My high school political science teacher, Jim Skaggs, passes on Pascal Bruckner:

Consider the meaning in contemporary jargon of the famous carbon footprint that we all leave behind us. What is it, after all, if not the gaseous equivalent of Original Sin, of the stain that we inflict on our Mother Gaia by the simple fact of being present and breathing? We can all gauge the volume of our emissions, day after day, with the injunction to curtail them, just as children saying their catechisms are supposed to curtail their sins.

Ecologism, the sole truly original force of the past half-century, has challenged the goals of progress and raised the question of its limits. It has awakened our sensitivity to nature, emphasized the effects of climate change, pointed out the exhaustion of fossil fuels. Onto this collective credo has been grafted a whole apocalyptic scenography that has already been tried out with communism, and that borrows from Gnosticism as much as from medieval forms of messianism. Cataclysm is part of the basic tool-kit of Green critical analysis, and prophets of decay and decomposition abound. They beat the drums of panic and call upon us to expiate our sins before it is too late.

This fear of the future, of science, and of technology reflects a time when humanity, and especially Western humanity, has taken a sudden dislike to itself. We are exasperated by our own proliferation and can no longer stand ourselves. Whether we want to be or not, we are tangled up with seven billion other members of our species. Rejecting both capitalism and socialism, ecologism has come to power almost nowhere. But it has won the battle of ideas. The environment is the new secular religion that is rising, in Europe especially, from the ruins of a disbelieving world. We have to subject it to critical evaluation in turn and unmask the infantile disease that is eroding and discrediting it: catastrophism.

Numerous authors tell us that humanity as a whole has gone off-course, and that it has to be understood as an illness that must be immediately treated: “Man is a cancer on the earth, … a throwaway species, like the civilization he invented,” writes Yves Paccalet. And Nicolas Hulot, the French environmentalist, writes: “The enemy does not come from outside, it resides within our system and our consciousnesses.”

For the past half-century we have, in fact, been witnessing a slide from one scapegoat to another: Marxism designated capitalism as responsible for human misery. Third-worldism, upset by the bourgeoisification of the working classes, substituted the West for capitalism as the great criminal in history and the “inventor” of slavery, colonialism, and imperialism.

With ecologism, we move up a notch: The guilty party is humanity itself, in its will to dominate the planet. Here there is a return to the fundamentals of Christianity: Evil is the pride of the creatures who are in revolt against their Creator and who exceed their prerogatives. The three scapegoats can be cumulated: Ecologism can reject the capitalism invented by a West that preys on peoples and destroys the earth. It is a system of Russian dolls that fit one inside the other until the final synthesis is reached. That is why so many old Bolsheviks are converting to ecologism in order to broaden their palette of accusations. This amounts to recycling anticapitalist clichés as one recycles wastewater: Ecologism adds a supplementary layer of reprobation, claiming to be the culmination of all earlier critiques.

Thus a whole segment of the South American left has seized upon this hobbyhorse to reinforce its credo: “We have two paths: either capitalism dies, or Mother Earth dies,” said Evo Morales, president of Bolivia. The globe becomes the new proletarian that has to be saved from exploitation, if need be by reducing the human population to 500 million, as some opponents of “speciesism” proclaim. Consider the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement (Vhemt), a group of individuals who have decided not to reproduce themselves …

The despondency is striking, given that our lives are still extraordinarily pleasant. Everywhere the culture of lament prevails. We have to wear grave expressions on our faces and wrinkle our brows: The perils are so numerous that we can hardly choose among them. Sounding the death knell is our viaticum. Saving the world requires us to denigrate everything that has to do with the spirit of enterprise and the taste for discovery, especially in the field of science. We have ceased to admire; we know only how to denounce, decry, whine. The capacity for enthusiasm is dying out.

That is because at the turn of the 21st century a paradigm change took place: The long list of emblematic victims—Jews, blacks, slaves, proletarians, colonized peoples—was gradually replaced by the planet, which has become the paragon of all the wretched. It is not a specific community that we are asked to identify with, but rather a small spaceship that carries us and groans. It is no longer a question of transforming the world but of preserving it. …

All the foolishness of Bolshevism, Maoism, and Trotskyism are somehow reformulated exponentially in the name of saving the planet. Authors, journalists, politicians, scientists compete in announcing the abominable and lay claim to a hyperlucidity: They alone see things correctly, whereas others vegetate in the slumber from which they will someday awaken, terrified. They alone have emerged from the cave of ignorance in which the human herd mills around, deaf and blind to the obvious. …

The fear is permanent, its object is purely contingent; yesterday it was the millennium bug, today it is global warming and nuclear energy, tomorrow it will be something else. This alarmism is as lazy as naïve optimism and no less illusory. The adepts of the worst-case scenario are still the victims of a fantasy of omnipotence: For them, to prognosticate a hateful destiny is to ward it off. It is one thing to teach the science of catastrophe as a science of reacting to and resisting disproportionate misfortunes; it is another to believe that we will be able to cope with mistakes by forecasting them.

In this rhetorical intoxication, the future becomes again, as it had once been in Christianity and communism, a tool of blackmail. The Catholic religion asked us to sacrifice our present joys for the sake of gaining eternal life, while Marxism asked us to forget our bourgeois happiness and embrace instead the classless society. Ecology calls upon us to adopt a rigorous diet in the name of future generations. …

In environmentalist propaganda, this kind of logic consists in reversing values: Since wealth leads to despair, need ought to elicit a return of hope. In fact, the progress of the material standard of living in the United States has been accompanied by an undeniable decrease in real happiness among most Americans. Conclusion: Since having more means being less, having less will mean being more. A marvelous acrobatic act: We have to voluntarily deprive ourselves in order to enrich ourselves spiritually. Subtraction as amplification! …

You will need to get rid of your car, take showers instead of baths (and the showers must be limited to four minutes; little hourglasses are sold for the purpose), stop buying imported fruit and vegetables, practice “locavorism” (that is, eat only locally produced food), decrease or even halt your consumption of meat and fish, avoid the elevator and even the refrigerator.

Each of us has to kill the frenetic consumer within us, for he is the scruffy wretch who through his greed is causing the melting of the polar icecaps, the rise in sea level, tremors in the earth’s crust, acid rain, and who knows what else.

Are you cold in the winter? Put on a sweater, for heaven’s sake, instead of turning up the heat, and go to bed early. Yves Cochet, a member of the European Parliament, tells us: “We have to manage to live with 50 percent less electricity. … We have to take maximum advantage of daylight.” And our friend of humanity further suggests a surtax on those who make excessive use of electricity and heating systems. Are we going to set up police brigades that are responsible for switching off electricity and enforcing a curfew?

What is worrisome about ecologism is that it energetically insinuates itself into the most intimate aspects of our lives—our eating habits and our clothing—the better to control them. The project here is authoritarian. On reading its recommendations, we can almost hear the heavy door of a dungeon closing behind us. …

The friends of the earth have for too long been enemies of humanity; it is time for an ecology of admiration to replace an ecology of accusation.

Save the world, we hear everywhere: Save it from capitalism, from science, from consumerism, from materialism. Above all, we have to save the world from its self-proclaimed saviors, who brandish the threat of great chaos in order to impose their lethal impulses. Behind their clamor we must hear the will to demoralize us the better to enslave us. What is at stake is the pleasure of living together on this planet that will survive us, whatever we do to it. We need trailblazers and stimulators, not killjoys disguised as prophets.