claim some role in producing food, shelter, or even basic consumer products. And yet they can afford to spend time in beautiful places — in their gardens, in the countryside, on beaches, and
near old-growth forests. As they survey these landscapes, they tell
themselves that the best things in life are free, even though they
have consumed mightily to travel
to places where they feel peaceful,
calm, and far from the worries of
the modern world.
These postmaterial values have
given rise to a secular and largely
inchoate ecotheology, complete
with apocalyptic fears of ecological collapse, disenchanting notions
of living in a fallen world, and the
growing conviction that some kind
of collective sacrifice is needed to
avoid the end of the world. Alongside those dark incantations shine
nostalgic visions of a transcendent
future in which humans might,
once again, live in harmony with
nature through a return to small-scale agriculture, or even to hunter-gatherer life.
The contradictions between
the world as it is—filled with the
unintended consequences of our
actions — and the world as so many
of us would like it to be result in
a pseudorejection of modernity, a
kind of postmaterialist nihilism.
Empty gestures are the defining
sacraments of this ecotheology. The belief that we must radically
curtail our consumption in order to survive as a civilization is
no impediment to elites paying for private university educations,
frequent jet travel, and iPads.
Thus, ecotheology, like all dominant religious narratives,
serves the dominant forms of social and economic organiza-
tion in which it is embedded. Catholicism valorized poverty,
social hierarchy, and agrarianism for the masses in feudal
societies that lived and worked the land. Protestantism val-
orized industriousness, capital accumulation, and individua-
tion among the rising merchant classes of early capitalist
societies and would define the social norms of modernizing
industrial societies. Today’s secular ecotheology values crea-
tivity, imagination, and leisure over the work ethic, produc-
tivity, and efficiency in societies that increasingly prosper
from their knowledge economies while outsourcing crude,
industrial production of goods to developing societies. Living
amid unprecedented levels of wealth and security, ecological
elites reject economic growth as a measure of well-being, tell
cautionary tales about modernity and technology, and warn
of overpopulation abroad now
that the societies in which they
live are wealthy and their popula-
tions are no longer growing.
The belief that we
must radically curtail
our consumption in
order to survive is no
impediment to elites
paying for private
educations, frequent jet
travel, and iPads.
