Michael Crichton on Religion

facts aren't necessary, because the tenets of environmentalism are all about belief. It's about whether you are going to be a sinner, or saved. Whether you are going to be one of the people on the side of salvation, or on the side of doom. Whether you are going to be one of us, or one of them.
--Michael Crichton
Commonwealth Club of San Francisco, 2003

Michael Crichton died on November 4, at the age of 66. He was brilliant, graduating summa cum laude from Harvard where he also obtained his M.D., then a post-doc at La Jolla’s Salk Institute. We know him as the successful author whose books sold over 150 million, and as the only person to have simultaneously the #1 book, movie, and television show (1994).

As “one of us” (see above quote), his comments on environmentalism as religion are particularly devastating. Crichton told his San Francisco audience in 2003:

we live in a secular society in which many people---the best people, the most enlightened people---do not believe in any religion. But I think that you cannot eliminate religion from the psyche of mankind. If you suppress it in one form, it merely re-emerges in another form. You . . . have to believe in something that gives meaning to your life, and. . . [t]oday, . . . environmentalism. . . seems to be the religion of choice for urban atheists.

Crichton then proceeded to take apart the main tenants of environmentalism:

• We have to get back to Eden, a paradise, a state of grace and unity with nature.

Crichton asked if we really want to go back to when infant mortality was 80%, when one woman in six died in childbirth, or when, as it was in America a century ago, the average lifespan was 40. He pointed out that “People who live in nature are not romantic about it at all," and asserted that “if you. . . {t]ake a trek through the jungles of Borneo, and in short order you will have festering sores on your skin, you'll have bugs all over your body, biting in your hair, crawling up your nose and into your ears, [but] even in the jungles of Borneo you won't experience nature so directly, because you will have covered your entire body with DEET.” Bluntly, he asserted nature “will demand that you adapt to it-and if you don't, you die.”

• If we don’t preserve the environment, we are doomed.

Crichton noted that while “the preachers of environmentalism” have for fifty years frightened us about population growth, fertility rates are falling almost everywhere, and predictions for total world population have gone from a high of 20 billion, to 15 billion, to 11 billion (the UN estimate around 1990) to 9 billion. So “these doomsday visions vanished, like a mirage in the desert.” Other mirages: a) running out of all natural resources, 2) Paul Ehrlich saying 60 million Americans will die of starvation in the 1980s, 3) half of all species on the planet will be extinct by 2000.

Here are some facts Crichton set against the religion of environmentalism:

• DDT is not a carcinogen and did not cause birds to die and should never have been banned, because the ban has caused the deaths of tens of millions of poor people, mostly children.

• the evidence for global warming is far weaker than its proponents would ever admit. The Sahara desert is shrinking, and the total ice of Antarctica is increasing. A blue-ribbon panel in Science concluded that there is no known technology that will enable us to halt carbon dioxide's growth in the 21st century.

To Crichton, “one of the problems with fundamentalists is that they have no perspective on themselves. They . . . believe their way is the right way, everyone else is wrong; they are in the business of salvation.” He wanted environmentalism out of the sphere of religion; he wanted hard science instead. Religions, he believed,
tend to kill people, and environmentalism has already killed “somewhere between 10-30 million people since the 1970s.” He even said, “The effort to promote effective legislation for the environment is not helped by thinking that the Democrats will save us and the Republicans won't.”

In a message seemingly aimed at Al Gore, Crichton proclaimed, “if we allow science to become politicized, then we are lost. We will enter the Internet version of the dark ages, an era of shifting fears and wild prejudices, transmitted to people who don't know any better. That's not a good future for the human race. That's our past. So it's time to abandon the religion of environmentalism, and return to the science of environmentalism.”

Can we abandon environmentalism as a religion? Probably not. Instead, we should recognize what Crichton said about religion elsewhere in his speech: “the reason I don't want to talk anybody out of [their] beliefs is that I know that I can't talk anybody out of them. These are not facts that can be argued. These are issues of faith.”