Environmentalism and Economics as Religion
| Author | G. Tracy Mehan III |
| Position | Principal with The Cadmus Group, Inc., an environmental consulting firm. He is also an Adjunct Professor at George Mason University School of Law |
| Pages | 6-7 |
Page 6 ❧ THE ENVIRONMENTAL FORUM Copyright © 2011, Environmental Law Institute®, Washington, D.C. www.eli.org.
Reprinted by permission from The Environmental Forum®, Sept./Oct. 2011
Who among us has
not, in a whimsical
or polemical mo-
ment, deployed reli-
gious metaphors to
criticize or belittle a professional or
ideological adversary who does not
quite see things the way one might
wish? at economist at the Office of
Management and Budget genuflects
only at the altar of efficiency and net
social benefit, notwithstanding clear
statutory directives to the contrary.
A colleague at the office worships
the job to the exclusion of family
and friends. And there is the politi-
cian who is overly devoted
to the catechism of (fill in
the blank) labor, business,
feminism, or the Second
Amendment.
In more sober moments,
we admit that these verbal
ripostes are not to be taken
literally, more products of a
wicked sense of humor than
anything else.
Such is not the case with
Robert H. Nelson’s book,
e New Holy Wars: Eco-
nomic Religion vs. Environ-
mental Religion in Contem-
porary America, in which he aims to
deconstruct modern economics and
the environmental movement, pur-
porting to reveal them as literal re-
ligions. ese are attenuated Protes-
tant sects, “Calvinism minus God,”
complete with a Creation story, Gar-
den of Eden, the Fall, and a path to
Salvation.
Nelson has also written a previous
book on economics and its religious
role, much of which he incorporates
into this volume. In his new book
he describes a war, “progress” versus
nature, between these two religions
and questions their intellectual and
constitutional legitimacy in the pub-
lic square.
Nelson, a former columnist for
Forbes and for many years an econ-
omist at the Department of the In-
terior, is now a professor of public
policy at the University of Maryland.
His mode of analysis is one of “secu-
lar theology,” which does not require
God or even a transcendent reality to
qualify a way of thinking or behav-
ing as “religious.” A religion may be
spiritual without being divine. e
person with a secular religious orien-
tation relies on it as means of appre-
hending, perceiving, or understand-
ing the world, its meaning and his or
her relationship to it.
us, Marxism, Communism,
Nazism, Freudianism, Darwinism,
secular humanism, and Nelson’s
personal faith, libertarianism, are all
religions, along with economics and
environmentalism.
Human beings do require some
means of coming to terms with all
that life has to offer — the good, the
bad and the ugly, not least of which
is the fear of non-existence. us,
absent, say, the God of Abraham,
Isaac, and Jacob, people will look for
another over-arching framework to
ground their lives in some kind of
meaning. e psychiatrist and Ho-
locaust survivor Victor Frankl called
this “logotherapy.” Results will vary.
Viewing the 2005 documentary
film, Grizzly Man, by German di-
rector Werner Herzog, calls to mind
G. K. Chesterton’s famous line, ex-
pressed by his literary sleuth, Father
Brown, in e Oracle of the Dog
(1923): “It’s the first effect of not
believing in God that you lose your
common sense and can’t see things as
they are.”
e film focuses on Timothy
Treadwell, who spent 13 summers
observing and videotaping a hundred
hours of his close, too close, contact
with the mighty grizzly bears of Alas-
ka — up to and including his death,
and that of his girl friend, at the paw
of one of these towering predators in
their tent one rainy after-
noon.
Treadwell’s self-recorded
video footage combines out-
standing wildlife shots with
self-absorbed soliloquies on
his extreme, dysfunctional
love and affection for the
bears, an obsessive anthro-
pomorphism really. “He was
treating them like people in
bear costumes,” said a pilot
who found their remains.
Treadwell saw the bears as
his salvation from his for-
mer alcohol abuse and the
void in his life. He made them his
vocation.
In one manic scene, Treadwell
vents his rage at a nonexistent, or at
least an unresponsive, God for fail-
ing to deliver rain during a drought
which is hindering the migration of
salmon, an essential food source for
the bears. He excoriates Christian-
ity, Islam, and Hinduism in one long
rant.
e irony of Treadwell’s vocation
to the bears is that he contributed
nothing to their survival. Herzog
makes it clear that the Alaska popula-
The New Holy Wars:
Economic Religion vs.
Environmental Religion in
Contemporary America.
Robert H. Nelson, The
Pennsylvania State
University Press; 388
pages; $24.95 (paper).
Grizzly Man (2005), a
documentary lm. Werner
Herzog, director.
IN THE LITERATURE
Environmentalism and Economics as Religion
By G. Tracy Mehan III
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