. And for all those scientists, advocates, activists, and just
plain citizens whose stories we have covered in reporting on how
environmental change affects our daily lives. We journalists are simply
beachcombers on the shores of other people's knowledge, other people's
experience, and other people's wisdom. We tell their stories.

The journalist who truly deserves this award is my friend, Bill McKibben. He
enjoys the most conspicuous place in my own pantheon of journalistic heroes
for his pioneer work in writing about the environment. His best seller "The
End of Nature" carried on where Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring" left off.

Writing in Mother Jones recently, Bill described how the problems we
journalists routinely cover  conventional, manageable programs like budget
shortfalls and pollution  may be about to convert to chaotic,
unpredictable, unmanageable situations. The most unmanageable of all, he
writes, could be the accelerating deterioration of the environment, creating
perils with huge momentum like the greenhouse effect that is causing the
melting of the Arctic to release so much freshwater into the North Atlantic
that even the Pentagon is growing alarmed that a weakening gulf stream could
yield abrupt and overwhelming changes, the kind of changes that could
radically alter civilizations.

That's one challenge we journalists face  how to tell such a story without
coming across as Cassandras, without turning off the people we most want to
understand what's happening, who must act on what they read and hear.

As difficult as it is, however, for journalists to fashion a readable
narrative for complex issues without depressing our readers and viewers,
there is an even harder challenge  to pierce the ideology that governs
official policy today. One of the biggest changes in politics in my lifetime
is that the delusional is no longer marginal. It has come in from the
fringe, to sit in the seat of power in the Oval Office and in Congress. For
the first time in our history, ideology and theology hold a monopoly of
power in Washington. Theology asserts propositions that cannot be proven
true; ideologues hold stoutly to a world view despite being contradicted by
what is generally accepted as reality. When ideology and theology couple,
their offspring are not always bad but they are always blind. And there is
the danger: voters and politicians alike, oblivious to the facts.

Remember James Watt, President Reagan's first secretary of the Interior? My
favorite online environmental journal, the ever-engaging Grist, reminded us
recently of how James Watt told the U.S. Congress that protecting natural
resources was unimportant in light of the imminent return of Jesus Christ.
In public testimony he said, "after the last tree is felled, Christ will
come back."

Beltway elites snickered. The press corps didn't know what he was talking
about. But James Watt was serious. So were his compatriots out across the
country. They are the people who believe the bible is literally true 
one-third of the American electorate, if a recent Gallup poll is accurate.
In this past election several million good and decent citizens went to the
polls believing in the rapture index. That's right  the rapture index.
Google it and you will find that the best-selling books in America today are
the 12 volumes of the left-behind series written by the Christian
fundamentalist and religious right warrior, Timothy LaHaye. These true
believers subscribe to a fantastical theology concocted in the 19th century
by a couple of immigrant preachers who took disparate passages from the
Bible and wove them into a narrative that has captivated the imagination of
millions of Americans.

Its outline is rather simple, if bizarre (the British writer George Monbiot
recently did a brilliant dissection of it and I am indebted to him for
adding to my own understanding): once Israel has occupied the rest of its
"biblical lands," legions of the anti-Christ will attack it, triggering a
final showdown in the valley of Armageddon. As the Jews who have not been
converted are burned, the Messiah will return for the rapture. True
believers will be lifted out of their clothes and transported to heaven,
where, seated next to the right hand of God, they will watch their political
and religious opponents suffer plagues of boils, sores, locusts, and frogs
during the several years of tribulation that follow.

I'm not making this up. Like Monbiot, I've read the literature. I've
reported on these people, following some of them from Texas to the West
Bank. They are sincere, serious and polite as they tell you they feel called
to help bring the rapture on as fulfillment of biblical prophecy. That's why
they have declared solidarity with Israel and the Jewish settlements and
backed up their support with money and volunteers. It's why the invasion of
Iraq for them was a warm-up act, predicted in the Book of Revelations where
four angels "which are bound in the great river Euphrates will be released
to slay the third part of man." A war with Islam in the Middle East is not
something to be feared but welcomed  an essential conflagration on the road
to redemption. The last time I Googled it, the rapture index stood at 144 
just one point below the critical threshold when the whole thing will blow,
the son of god will return, the righteous will enter heaven and sinners will
be condemned to eternal hellfire.

So what does this mean for public policy and the environment? Go to Grist to
read a remarkable work of reporting by the journalist, Glenn Scherer  "The
Road to Environmental Apocalypse." Read it and you will see how millions of
Christian fundamentalists may believe that environmental destruction is not
only to be disregarded but actually welcomed  even hastened  as a sign of
the coming apocalypse.

As Grist makes clear, we're not talking about a handful of fringe lawmakers
who hold or are beholden to these beliefs. Nearly half the U.S. Congress
before the recent election  231 legislators in total  more since the
election  are backed by the religious right. Forty-five senators and 186
members of the 108th congress earned 80 to 100 percent approval ratings from
the three most influential Christian right advocacy groups. They include
Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, Assistant Majority Leader Mitch
McConnell, Conference Chair Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, Policy Chair Jon
Kyl of Arizona, House Speaker Dennis Hastert, and Majority Whip Roy Blunt.
The only Democrat to score 100 percent with the Christian coalition was
Senator Zell Miller of Georgia, who recently quoted from the biblical book
of Amos on the senate floor: "the days will come, sayeth the Lord God, that
I will send a famine in the land." he seemed to be relishing the thought.

