ABSTRACT
Many environmental activists want more than a clean environment. Their commitment to conservation is almost religious, and their goals are often far-reaching: to transform what they consider to be a sick, greedy, and wasteful consumer society. Politics has infected environmental policymaking in two different ways. The first is to create real environmental problems. The second is to generate unfounded hysteria. For all of the enthusiasm of environmentalists for government programs, the government has proved to be a remarkably poor steward of the resources. The environment has become as much a spiritual as a political issue for even many people of mainstream religious faiths. Some environmentalists go far further, turning ecology into a separate religion by mixing traditional pantheism and more modern forms of earth worship. While a doctrinal environmentalist might be happy with the policy result for religious or philosophical reasons, it is foolish for the rest of us to waste resources on non-problems and on unnecessarily inefficient clean-up strategies.
