“Neo-Conservation: The Religion of Guilt” is part 2 in an 8-part series focused on explaining a document called “A Manifesto for Local Stewardship.” The manifesto, which made its rounds in summer of 2022, was published in The Byway’s most recent September paper.
“Science proves kids are bad for Earth. Morality suggests we stop having them,” read the headline of a 2017 NBC News article by Travis Rieder.
But for many, this wasn’t news.
In the last half of the 1960s, the fear of overpopulation reached fever pitch. The baby boom period had ended just a few years earlier, and now, I guess, there were too many 3rd-graders. The fervor spawned dystopian stories that are still with us today — such as Harry Harrison’s novel, Make Room! Make Room! and the 1973 classic film, Soylent Green. If you haven’t seen this, you need to! Because Soylent Green is People!
Also during that era, Stanford University biologist Paul R. Ehrlich wrote a bestselling book called The Population Bomb, which began with the statement, “The battle to feed all of humanity is over.” He predicted that the end was only 15 years away.
Today, Dr. Ehrlich is still predicting the end, though he said timetables for disaster aren’t significant. In his view, allowing women to have as many babies as they want is akin to letting everyone “throw as much of their garbage into their neighbor’s backyard as they want.”
Since then, except for a few holdouts like Ehrlich, fears of overpopulation have essentially disappeared. Perhaps this is because decades of more data show that across developed nations, the risk of population shrinkage is even greater!
The problem now is that the anxiety has shifted slightly — it’s not a fear of overpopulation per se. Instead, it’s a personal anxiety about how we are all individually consuming and destroying the planet. Usually the threat cited is climate change.
It’s so prevalent now that among the young adult age group ages 16 – 25, one survey reported that 59% of respondents said they felt “very worried” or “extremely worried” about climate change, and 84% were at least somewhat worried. Over half of them reported feeling “sad, anxious, angry, powerless, helpless, and guilty,” and 45% said their feelings were impacting their daily life and functioning.
That’s too bad because most of the time, that is not the kind of anxiety that leads to meaningful action or positive change. The phenomenon now has a name: eco-anxiety, defined by the American Psychological Association as “a chronic fear of environmental doom.” Some therapists have written on ways to cope with the problem, ranging from taking action, volunteerism and knowing when to “disengage” from media and politics when the anxiety becomes debilitating.
But many other therapists, surprisingly, say that people should have this anxiety. Caroline Hickman, a psychotherapist at the University of Bath in the UK, said that when your fearful 10-year-old asks if the earth is going to be “burned to a crisp,” as she put it, that “the question is grounded in reality.” She advised parents to answer something like, “I want you to feel proud of those feelings. Because you only feel that anxiety or worry because you care about the planet.”
No wonder these kids are so messed up.
Not only has this fear-and-guilt doctrine become pervasive in society, it has also entered our government where politicians are busy writing legislation and administrative rules to lock it into policy. Tracy Stone-Manning, who was installed as Director of the BLM by President Biden, has been vocal in her belief that humans are bad for the planet.
“The origin of our abuses is us. If there were fewer of us, we would have less impact,” Stone-Manning wrote in her graduate thesis in 1992. “We must consume less, and more importantly, we must breed fewer consuming humans.”
As part of her thesis, Stone-Manning created an ad that would urge people not to have children. The ad showed a picture of a child with the text, “Can you find the environmental hazard in this photo?…That’s right, it’s the cute baby.”
While the Christians and the other great world religions usually take a more positive approach to dealing with serious problems in our environment, such as taking action, environmentalists and other liberally-minded people have sold a religion of fear and guilt. And that guilt is not to spur personal change as the Christians would teach: the guilt is for our unchangeable attributes. We are animals that consume and abuse the earth for nothing in return.
Insoluble guilt from our nature as consumers has gone hand-in-hand with other liberal teachings such as guilt from “original sin” (making reparations necessary for our ancestors’ misdeeds) and guilt for “whiteness.” There is no appropriate solution to these “problems.”
That is probably why self-identified liberals report lower levels of happiness than their conservative counterparts — a pattern that also holds true for teenagers.
Much of the pain and suffering from eco-anxiety, it seems, is at the hands of environmentalists. They are less likely to identify as religious — but because of the religion they have made for themselves, they have not only made themselves more unhappy, but have pressed that mindset on the broader public.
There are serious problems in the world which need serious work and serious solutions. But if anxiety doesn’t lead to any serious solutions, it should be scrapped.
We are all consumers on the earth, just like every animal species and every plant. Every civilization in history has based their conservation on the belief that the earth is for responsible use, and we should too. It is time that today’s “neo-conservationists” be honest about their consumptive nature. After they acknowledge that, their conservation efforts will hold more meaning as they work to reduce waste and excess.
The earth is a great gift. Rather than feel guilty about using the gift, we should practice gratitude instead.
– by B.E. Davis
Feature image caption: Tracy Stone-Manning, then-nominee for Director of the BLM, speaks to a senate committee as part of her appointment to the position on June 8, 2021. Courtesy of Senate Energy Dems-Youtube.