Climate Change -- More than just rhetoric
"How a nation treats its animals is how a nation deserves to be treated," Gandhi

Some time ago, I was riding in the car with my dad. I looked out the passenger side window and noticed a heavily wooded area had been cleared for development. Another franchised retail outfit was set to be built. This was the last thing this area needed.

"Oh, great. Let's clear more trees for another business we don't need."

"Trees don't grow jobs," he sarcastically replied.

Point well taken. However, there's a flipside to that coin. I'm encouraged when businesses make conscientious efforts to plant trees around its structures. This has a great impact on reducing energy costs. There's another broader issue to this though and it has to do with dominionism. Since the majority of our country still identifies themselves as Christians, I feel dominionism has been perverted over the years.

A parent sends his or her child to school. How do you think this parent wants the child returned? Obviously, you want the child to be returned in the same condition or better than before. This same concept should be applied to nature. What we take away from nature should be returned and restored in as good or better shape than before. This is where the majority of Evangelicals and right-wing chatter boxes love to blame a boogeyman like Al Gore.

I remember being subjected to the numb and dumb talking heads like Neal Boortz and Rush Limbaugh at a few different workplaces. Environmentalism drives them nuts. Take the Alaskan National Wildlife Arctic Refuge (ANWAR) and drilling oil there as an example. They cherry pick this area and say things like, "The environmental wackos are wanting to stop our oil shortages by protecting a bunch of caribou." First and foremost, this argument is literally meaningless. There's much more diverse wildlife there than caribou. Second, studies have shown it would take 50 years in this area to provide us with what we receive on average in one year. Finally, oil drilling is a public health hazard to all wildlife, including us.

I forgive these narrow-minded views to just tear everything down for our own petty interests. Once again, this all stems back to the Reagan era when the Religious Right became empowered and have completely decimated the Separation of Church and State that Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Benjamin Franklin, and Roger Williams warned us about; you know, the Founding Fathers. We are and always have been meant to be a secular nation.

The process for Evangelicals who do believe in environmentalism and influencing their fellow believers is a slow, gradual one. It's encouraging to see more and more turn from mocking climate change as a hoax to a crisis needed to be taken seriously. Here's an alarming article by CNN:

http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/06/10/climate.change.refugees/index.html