[lit-ideas] Bill Moyers on the environment
- From: "Andreas Ramos" <andreas@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "Lit-Ideas" <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 13 Feb 2005 00:06:27 -0800
On Receiving Harvard Medical School's Global Environment Citizen Award
by Bill Moyers
Last 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. " 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 formal 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, "the
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 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 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 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 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."
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