“KILL THE GREEN DRAGON”

It’s a sad thought for Easter weekend, what with the bunnies and eggs and all, but there’s now a fundamentalist Christian movement – funded by the oil barons – dedicated to countering all environmental protections. They call it “killing the green dragon” and appear to believe that their god fully sanctions the corporate and systematic rape of the planet.

“Buoyed by corporate finances and a radical ‘dominion theology,’ the Religious Right has become more aggressive and fanatical in its defense of corporations and denial of climate science. Trying to combat the increasing number of evangelical Christians who are part of the “creation care” movement that is calling for a greater commitment to combat climate change, the Religious Right is working to misrepresent the environmental movement as dangerously deceitful, harmful to the poor and destructive to Christianity. In the last decade, as evangelical Christian leaders increasingly became involved in conservation, “creation care”and taking action against global climate change, the alarms went up in corporate America that many traditional members of the conservative coalition were becoming advocates for environmental protection. To counter the rise of the faith-based environmentalist Evangelical Climate Initiative, the Interfaith Stewardship Alliance emerged. The ISA, propped up by business interests including Exxon Mobile, has peddled misleading and false claims to make the case that climate change is a myth. In 2007, the ISA was renamed the Cornwall Alliance and became more belligerent and zealous in its anti-environmental activities. The Cornwall Alliance is led by E. Calvin Beisner, who believes that since God granted humans “dominion” over the earth, humans have a right to exploit all natural resources. As Randall Balmer writes in Thy Kingdom Come, Beisner “asserts that God has placed all of nature at the disposal of humanity.” Balmer quotes Beisner’s own summary of his dominion theology: “All of our acquisitive activities should be undertaken with the purpose of extending godly rule, or dominion.” As Balmer notes, “the combination of dominion theology from the Religious Right and the wise use ideology of corporate and business interests has created a powerful coalition to oppose environmental protection.” (Click here for more)

And while we’re on the subject of the environment, check out these videos of robots inside the Fukushima reators that were sent to us by the splendid Yukiko in Tokyo.

The secret word is Rancid