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Journalist Bill Moyers recently received the Global Environment Citizen Award from Harvard Medical School. His acceptance speech is devastating. I couldn’t read it straight through; my dinner started to back up on me.

Bill Moyers on Health and the Global Environment

Moyers was establishing a connection between religious fundamentalism and the destruction of the environment. It seems counter-intuitive that someone claiming respect and awe for all God’s creation would willingly participate in the systematic trashing of same. But that’s Moyer’s case, and he delivers.

James Watt, President Reagan’s first Secretary of the Interior … told the U.S. Congress that protecting natural resources was unimportant in light of the imminent return of Jesus Christ. In public testimony he said, “after the last tree is felled, Christ will come back.”

I’m strugging to accept that nutjobs like that can achieve high office. George W. Bush, I’m looking at you.

A 2002 TIME/CNN poll found that 59 percent of Americans believe that the prophecies found in the book of Revelations are going to come true. Nearly one-quarter think the Bible predicted the 9/11 attacks… you will come to understand why people under the spell of such potent prophecies cannot be expected, as Grist [magazine] puts it, “to worry about the environment. Why care about the earth when the droughts, floods, famine and pestilence brought by ecological collapse are signs of the apocalypse foretold in the bible? Why care about global climate change when you and yours will be rescued in the rapture? And why care about converting from oil to solar when the same god who performed the miracle of the loaves and fishes can whip up a few billion barrels of light crude with a word?”

Here’s the ultimate irony: the United States was founded by people who left their home country to escape religious persecution. Now I’m considering leaving the United States for the same damn reason.