Those of you who read Canada's National Post may have run across this gem of a story called "The Green Fervour: Is Environmentalism the New Religion?"

Oh, how I love this angle - even though its politics, in keeping with the Post, are nakedly conservative. It's pretty much a rant against global warming science, but there are a few points about the religious idion of the environmental movement that strike home. Being, myself, a refugee from the environmentalist meccas of the west, I appreciate how the author pegs the righteous "fervour" of the modern enviros:

It can be felt in the frisson of piety that comes with lighting an energy-saving light bulb, a modern votive candle.

and

Adherents make arduous pilgrimages and call them ecotourism. Newspapers publish the iconography of polar bears. The IPCC reports carry the weight of scripture.

John Kay of the Financial Times wrote last month, about future climate chaos: “Christians look to the Second Coming, Marxists look to the collapse of capitalism, with the same mixture of fear and longing ... The discovery of global warming filled a gap in the canon ... [and] provides justification for the link between the sins of our past and the catastrophe of our future.

and

What was once called salvation — a nebulous state of grace — is now known as sustainability, a word that is equally resistant to precise definition. There is even a hymn, When the North Pole Melts, by James G. Titus, a scientist with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which is not exactly How Great Thou Art, but serves a similar purpose.

Environmentalism even has its persecutors, embodied in the Bush White House attack dogs who have conducted no less than an Inquisition against climate scientists, which failed to bring them to heel but instead inspired potential martyrs. Of course, as religions tend to do, environmentalists commit persecution of their own, which has created heretics out of mere skeptics.

Apart from these canny observations, the article is mostly a rant against recent findings on global warming. It is a 1,000 word detour on review of Apollo's Arrow, a new book by mathematician David Orrell about the statistical difficulty of predicting... anything.

For a more liberal take on the same subject - and a much more comprehensive list of the similarities between environmentalism and religion - do yourself a favor and read Jack Hitt's "A Gospel According to the Earth", which appeared in the July 2003 issue of Harper's Magazine. My favorite comparison is between the early Christian ascetics and the tree sitters of the Earth First! movement. Uncanny.