Sunday, November 29, 2009
Religion and environmentalism: ‘A perfect alignment’
This article on the Amish moving into Maine is pretty good. But the real religious aha moment came in this graf:
I’ll say this for the Amish: At least they don’t try to impose their religion and lifestyles on others, God bless ‘em. …
This article on the Amish moving into Maine is pretty good. But the real religious aha moment came in this graf:
In Unity, population 1,900, the Amish have found a particularly happy coincidence of interests. The town is home to Unity College, an environmental school that teaches sustainable living practices and lends an earthy quality to the culture. That a group of people with such small carbon footprints - erecting wind turbines to charge battery packs used for powering tools and lanterns, keeping food cold in summer in an insulated basement room lined with three wagonloads of ice chunks from a pond - would land here, strikes many as a perfect alignment.I say ‘religious’ because for some time I’ve believed many environmentalists have been on a quasi-religious trajectory, professing devotion to a higher being (Nature), living a monk-like existence (‘sustainable living practices’), warning of apocalyptic endings, and general moralistic finger-wagging at the rest of us. They even have quasi-inquisitions (how else to describe Bjorn Lomborg’s treatment by the Danish government?). Environmentalists are right about global warming. But that doesn’t make them right about solutions – and it’s going to require considerable pushback over the decades to get our economic and environmental policies right. …
I’ll say this for the Amish: At least they don’t try to impose their religion and lifestyles on others, God bless ‘em. …
