The summer of 2007 was nearly intolerable here in Northern Illinois.  Except for a glorious week in July when the sun, shining bright in the clear sky, never warmed our city to above 80 degrees, the days were an unpleasant mix of heat and humidity, punctuated by a few cool stretches drowned in torrential rains and the rising waters of rivers three feet above flood stage.  Rockford was so hot and muggy that trips to Charleston, Baton Rouge, and the Southwest provided my only relief.  Former Vice President Gore and his legion of disciples have the inevitable answer: global warming.  According to friends (and the rather less reliable evidence of Weather.com), France during the same period was experiencing one of the coldest summers in living memory.  The explanation for some extreme Greens—and for anyone who saw the movie The Day After Tomorrow—is the same man-made phenomenon, global warming.

Perhaps the Greens are right on both counts.  I know about as much of climatology and meteorology as I know of French literary theory, but the same can be said of the former Vice President and most environmental activists.  The other side, naturally, points out the sloppy reasoning and bad science of the Greens, but, with a few notable exceptions, few of the opponents of the global-warming theory know any more science than Al Gore, and that is saying a great deal.  Mr. Limbaugh, who is better informed than most conservatives, simply cannot bring himself to admit that man is capable, in this new millennium, of poisoning the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the food we eat, much less of inducing a climate change.

As for me, I simply do not know, and, more to the point, I can probably never know enough to make an informed judgment.  A man might spend 20 years reading reports from the Sierra Club and The Mysterious Climate Project and know little more than the positions each side claims to believe in.  Que sais-je?  If the polar icecaps are truly melting, stranding all those sweet and cuddly polar bears, I can only say, with Louis XV, “Après moi le déluge.”

The debate, we are told repeatedly by the wise and scientifically educated gentlemen of the press, is over.  Global warming is a reality.  The management of Enterprise Rent-A-Car are convinced, and they personally are going to do something to prevent the catastrophe.  I am sure these captains of commerce are sincere in their attachment to the green stuff, but if I believed as they do, I should not be taking little baby steps, such as offering flexcars, to reduce emissions, when I could destroy my entire fleet of cars and trucks and quit feeding the carbon-dioxide monkey that sits on the backs of American consumers.

Ordinary people like you and me, who are neither experts nor ideologues, should treat the impending climatic cataclysm with some caution.  When I was a child, the newspapers convinced me that, if I drank milk, I would die young from cancer, and my corpse would glow in the dark from all the radioactive Strontium 90 I had consumed.  Perhaps they exaggerated the threat.

Free-market economists like to point to the late-19th-century prognostication that, by the 1920’s, the streets of London would be buried many feet deep in horse manure.  What they conclude from this is that new technology—in this case, the automobile—always comes along to save the day.  However, their argument is not quite right.  In the first place, automobiles have created many more problems—environmental pollution, the destruction of cities, the dislocation of populations—but, more significantly, they have betrayed their own optimism.  It is an insult, both to England and to human nature, to assume that Londoners, an intelligent and enterprising people, could only be saved from their deluge of manure by the likes of Henry Ford.

We all like to be a little bit afraid of the dark, and nothing is darker than the future.  In the 1930’s and 40’s, we could lie awake at night, worrying about Nazi Germany and nationalist Japan.  During the Cold War, the threat of communism inspired visions of nations, one by one around the world, collapsing like a long line of dominos.  Proponents of the domino theory did not pause to examine their metaphor: Dominos do not fall over by accident or of themselves; they have to be set up by the children who plan the collapse.  How many people in, say, Japan or Italy really wanted to worship the corpse of Joe Stalin?

These days, we have transferred our fears, if we are conservative, to Islamic terrorism, or, if we are liberals, to environmental catastrophe.  It is not that Muslims and air pollution are not serious threats to our security and health, but they are instrumentalized, as our European friends would say, for political purposes.  To continue the Cold War analogy, poor George Kennan, the architect of our containment policy, was soon dismayed by the reckless policies pursued by saber-rattling politicians, eager to show that they had the guts to stand up to the Russians.  The same conservatives who used to ridicule Chronicles for warning against the threat of Islam are now instrumentalizing Islamophobia to such an extent that it makes my stomach queasy.

In much the same way, Greenies would like to terrify us into totalitarian measures designed to eliminate human civilization—if not humanity itself—from the planet.  Global warming is the latest proof that our way of life, especially our bourgeois individualism and weird attachment to private property, is evil.  Earlier generations, with more justification, might have referred to the wrath of God visited upon a guilty nation.  But we are not a nation of believers but a random conglomeration of consumers, who “all dwell together to make money from each another.”  We spent the last century worshiping only our belly and the organs located a little below the belly, and now we must be afraid of things that go hiss in the night—hairsprays and room deodorizers.

This is an argument familiar to readers of Chesterton, who, although he did not actually say, “when people stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing—but they will believe in anything,” made a similar argument many times.  More recently, a nonbeliever (E.O. Wilson) has observed that modern men and women who give up on Christianity turn to the absurdities of Marxism and Scientology.  Since the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, Western intellectuals have occupied themselves almost exclusively with finding alternatives to the Christian Faith: Communal living and sociology, art and music, the cult of the state and its heroes, Marxism and American Democratism have all been tried and found wanting; all are nothing more than godlets doomed to fail the duped believers.

