Devastated Old Growth Forest. Oregon.

President Ronald Reagan once reportedly quipped, "When you've seen one redwood, you've seen them all." His first Secretary of the Interior, James Watt, publicly declared to a Senate Committee that preservation of the natural world assumes a low priority if you believe, as he did, that Jesus' return is imminent and will put an end to the whole thing anyway.  George W. Bush's first Secretary of the Interior, in turn, was a protégé of Mr. Watt, and though less likely to say something so stupid so publicly, acted as if she held the same view. This is the world as object, as resource, as an economic reservoir to be exploited here and now, and not to be left for the enjoyment of future generations.  This is the environmental legacy of the current, dominant conservative ethos, which cares nothing for the conservation of the tangible world, but only for the preservation of our American mythology, the conservation of antiquated modes of imputing meaning to the world and cosmic significance to ourselves.

In passing, the conservative dominance I speak of has not been erased by the recent election of a certain more liberal U.S. President. The major strains of a culture tend not to shift so radically as to be overturned by an election, and American culture has long reflected a conservative stance, particularly in regard to the troublesome, antiquated religiosity expressed by Reagan's Interior Secretary and his ilk.

I can anticipate a certain objection from some quarters, that I overestimate the significance of religious belief as a motive for policy as opposed to simple economics and class self-interests. To that objection, I reply that it reflects a characteristic underestimate and misunderstanding of religious influence in American culture and, hence, in its policy. In academic centers on the east and west coasts, nothing is more common than the person who cannot bring himself to believe that other people really act on purely religious motives and views in defiance of economic or other interests, except perhaps in the most exceptional cases. Such a person is as ignorant of American culture writ-large and of the nature of religious faith as the fundamentalist is of science. This particular brand of ignorance also outcrops more frequently, in my experience, in the humanities than in the sciences (which might lead one to question how much understanding of humanity resides in the humanities, the so called 'human sciences' like sociology and political 'science' not excepted, and whether the fields so-classified are not more influenced by ideology than their practitioners usually care to think).

Having said this, I do not wish to dismiss the malignant influence of the economic interests so eagerly credited by those challenged in the understanding of religion. I will even go further, and place considerable blame with economists, and not merely economic motives; for economists are perhaps more guilty of self-misunderstanding than any similarly educated class in the respect alluded to above: namely, they traffic in values, in norms, in prescriptions, in "shoulds" and "oughts," almost as if they constituted a religious priesthood rather than a guild of objective scholars, and they themselves are, by and large, ignorant of this fact. It so happens that these subterranean economic value judgments tend to dovetail nicely with the religious view expounded in Genesis, which esteems the world as stage of resources created for the special interests of man, and commands man to "multiply" and fill the earth, and "subdue it."

Thus does the crass materialism of America's reigning economic theorists thrive in a culture that remains anomalously religious (for an "advanced nation"). If I may be pardoned for a crude contemporary reference, thus does Joel Osteen find a warm reception among simpletons inclined to esteem Milton Friedman or even Ayn Rand for their "worldly wisdom" while thinking themselves devotees of Jesus: traffickers in values all, and in values inimical to the real and natural world. Our values leave their imprint upon the land.