Echoes in Eternity

As you already know by my past posts here and here regarding "global warming," I am not loath to express my disdain for this current fad. In that vein, Mark Steyn has written another great column this week; once again taking the "climate change" craze and tearing it asunder.

The aphorism usually attributed to Chesterton seems pertinent here: once man has ceased to believe in God, he'll believe in anything. Most of the post-Christian West seems to have decided that, if the here and now is all there is, then we have to keep the here and now right here and exactly as it is now for all time. Environmentalism is, in that sense, the apotheosis of our present-tense culture. It is, of course, anti-nature. Far from "honouring your mother" (as the Gaia bumper stickers commend), it explicitly dishonours her: it assumes she is not a living evolving entity but exists in a fixed state whose condition is determined by man--or, at any rate, wicked capitalist Anglo-American man.