Campaign Against Birth Control, Opposition To Action On Global Warming Linked
The ideological roots of the newly minted campaign against birth control likely tie the new initiative to anti-environmentalism on the Christian right. The connection comes, in part, through Calvin Beisner, one of the leading proponents of Biblically based Cornucopian thought and also lately a major figure leading religiously based opposition to action on Global Warming. In a 1990 piece entitled "Population Growth as Blessing or Blight?", Beisner expounds on his view that the Earth is, if anything, underpopulated:
Are teeming cities gobbling up the world's land? Certainly not. One study in 1974 indicated that all human settlements--including everything from tiny tribal encampments to multi-million-person cities--took up only about 1 percent of the land surface of the earth.[27] The percentage isn't likely to have grown much since then.... Beisner's 'environmentalist' views appear to be rooted in his longstanding association with many of the leading figures of Christian Reconstructionism, and displays little of the grounding of historical environmentalism in ecology and research in the life sciences.
As a stark contrast, in A Christian Agenda for Environmental Protection, Beisner cites - for the first mandate of his advocated "Christian Agenda... ", the mandate of human 'Dominion' over the Earth - with 'Dominion' apparently taken to mean the numerical maximization of humanity. Calvin Beisner is also the founder of the new Interfaith Stewardship Alliance, a coalition that minimizes the threat of Global Warming and opposes concerted government action to mitigate the buildup of greenhouse gasses in the Earth's atmosphere. The Interfaith Stewardship Alliance ( ISA ) appears to have been formed to galvanize political opposition to a growing movement with the National Association Of Evangelicals ( NAE ) to advocate for concerted action to confront Global Warming. ISA's first major initiative came in the form of a letter ( link to Pdf file of letter ) written to the NAE as a response to a statement concerninf Global Warming written by members of the Evangelical Climate Initiative. In August 2006 Ethics Daily released a report, by Brian Kaylor, that revealed substantial financial links between signers of that ISA letter and Exxon-Mobil, a corporation that has recently been challenged by the British Royal Society for funding groups that have:
"misrepresented the science on climate change, either by outright denial of the evidence that greenhouse gases are driving climate change, or by overstating the amount and significance of uncertainty in knowledge, or by conveying misleading impression of the potential impacts of climate change." The Ethics Daily / Kaylor report detailed extensive financial links between Exxon-Mobil and the signers of ISA's "Open Letter":
A recent statement by evangelical Christians downplaying the potential problems of global climate change includes eight signers whose six organizations have received a total of $2.32 million in donations from ExxonMobil over the last three years.
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