[North-NV-Greens] Fwd: USGP-INT Fw: Bill Moyer on Environment, Christian Zionists

[Paul Etxeberri]

PLEASE READ. THIS IS A MUST READ. PLEASE READ.

>
>From: "Justine McCabe" <justinemccabe at earthlink.net>
>To: "USGP International Committee" <usgp-int at gp-us.org>
>Subject: USGP-INT Fw: Bill Moyer on Environment, Christian Zionists
>Date: Mon, 6 Dec 2004 19:41:28 -0500
>
>
>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 an 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.
>
>© 2004 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
>View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/20666/
>
>
>
>
>
>
>=====
>Hassan Fouda
>
>
>
>---
>| Sent via usgp-int
>| To unsubscribe, please send a message to usgp-int-request at gp-us.org
>| with ONLY unsubscribe in the message
>---


-- 
Paul Etxeberri

"Forests precede civilizations and deserts follow"   ---Chateaubriand