ROME — Today’s environmentalism has morphed into a “holy war,” one that is now part of an enormous false ideological construct based on Malthusian thought and reflective of a wider cultural decay. 

This is according to Giulio Meotti, the author of a new book in Italian called The Green God — Ecolatry and Apocalyptic Obsessions, in which he argues that the entire ecological discourse is based on the theories of Thomas Malthus, the 19th-century British economist and advocate of population control. 

He contends that ecologism today is an “enormous ideological” construct “in which climate is only a small part, an excuse.” It has become a means to promote “trite slogans” such as opposition to “heteronormativity,” “patriarchy” and “binary genders” that have nothing do with ecology, but which were mentioned at the recent COP26 international meeting in Glasgow and promoted by prominent environmentalists such as Greta Thunberg. 

Meotti also warned that if Christianity continues to jump on this bandwagon, it will have to accept “genderism, transhumanism, and immigrationism, all theories that posit an uprooting of a certain vision of Europe, the West, culture, Christianity and traditions.”

An author and essayist for the Italian newspaper Il Foglio, Meotti made these comments in a Dec. 14 interview with Andrea Mariotto of the Cardinal Van Thuan International Observatory on the Social Doctrine of the Church. 

He noted that everyone is concerned about the environment and creation and that over the past 40 years great strides have been made in, for example, producing fewer polluting cars and more recycling. But he said the nature of that concern changed when big corporations, politicians such as former Vice President Al Gore, lobbies and think-tanks introduced environmental alarmism, a “collective anxiety of which Greta Thunberg is the megaphone.” 

Thunberg, he observed, says that the climate problem “is linked to the racial system, gender and patriarchy and that we need to dismantle them all.” Such thinking, Meotti believes, “is a mirror of cultural decay.”

He went on to also point out that Thunberg “is a product of the system that she herself criticizes” by saying all the world’s leaders do is “blah, blah, blah.” Meanwhile, big corporations have come on board pretending to have green policies but “in reality they keep their consciences clear this way.”

“It is in everyone’s interest to do this,” Meotti explained. “Big companies manage to be well liked in this circle because otherwise they would be fiercely attacked” and Thunberg “takes advantage of this because being received by the powerful of the earth is a sign of powerful legitimacy.” 

“It benefits everyone except the people, who will be called to pay for this ecological transition,” he said. “On whom will the burden fall? On those who use cars because they do not live in a big city and do not have the possibility of buying a scooter or an electric car. 

“It is a big bluff that the middle and working classes will end up paying for,” Meotti said. “We are seeing it in these weeks with the increase of bills that governments are trying in every way to bring down, but they do it [by increasing] public debt, thereby further worsening the situation of future generations.”

Meotti warned that if public opinion fails to challenge and confront these “leaders and ideologues,” then the situation will continue, as will China and its high pollution levels. 

“With globalization, we have exported production to China and with that we have also exported pollution,” he observed, and so the transnational world that is responsible for globalization (Davos, COP26, the U.N.) “cannot now say it’s China’s fault because [globalization] is to everyone’s advantage.” 

In addition to this, Meotti observed that “the Western white man has become the great Satan,” and that ecologism, coupled with an ideology of “happy degrowth [reduced global consumption in favour of an economically sustainable society],” is now part of “cancel culture.” 

But at the core of this overarching ideology, he noted, is that climate change is “man’s fault” and that his human activity and presence on earth should be questioned. 

“This whole ecological discourse is based on Malthus,” Meotti observed. “Even today there is a return to these issues related to population reduction — just think of the slogans of the star of the American radical left, Alexandra Ocasio Cortez, the ‘birth strike’ movement [women who refuse to have children until climate change ends], the British royals who apologize for having two children and promise not to have any more, the billboards on American highways that say that the best favor you can do for the climate is to have one less child, the calculation of how much CO2 produces each child that comes into the world. 

“There is certainly an underlying misanthropy,” he said. 

Regarding the Church’s engagement with this ideology, Meotti stressed that those in favor of protecting the earth are no friends of the Church as they “are not interested in the preservation of identities, cultures, traditions, all things that should be at the heart of a Catholic.” 

He therefore advised caution, especially when hearing “prayers ‘for the earth’ in liturgies, because it is a form of paganism that is the antithesis of Catholic doctrine.”

“When the preaching of the Church on ecology was in defense of creation and trying to maintain a concern for the environment, it was outstanding — beautiful pages were written,” he said. “Lately, however, it seems to me that there has been a deviation on these issues.” 

Meotti’s concerns are similar to those recently shared with the Register by Rome-based theologian Father Paul Haffner. The author of Towards a Theology of the Environment, Father Haffner called ecologism “a new age religion, basically cosmo-centricism whereby the cosmos is placed at the center, the human being is a nuisance, and you want to push him or her aside. 

“Therefore abortion, euthanasia, and depopulation of course, are all a part of this wicked agenda,” he said, and the hierarchy of creation — whereby the “human person is the apex, under God, under Christ, with dominion over creation” — is “forgotten.”