Note: I know this is a very long article, and the opinions may be
controversial. But I believe it is essential reading for anyone who
cares about our world. I hope you will take the time to read it.
Maureen Koplow

Published on Monday, December 6, 2004 by CommonDreams.org
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 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 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.

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 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 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; of Thomas,
age 10; of 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 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 '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.

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http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1206-10.htm

Posted on SHARE Yahoo group Dec. 19, 2004