That much we all know or ought to know.  But, just as the character of a society may be largely determined by the character of its elite class, the ideology of that elite is also instructive, whether it is the Marxist-Leninism of the old Soviet Union or the hedonist consumerism of America in the later 20th century.  If global warming is now viewed by environmentalists as an instrument of divine wrath, then what, exactly, is the “god” we have offended, and how is it (we dare not say “he”) to be propitiated?

Before answering this question, we should remind ourselves that one leftist revolution does not so much supplant its predecessors as absorb them.  Marxism absorbed liberalism’s attack on religion, monarchy, and social status, but it also prepared the ground for feminism and globalism.  Viewed in another way, anti-Christianity has defined a series of enemies to be eliminated: first, kings, priests, and aristocrats; then capitalists and property owners; then patriarchs, patriots, and other “fascists”; and finally, as C.S. Lewis recognized over 50 years ago, humanity itself.  For the most radical Greens, man made in the image of God is the penultimate enemy (our Creator being the ultimate).  Nature must be not only unspoiled but an untouched wilderness, “where every prospect pleases and only man is vile.”

Blake’s romantic misanthropy is now the credo of the environmental idealists, but there is a lower kind of environmentalism, one more compatible with the weakness of the American character.  If there is no God or gods, no supranatural dimension beyond the universe perceived by our senses, no possibility of personal survival after death, much less Heaven or Hell, then this physical existence we have on earth is pretty much it.  If medical scientists keep making progress and we follow their orders—avoid smoking, drinking, fatty foods, and sodomy—we might see out some 75 to 80 years in sufficiently good health in which we can watch TV and listen to our hearts still beating in the silence of a darkened bedroom.  We can let nothing stand in the way either of prolonging this existence or of enjoying it while we can, not even the unborn babies we abort or grind up into elixirs of youth.

If Juvenal’s mens sana in corpore sano were all we may know on earth and all we need to know, then the physical extinction of a sentient and conscious being would be the ultimate evil, hence the leftist’s hatred of capital punishment and enthusiasm for abortion: Unborn babies are not conscious, but they are a punishment for promiscuous sex.  It also explains how the same person can weep over the fate of whales, baby seals, and laboratory rats but endorse euthanasia.  What is the point to breathing or even thinking, when all the fun is gone?

Environmental pollution, then, is a grave evil because it threatens our health and our existence, and not ours only but the existence of the whole world of living things.  The environmental catastrophe that is supposed to result from global warming is Ragnarok, the pagan extinction of the mortal gods and their planetary Valhalla.  Better still, it is a post-Christian millennium, when an angry Nature sets free the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

The personification of Nature, while it is hardly a new idea, should strike us as odd.  A Roman would not ordinarily have said, “Nature does this or that,” or “Nature suffers this or that.”  He would certainly not use the expression, as the newest edition of a popular Latin book put it, “look at nature” (in the sense of looking at flowers and birds, etc.).  Nor would a Greek or Roman have spent much time mooning over the fate of the Earth.  Now, Gaia was certainly a goddess, but she was a goddess of the earth and not the ball of rocks and dirt bristling with green fuzz on which we live.  It is a queer move, when humans begin to speak of “the fate of the planet,” as if the planet were a person—and not just a person, but a divine person.

Planet-worship merges with black magic in “Wicca,” the incredibly silly cult invented whole cloth by a retired British civil servant in the 1950’s.  The whole cult is a typical British product of the 50’s—as silly as anything on the Goon Show but a good deal less probable.  Wiccans are mostly harmless cranks who like to dress up and like, even more, to talk endlessly about the religious spoof they believe in.  There is nothing surprising in the emergence of superstition in our feeble-minded and humorless age, but what makes Wicca so attractive to the flotsam and jetsam of postmodernity is the religious spin they are able to put on what otherwise might be dismissed as ecofreakism.  As Catharine Sanders, authoress of a study of Wiccans, puts it: “Since Wiccans essentially deify the earth, a key element of Wicca is having a positive impact on the environment.”

Some bad ideas, as wise old Sir Thomas Browne observed, never go away: “Heresies perish not with their authors, but like the river Arethusa, though they lose their currents in one place, they rise up again in another . . . ”  Ancient Neoplatonists and Gnostics developed extravagant theories of a hierarchy of divine beings.  In some versions, a lower set of divinities is charged with the control of heavenly bodies, as well as the earth itself.  In Christianized Gnosticism, the ruler of this world is often identified with the earth’s Creator in the Old Testament, an inferior and malicious being who has condemned mankind to a lower, materialistic existence.  But for Iamblichus and the pagans, these archons were lords of the universe to be propitiated and put into the service of the magicians we would now call scientists.

Lurking beneath the surface of the Gaia-worshipper’s reverence for Nature and his concern for “the planet” is this older idea, of a planetary archon who demands reverence.  Because few of them have a name for this being, they are content with descriptive titles in English (Earth or Nature), Latin (Tellus), or Greek (Gaia).  However, Christians—and probably some Wiccans advanced in their craft—know his name, though, if they are wise, they do not often speak it, lest the enemy of mankind hear his name and take it for an invitation.  In the pre-Christian world there was, perhaps, little harm and much good in revering the lesser spirits of the created order, but, since the Incarnation, such reverence can mean, ultimately, only one thing.  Doing unconscious homage to their master, environmental alarmists—when they are not purely cynical like Al Gore, the former shill for Armand Hammer’s Occidental Petroleum—cannot help telling the lies that can only frighten children and the grown-up children who suppose they are atheists.