animism

Environmentalism continues its radical shift from reasonable conservationism to environmentalist earth religion. This growing faith was most recently preached in an op-ed published by the New York Times that quite literally proselytizes for nature animism.

Robert Moor, a self-described “Thoreauvian” nature writer and the author of In Trees, describes moving from New York City to the forests of British Columbia. He has not had the sylvan experience for which he hoped. After about a week of smoky air caused by annually recurring forest fires, the once “bone deep atheist” experiences a “baptism by wildfire,” a “religious conversion” into a neo-pagan faith called “scientific animism.” From “Our Forests Are Demanding a Sacrifice“:

In these moments, I stop seeing the sky as a blank backdrop. I see it as a living thing, and an angry one. I see the spirit of the forest rising up, rageful and trickstery, to hurl down thunderbolts and sicken us while we sleep. Put differently, I feel myself drawn away from scientific atheism, and toward a creed that philosophers call “scientific animism.”

Animism, put very simply, is the belief that the natural world is inhabited by spirits who can either punish us or bestow favors. Scientific animism applies this ancient lens to modern science, showing how forces in the natural world (plants, rivers, entire planets) are self-organized, self-perpetuating and self-willed. In this view, nature is not an inert, passive backdrop to human progress. It actively responds to our actions — though not always in the way we would predict.