Due to a quirk in the calendar, we get a three-for-one Holy Week this week. Christians celebrate Good Friday and Easter. Jews celebrate Passover, and everyone else (including some Christians and Jews) can celebrate “Earth Week.”

Earth Week is an expansion of Earth Day, which Wikipedia describes as “is a day that is intended to inspire awareness and appreciation for the Earth’s natural environment.”

Appreciating the Earth’s natural environment is something I do whenever I go snowboarding, mountain biking, or walking through the woods near the North Shore. And I’m all for cleaning up the earth.

But, says Joel  Garreau, “For some individuals and societies, the role of religion seems increasingly to be filled by environmentalism.”*

“Oh come on!,” you may be thinking. Sociologists say you can define a religion in one of two ways: A system of belief about a god, or a set of beliefs that organize your life. The web portal Atheism.About.Com says, “if your belief system plays some particular role either in your social life, in your society, or in your psychological life, then it is a religion.” And for some people, environmentalism fills the bill.

Garreau’s long essay explains how this works out in environmentalism, so I’ll add just one point. Religious adherents assume various obligations as part of their belief system: The Jew who strictly observes Passover cleanses his house of leaven. The Christian observes communion. The Muslim makes a journey to Mecca.

But what about the person who embraces environmentalism as religion? Oh, it’s easy enough to buy a fuel-efficient car, but if you want to have the most impact on the environment, you’ve got to restrict the activities of other people. Hence, we have automobile manufacturers making fuel efficient cars not in response to consumer demand but to political demands, housing and transportation policies that attempt to “control sprawl,” CAFE rules, and the like, all of which result in lower incomes and fewer net jobs.

It’s one thing for a person to take personal action to “save the planet,” but as the examples above demonstrate, environmentalism today is about forcing other people to conform to the dictates of a few.

* Garreau says that “no matter its empirical basis, environmentalism is progressively taking the social form of a religion and fulfilling some of the individual needs associated with religion, with major political and policy implications.” He also assembles some comments from others that are worth considering. Here they are:

– “Since the roots of our trouble are so largely religious, the remedy must also be essentially religious.” — Lynn Townsend White, Jr. White, a historian, had blamed Christianity for the environmental problems he saw when he wrote, “The Historical roots of Our Ecologic Crisis.”

– The environmental movement “is ‘quasi-religious in character. … It generates its own set of moral values.'” — Luis E. Lugo, director of the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.

– Environmentalism is “a worldwide secure religion.” It has “replaced socialism as the leading secular religion.” — Freeman Dyson, New York Review of Books. – “Of environmentalism increasingly being faith-based, [James] Lovelock says, ‘I would agree with you wholeheartedly. I look at humans as probably having an evolutionary desire to have ideology, to justify their actions. Green thinking is like Christian or Muslim religions – it’s another ideology.'” [Lovelock is the author of the “Gai Hypothesis.”]

– “The authority of science is relied on not for factual enlightenment but as ideological foundation for authoritarian policy.” — Arizona State University professor of environmental engineering, ethics, and law.

First published by the Detroit News: http://apps.detnews.com/apps/blogs/watercooler/index.php?blogid=2136