If there’s anything that almost universally describes today’s environmental movement, it’s fear: fear of global warming, fear of sea-level rise, fear of rapid species extinction, fear of dead zones in the oceans, fear of topsoil erosion, fear of running out of oil, fear of finding and burning too much oil (or coal or natural gas), fear of nuclear waste, fear of deforestation, fear of overpopulation—the list could go on and on.

The common denominator is fear.

Yet the most common command in the whole Bible—the one given more times than any other—is “Fear not.”

Why, then, does fear so dominate environmentalism?

Is it because the empirical evidence for eco-catastrophe is so powerful?

No.

Various scholars have catalogued the Greens’ fears and shown them empirically unjustified:

• Julian L. Simon and Herman Kahn, eds., The Resourceful Earth: A Response to Global 2000 (1984)
• Ronald Bailey, Eco-Scam: The False Prophets of Ecological Collapse (1993)
• Julian L. Simon, ed., The State of Humanity (1995, of which I was a managing editor)
• Aaron Wildavsky, But Is It True? A Citizen’s Guide to Environmental Health and Safety Issues (1995)
• Bjørn Lomborg, The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World (2001)
• Christopher Booker and Richard North, Scared to Death: From BSE to Global Warming: Why Scares Are Costing Us the Earth (2007)

Even assuming the truth of the “consensus” predictions about global warming—the currently most popular environmental fear—people all over the world will be staggeringly richer, and staggeringly safer and healthier, than they are today.

As Matt Ridley points out, “… all six of the [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s] scenarios assume that the world will experience so much economic growth that the people alive in 2100 will be on average four to eighteen times as wealthy as we are today.” Indeed, without that much economic growth, the warming IPCC projects—driven precisely by that economic growth—wouldn’t happen. “In the hottest scenario, income rises from $1,000 per head in poor countries today to more than $66,000 in 2100 ….” (Matt Ridley, The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves [New York: Harper/Collins, 2010], 331, 332.)

So I ask again, why is environmentalism so dominated by fear?

Ridley offers one explanation, and it’s no doubt true: “Optimists are dismissed as fools, pessimists as sages, by a media that likes to be spoon-fed on scary press releases” (Rational Optimist, 341)—an observation reflecting two journalistic truisms: “If it bleeds, it leads,” and “Bad news is good news; good news is no news”—because scary news attracts readers/viewers, which enables the media to sell advertising, which pays their bills.

But the Bible has a much more profound explanation—one that doesn’t replace but roots Ridley’s. Why are people more attracted by scary stories than comforting ones? There are two layers to the Bible’s explanation.

First, in Proverbs 8:36, wisdom, personified, says, “he who fails to find me injures himself; all who hate me love death.” Those who reject wisdom have a morbid fascination with death and danger.

But who are those who reject wisdom? Those who fail to earn college or graduate degrees? No. “[T]he fear of the Lord, that is wisdom” (Job 28:28). “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” (Psalm 111:10).

The Apostle Paul wrote that people are without excuse who, “although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles. Therefore God gave them up … because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator …” (Romans 1:21–25).

The prevalence of Earth worship among environmentalists—worshiping the creature rather than the Creator—is the root explanation of the widespread foolishness of so many environmental fears.

Second, in a stunning passage the Prophet Jeremiah compares the stubborn and rebellious people of Judah with the waves of the sea:

“Hear this, O foolish and senseless people, who have eyes, but see not, who have ears, but hear not [an allusion to their having become like the blind and deaf idols they worshiped, for which, along with their covenant breaking, lying, theft, murder, and adultery, God would send them into exile]. Do you not fear me?” declares the Lord; “Do you not tremble before me? I placed the sand as the boundary for the sea, a perpetual barrier that it cannot pass; though the waves toss, they cannot prevail; though they roar, they cannot pass over it. But this people has a stubborn and rebellious heart; they have turned aside and gone away. They do not say in their hearts, ‘Let us fear the Lord our God, who gives the rain in its season, the autumn rain and the spring rain, and keeps for us the weeks appointed for the harvest.’ Your iniquities have turned these away, and your sins have kept good from you.” [Jeremiah 5:21–25]

Just as the sea could not overcome the boundaries God set for it following the Flood (Evangelicals who fear sea level rise driven by global warming, take note!), so the people of Judah could not overcome the boundaries God set for them. Rage against His laws as they might, they would still face His judgments.

God’s words through Jeremiah make it clear what is the real root of fears of natural catastrophes like droughts: the absence of the fear of the Lord, manifested in persistent sins like those named so frequently throughout Jeremiah: idolatry, spiritual adultery, murder, injustice, falsehood, rejection of God’s Word, covetousness, worship of nature, trusting in man instead of in God, and Sabbath breaking.

Jeremiah mentions other sins, too. But significantly, though some environmentalists claim that God sent Israel and Judah into exile because they polluted the land, never once do the prophets blame the people for unsustainable farming practices, pollution, or similar things. True, “they have polluted my land,” but how? “… with the carcasses of their detestable idols, and … with their abominations” (16:18).

According to the inspired Prophet Jeremiah, it is because people do not fear God (and so practice idolatry and other kinds of sin) that they come to fear ecological catastrophes.

Fear of environmental catastrophe grows out of lack of fear of God. That, I would argue, is the real root of the environmental scares that have plagued the modern world. Indeed, Green fear mongers are far more afraid of the Earth—a fact epitomized in the title of James Lovelock’s The Revenge of Gaia—than they are of Earth’s Creator, who is the real holy and just Judge.

Eco-fears will continue–with or without scientific basis—until people repent and fear the Lord, for “Cursed is the man who trusts in man and makes flesh his strength, whose heart turns away from the Lord. Blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord, whose trust is the Lord. He is like a tree planted by water, that sends out its roots by the stream, and does not fear when heat comes, for its leaves remain green, and is not anxious in the year of drought, for it does not cease to bear fruit” (Jeremiah 17:5, 7–8).

Where are we to find confidence instead of fear? “There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not been perfected in love” (1 John 4:18), and “By this we know love, that he laid down his life for us” (1 John 3:16).

The only true, abiding deliverance from eco-fears, or any other fears, comes from being reconciled with God by grace alone through the Lord Jesus Christ alone, “whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith” (Romans 3:25).

What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things? Who shall bring any charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies. Who is to condemn? Christ Jesus is the one who died- more than that, who was raised- who is at the right hand of God, who indeed is interceding for us.

Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword? As it is written, “For your sake we are being killed all the day long; we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered.”

No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord [Romans 8:31–39].

 

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