Dear Editor:

Last Friday’s Scripps Howard editorial, Environmental miseducation, has been a long time acomin’ and is a breath of fresh air to the politically polluted pages of the prestigious press. (It was Time who decided to put a politically-correct environmental spin on stories, regardless of the truth, since it "was in the country’s best interest." It was Al Gore who wrote a travesty of scholarship, a book on the environment that cited no sources and gave only one side of any issue—but it did help get him elected.)

Luckily, Earth Day has lost ground, so to speak. The very first one, I believe, just happened to coincide with Lenin’s birthday, and the color red underneath the environmental green has led to a plethora of watermelon jokes. Leftist politics is the bedfellow of materialistic (non-God-believing) religion, and I find that the national press and the Academy (the universities and schools) long ago made up their minds to extol the religion of Secular Humanism in a manner that makes Christian fundamentalists look like amateurs. (Yes, according to the Humanists, themselves, it is a religion.)

But the big joke is that underneath the materialism is an intense spiritualism, for in the literature of so-called Deep Ecology one finds the worship (literally) of Gaia, the Greek earth goddess, a Mother who’s spawned renewed interest in the worship of ancient gods such as Isis and Sophia. The latter was the object of worship in a national conference of mainstream (Presbyterian, Methodist, etc.) church feminists held recently in Minneapolis.

Environmentalism was long ago co-opted by radicals in their struggle for upsetting the status quo, and a whole new breed of Useful Idiots has rushed lemming-like to the Sea of Disaster, follow sages like Carl Sagan, whom you recently panegyrized, who went on record in one of his many "science by press conferences" that the smoke from the Gulf War would cause the equivalence of nuclear winter. Or like Stanford lepidopterist Paul Ehrlich, who forecast dire famines in this country in the 1970s and lost a public bet with economist Julian Simon when the price of raw materials kept on dropping in spite of a predicted (by Ehrlich) scarcity.

There are many other smart scientists and intellectuals, some of whom actually believe in God, but they don’t make good press or become darlings of PBS. Economics Professor Jacqueline Kasun over at Humboldt State has exposed the myths underlying the population scaremongers, and the late Governor Dixie Lee Ray up in Washington, a zoologist, regularly punched holes in pseudo-science, as does Harvard-Smithsonian astrophysicist Sally Baliunas. Most people have never heard the other side to the ozone scare, or the global warming scare, or the vanishing species scare. (Hmm, do we have a pattern with all these scares?)

I maintain that many so-called intellectuals and teachers are academically dishonest or have never been taught to consider all sides of an issue, which is academic dishonesty by their mentors. How many people teaching environmental studies have ever read In A Dark Wood by Alston Chase, a Princeton Ph.D. who has studied not just one, but three or four sides of the environmental issue? This book is a masterpiece of exposing hidden presuppositions of ecology, such as "all diversity is good," "pristine is best," or even that "ecosystems exist." Not to include it in ones lectures is like teaching religion without ever having directly read the Bible (or Koran, or Talmud). Gee, that sounds like our modern seminaries, but that’s another letter. . . .

I have on file many references to the "other side" of the ecological issue, and I offer them, or the citations thereof, to any teacher or student seriously interested in matters of the environment. Students, don’t let your teachers get away with one-sidedness, and vice versa. Make those who pontificate explain the beliefs underlying their dogma (even the Pope does that).

Don’t be like an old racquetball adversary of mine who deprecated me ad hominem for expressing my beliefs that evolution may be apocryphal, yet admitted in private that he had never read any seminal works arguing against Darwinism, which he saw as fact, not theory. His would have been one of the many dissertations extolling the Piltdown Man (later found to be a hoax supposedly perpetrated by sometime-Catholic mystic and evolutionist Teilhard de Chardin).

But hey, I’ve never once beat him on the courts, so perhaps there is something to this descent from apes stuff. . . .