"apocalypse was in the air"..........

As traditional faiths are waning, environmentalism is coming to resemble a faith for the new age.  Christianity offered guidance for how one should live and conduct one's personal affairs in a manner pleasing to God, but the green movement seeks to steer people to a life in better harmony with nature.  Environmentalism, said Joel Garreau, has become "the religion of choice for urban atheists."

     Like medieval Catholicism, the green faith foresees impending doom caused by human activity.  To people in the Middle Ages, wrote Barbara Tuchman, "apocalypse was in the air."  The Final Judgement, brought on by human sin, was not only real but imminent.  St. Norbert in the twelfth century predicted the event would come within the lifetime of his contemporaries.  Similarly, the environmental movement—whether religious, scientific, or leftist—routinely traces a direct line from human materialism to looming catastrophe.

-Joel Kotkin, The Coming of Neo Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class