{news} Fw: [Al-Awda-Media] Bill Moyer on Environment, Christain Zionists

Mon Dec 6 19:27:49 EST 2004

From: "Hassan Fouda" <hfouda at yahoo.com>
To: <al-awda-Media at yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Monday, December 06, 2004 5:16 PM> Battlefield Earth
 By Bill Moyers, AlterNet
 Posted on December 4, 2004, Printed on December 6, 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 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 artic 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 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 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 the 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 artic 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
 Exxon Mobile 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 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 "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.