And why not? There's a constituency for it. A 2002 TIME/CNN poll found that
59 percent of Americans believe that the prophecies found in the book of
Revelations are going to come true. Nearly one-quarter think the Bible
predicted the 9/11 attacks. Drive across the country with your radio tuned
to the more than 1,600 Christian radio stations or in the motel turn some of
the 250 Christian TV stations and you can hear some of this end-time gospel.
And you will come to understand why people under the spell of such potent
prophecies cannot be expected, as Grist puts it, "to worry about the
environment. Why care about the earth when the droughts, floods, famine and
pestilence brought by ecological collapse are signs of the apocalypse
foretold in the bible? Why care about global climate change when you and
yours will be rescued in the rapture? And why care about converting from oil
to solar when the same god who performed the miracle of the loaves and
fishes can whip up a few billion barrels of light crude with a word?"

Because these people believe that until Christ does return, the lord will
provide. One of their texts is a high school history book, America's
providential history. You'll find there these words: "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." However, "[t]he
Christian knows that the potential in god is unlimited and that there is no
shortage of resources in god's earth ... 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." No wonder Karl Rove goes around the White House whistling that
militant hymn, "Onward Christian Soldiers." He turned out millions of the
foot soldiers on Nov. 2, including many who have made the apocalypse a
powerful driving force in modern American politics.

I can see in the look on your faces just how had it is for the journalist to
report a story like this with any credibility. So let me put it on a
personal level. I myself don't know how to be in this world without
expecting a confident future and getting up every morning to do what I can
to bring it about. So I have always been an optimist. Now, however, I think
of my friend on Wall Street whom I once asked: "What do you think of the
market?" "I'm optimistic," he answered. "Then why do you look so worried?"
And he answered: "Because I am not sure my optimism is justified."

I'm not, either. Once upon a time I agreed with Eric Chivian and the Center
for Health and the Global Environment that people will protect the natural
environment when they realize its importance to their health and to the
health and lives of their children. Now I am not so sure. It's not that I
don't want to believe that  it's just that I read the news and connect the
dots:

I read that the administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
has declared the election a mandate for President Bush on the environment.
This for an administration that wants to rewrite the Clean Air Act, the
Clean Water Act and the Endangered Species Act protecting rare plant and
animal species and their habitats, as well as the National Environmental
Policy Act that requires the government to judge beforehand if actions might
damage natural resources.

That wants to relax pollution limits for ozone; eliminate vehicle tailpipe
inspections; and ease pollution standards for cars, sports utility vehicles
and diesel-powered big trucks and heavy equipment.

That wants a new international audit law to allow corporations to keep
certain information about environmental problems secret from the public.

That wants to drop all its new-source review suits against polluting
coal-fired power plans and weaken consent decrees reached earlier with coal
companies.

That wants to open the Arctic [National] Wildlife Refuge to drilling and
increase drilling in Padre Island National Seashore, the longest stretch of
undeveloped barrier island in the world and the last great coastal wild land
in America.

I read the news just this week and learned how the Environmental Protection
Agency had planned to spend nine million dollars  two million of it from
the administration's friends at the American Chemistry Council  to pay poor
families to continue to use pesticides in their homes. These pesticides have
been linked to neurological damage in children, but instead of ordering an
end to their use, the government and the industry were going to offer the
families $970 each, as well as a camcorder and children's clothing, to serve
as guinea pigs for the study.

I read all this in the news.

I read the news just last night and learned that the administration's
friends at the international policy network, which is supported by Exxon
Mobile and others of like mind, have issued a new report that climate change
is "a myth, sea levels are not rising," [and] scientists who believe
catastrophe is possible are "an embarrassment."

I not only read the news but the fine print of the recent appropriations
bill passed by Congress, with the obscure (and obscene) riders attached to
it: a clause removing all endangered species protections from pesticides;
language prohibiting judicial review for a forest in Oregon; a waiver of
environmental review for grazing permits on public lands; a rider pressed by
developers to weaken protection for crucial habitats in California.

I read all this and look up at the pictures on my desk, next to the computer
 pictures of my grandchildren: Henry, age 12; of Thomas, age 10; of Nancy,
7; Jassie, 3; Sara Jane, 9 months. I see the future looking back at me from
those photographs and I say, "Father, forgive us, for we know now what we
do." And then I am stopped short by the thought: "That's not right. We do
know what we are doing. We are stealing their future. Betraying their trust.
Despoiling their world."

And I ask myself: Why? Is it because we don't care? Because we are greedy?
Because we have lost our capacity for outrage, our ability to sustain
indignation at injustice?

What has happened to out moral imagination?

On the heath Lear asks Gloucester: "How do you see the world?" And
Gloucester, who is blind, answers: "I see it feelingly.'"

I see it feelingly.

The news is not good these days. I can tell you, though, that as a
journalist I know the news is never the end of the story. The news can be
the truth that sets us free  not only to feel but to fight for the future
we want. And the will to fight is the antidote to despair, the cure for
cynicism, and the answer to those faces looking back at me from those
photographs on my desk. What we need to match the science of human health is
what the ancient Israelites called "hochma"  the science of the heart ...
the capacity to see ... to feel ... and then to act ... as if the future
depended on you.

Believe me, it does.