Bob Tippee
Environmentalists and their friends in high office go too far when they decorate politics with religion.
Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) slipped over this line while chortling about the latest defeat of oil and gas leasing of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska.
On Mar. 19, the Senate voted 52-48 to strip from its annual budget resolution a provision for leasing ANWR's coastal plain.
Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska.), a strong supporter of ANWR leasing, had hinted he would use his power as chairman of the Appropriations Committee against senators voting to remove the ANWR provision.
"That's kind of a threat from a very powerful senator," Boxer said, according to the New York Times. "But you know what? There's something more powerful out there than any senator, even than any president, and that's God's gift to us. And we stood on that side of preserving this wondrous gift."
With all due respect to the senator's religious beliefs, this is a very narrow view of the gift in question.
The coastal plain, the only part of ANWR that can be leased, is no magnificent, unspoiled vista. It's certainly not the beautiful, mountainous landscape leasing opponents display in their propaganda.
The coastal plain is mostly flat and bleak, frigid in winter, marshy in summer.
If there's a "wondrous gift" associated with the coastal plain, it's not what's on the surface of the place. It's what might lie beneath the surface: billions, maybe tens of billions of barrels of recoverable oil.
Maybe, in the religious views of some people, subsurface resources don't count where divine gifts are concerned.
How peculiar, though. For most religious people, human welfare is a priority concern. Throughout history, human welfare has advanced as a function of resource development.
To exclude natural resources, including oil and natural gas, from any assessment of divine benevolence, therefore, seems fickle. And to resist resource development in blind service to ill-defined preservation seems, at the very least, ungrateful.
Boxer and many environmentalists will disagree with this view, of course. They just shouldn't assert that religious faith leads unalterably to their do-nothing approach to nature.
(Author's e-mail: [email protected])