[extropy-chat] Bill Moyers' Comments - Global Environment Citizen Award

[Natasha Vita-More]

>This is a chilling speech, worth reading, and in my judgment, well worth 
>passing on.  Unfortunately, it will only be heeded by those of us who are 
>not "believers."  The ones who need to understand it, won't...
>
>Donald R Emery PhD
>
>
>On Receiving Harvard Medical School's Global Environment Citizen Award
>
>by Bill Moyers
>
>On Wednesday, December 1, 2004, 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." Here is the text of his 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 
>bestseller 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 melt 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 journalist, 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 twelve 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 Revelation 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. 
>(<?/bigger><?/color><?/fontfamily>http://www.raptureready.com/rap2.html)<?fontfamily><?param 
>Arial><?color><?param 0000,0000,0000><?bigger>
>
>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 Revelation 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 November 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 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 - $2 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, 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; Thomas, age 10; 
>Nancy, 7; Jassie, 3; Sara Jane, nine 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 'hocma' - 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.

Natasha Vita-More
http://www.natasha.cc
[_______________________________________________
President, Extropy Institute http://www.extropy.org
[_____________________________________________________
Founder, Transhumanist Arts & Culture http://www.transhumanist.biz
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