Tuesday, February 05, 2008

GreenBiz | News Center | Columns

I complained recently about how climate science has turned into something else. This recent article, trying to figure out why everything from childbirth to gender differences are measured in terms of their impact on the environment, says it well: "Climate change science and policy is rapidly becoming carbon fundamentalism, an over-simplistic but comprehensive structure of moral valuation that can be applied to virtually any individual or institution." What's disturbing about this 'structure of moral valuation' is not just the way it has become fundamentalist and oversimplified. It is also the morality itself. Despite its own claims to the contrary, it is clear that environmentalism's ultimate object of concern is nature, not human beings. That is why it leads to measuring human events - birth, movement, eating - in relation to their impact on nature, rather than nature in terms of its ability to serve human needs.

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