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This week the Center for Health and 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.'
Here is the text of his 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 arctic 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 Revelation 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 US 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.
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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 Revelation 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 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 US 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 plants and weaken consent decrees reached earlier
with coal companies.
- That wants to open the arctic 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 ExxonMobil 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 not 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.
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