[Mb-civic] Bill Moyers: Battlefield Earth

[ean at sbcglobal.net]

http://www.alternet.org/envirohealth/20666/


Battlefield Earth
By Bill Moyers, AlterNet
Posted on December 8, 2004

Recently 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 hard 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 
ExxonMobil 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 not 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 our 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. 

© 2004 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/20666/ 

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Action is the antidote to despair.  ----Joan Baez
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