Copenhagen: The end of environmental scaremongering?

But even if they are able to stitch up a plastic-surgical agreement, we may well be experiencing, in Copenhagen, the event that puts an end to environmental scare-mongering for a generation. The perpetrators of this scare-mongering (and I have listed so many earlier examples in previous columns) have finally overplayed their hand.

Strange to say, my delight in this is mixed. For the planet has real “environmental issues” that have gone unaddressed at Copenhagen, and will now be harder to address in light of the fallout…

But we can, in more than principle, move ahead of our imitators again, by setting a better example of how to live, one man and one woman at a time. We could — I know this sounds a little idealistic, but bear with me — try to export the best of our old Christian civilization, instead of the worst of our post-Christian one. For my reader may recall that civilization had nothing to do with conspicuous consumption, and put more of its money in cathedrals than into personal and corporate display. To say this would be “good for the environment” is an understatement: there is so much joyful life we could recover, by simply discarding what is not genuinely useful, and getting on with the root human task of salvation, through the advancement of the good, the beautiful, and the true.