Today's environmental movement is mostly composed of special-interest groups seeking political power, using the environment to get votes. To acquire that power, they even play on human nature's need for religion, intentionally creating a new pseudo-religion to specifically serve their needs.

           A pseudo-religion centered on global-encompassing pantheistic beliefs, based on artificial assertions. And to propagate these assertions, they project human values and concerns onto an amoral non-human material world. As one of their "priests," M. J. Cohen, said, all organisms and entities, including dirt, rocks, flowers, clouds, even wind are equal in intrinsic worth to humans! All this is meant to direct those who do not make their living cultivating nature, or scientifically understanding it.

 Ultimately, this "nature-love" substitutes for real religion, eventually trivializing into the pseudo-scientific banality of therapeutic narcissism.

            This is manifestly anti-human. If we redefine ourselves as just one more species, we cease to be human, and will behave like nature: amorally, indifferent to cruelty, suffering, deaths of individuals, even whole species; capable of anything, with no compassion, no pity, no art, no altruism or any other virtue. Nature's way includes destruction by meteors; fires; global warming caused by volcanoes; ice ages; tectonic plate movements, changes in the Earth's orbit or polarity and wholesale death (99 percent of all species that ever existed are extinct, thanks in large part to—nature). Comparatively, human environmental depredation is a mere temporary rash.

            What makes us human is not found in nature: reason, language, culture, ritual, technology, self-awareness, memory, imagination, higher emotions, values, ethics, morals, the freedom to choose, consciousness and free will. Nothing other than humans possess any of these attributes. It should be obvious, then, that our relationship to the environment must be defined not in nature's terms, but in ours.

           We must stop indulging in the myth of a paradise lost due to civilization and its discontents, and we must stop promoting self-gratifying eco-utopian fantasies. Instead, we must start making clear-headed decisions about human needs. Those decisions will not be found in politically-oriented movements that rely on quasi-religious, unscientific views of nature.

Janice Shadley Oakbrook Terrace, 111.