Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All

by Michael Shellenberger

For twenty-first-century environmentalists, the word wilderness has positive connotations, but in the past it was a frightful “place of wild beasts.” European farmers viewed forests as places of danger, which they often were, home to both dangerous animals like wolves and menacing humans like outlaw gangs. In the fairy tale “Hansel and Gretel,” two children get lost in the forest and fall into the hands of a witch. In “Little Red Riding Hood,” a little girl traveling through the forest is terrorized by a wolf.46 Thus, for early European Christians, removing the forest was good, not bad. Early Christian fathers, including Saint Augustine, taught that it was humankind’s role to finalize God’s creation on Earth and grow closer to Him. Forests and wilderness areas were places of sin; clearing them to make farms and ranches was the Lord’s work. Europeans believed humans were blessed and distinct for their transformative powers. Monks tasked with the work of creating a clearing in the woods literally imagined themselves expelling the devil from Earth. They weren’t trying to create Eden but rather a New Jerusalem: a civilization that mixed town and country, sacred and profane, commerce and faith. It was only after humans started living in cities, and growing wealthier, that they started to worry about nature for nature’s sake.47 Europeans who, in the nineteenth century had viewed the Amazon as “jungle,” a place of danger and disorder, came to see it in the late twentieth century ...