Legal Planet: Do religion and environmentalism mix?
First, it seems to me that many of the crucial issues of modern environmentalism are not amenable to broad-based moral reasoning and intuition that religion can provide. Religious thinking has little to say about, for example, what is the appropriate amount of particulates that should be in the air, or whether climate change should be tackled by cap-and-trade, or a carbon tax, or command-and-control regulation.
Second, it concerns me to sugges that one cannot be a good Jew/Christian/Muslim/anything else and have a particular position on the environment. The environment is a political issue, and it should be. But that begins to move us toward a political test of religious commitment.
Political test of religious commitment like, say, enacting climate change laws?
Also pretty fascinating that the "S" word doesn't appear once...
It isn't accurate to argue that religions don't often indicate an ecological perpective. The book of Genesis, for instance, has been used by a wide range of ecologically minded Christians to support a "dominion" perspective--both to argue that the earth is ours to plunder and that the earth is ours to protect and defend. Likewise Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism all have ethics that demand certain types of environmental responsibilities. Avoiding eating red meat is something that has a big impact on what resources you think should be allocated to cattle ranchers and their associated industries... Frankly, I can't think of one religion that doesn't indicate that its followers should take some environmental view.