Still, at least it was Rainforest Alliance coffee!

Actually, you touch on an interesting point: how many people in the Environmental movement are urban dwellers with minimal experience of the natural world? Certainly the Green's vote seems to be strongest in the inner cities of the largest metropolises. This may account for the overly romanticised notion of the natural world that permeates so much Environmental rhetoric.

As an article I read some time back said, 'Environmentalists should be called "sentimentalists", for it would be a much more accurate concept'.

Speaking of coffee and religious nutbags - which is the original topic that we've kind of wandered off of, sorry - you do realise that a certain well-known coffee franchise is owned by a nutbag Christian cult that goes in for holding young women prisoner and 'exorcising' them of 'lesbian tendencies'?

It beggars belief that these freaks actually got away with that kind of whackery, in this day and age.

I suppose that's what happens when you have to 'respect' religious beliefs, no matter how stump-dumb crazy they are.

Gosh...how to avoid a discussion of religion - just keep mentioning climate change.

Some religious groups do a lot of good in the community and like any other charitable organisation are tax exempt. While as an atheist I have some discomfort in the proselytizing motives of many of these groups, one cannot deny they do feed and clothe the hungry. Personally I think these charitable functions could be done without any ulterior agenda, however there can be some middle ground here.

As Cornflower mentioned, perhaps there is a need for an oversight body to ensure that tax exemptions are not being misused and are based on need. Part of the problem with religious business ventures is they often compete with the private sector who are at an unfair disadvantage.

There was a case here some time ago where one charitable group went into laying turf to raise money for charity but it got very sticky when they could undercut the private players because of the use of some volunteer labour and tax exemptions.

Religion should not be the basis for exemption it should rest solely on the charitable component.

Government funding to charitable groups should also rest on need. If a religious group is making inordinate amounts of money via fundraising and other ventures then funding would be best left to those groups whose work largely relies on government support.

Fascinating. I see Clownfish is still banging on about the so-called 'Gaia' religion, despite being corrected by several posters.

Clownfish, I know lots of environmentalists, and not a single one subscribes to the nonsense that you disingenuously ascribe to them. However, more than a few are biologists who take Lovelock's analogy seriously, but who are more than capable of distinguishing it from the sort of of religious thinking with which you attempt to smear them.

Also, many of the environmentalists I know live in the bush, as I do.

I agree with you about the coffee though. I've boycotted Gloria Jean's when visiting the city ever since I heard about the cult connection.

Oh, right. So the nutty, nature-worshipping Environmentalists are kind of like the 'not-real-Christians' that other Christians try and distance themselves from?

'Oh, no, no - those guys who hate homosexuals/believe in Creation/molest altar boys/practice exorcisms - they're not REAL Christians. They just, um, read the same holy book, and um ..."

Trouble is, as Richard Dawkins points out, the religious nutbags aren't so distant from the 'mainstream' as the 'mainstream' likes to try and pretend.

Remind me how all Environmentalists aren't nature-worshipping loonies the next time Julia Butterfly Hill is a keynote speaker at an Environmental rally.

CJ, don't take my word for it, nor Andrew Bolt's (who I don't read, btw): just take a look at what some of your Environmentalist friends are saying:

"there are several overarching principles to spirituality and sustainability that share very similar traits": 'World as one! Logic suggests a more spiritual mindset could enrich the planet too', futureplanet.org

"GreenSpirit (formally the Association for Creation Spirituality) stands in a long tradition of 'green spirituality' ": greenspirit.org.uk (it would be interesting to get a copy of their journal, and read such articles as "Global Green Spirituality").

The Gaia Partnership site is particularly interesting. It starts off simply reiterating Lovelock's theory, then spins off into such territory as: "we may have discovered a living being bigger, more ancient, and more complex than anything from our wildest dreams. That being, called Gaia, is the Earth ... is there a planetary being, whose life cycle must be counted in the billions of years, which spawns these evolving life forms to suit the purpose of its being ... is Gaia herself somehow part of a larger living being, perhaps on a galactic scale?" (Note the constant references to 'Gaia' as a personified "she").

Visit the website of Great Turning Times; it's a mirror image of any number of Rapture-obsessed Christian websites. Just substitute 'Earth' for 'God', and 'the great turning' for 'End Times', and I'm hard pressed to spot the difference.

Even religious journalists ("We're doomed without a green religion" - Andrew Brown, the Guardian), and professors of religion and ethnography ("Dark Green Religion: Nature Spirituality and the Planetary Future", Bron Taylor) and even judges ("Judge rules activist's beliefs on climate change akin to religion", the Guardian - oh, that right-wing rag, the Guardian!) can see it.

Clownfish
So you can't be an environmentalist without being a looney. I am glad your mindset is not the norm. That sort of thinking is the same as those who would use Hitler or Marxism as the icons of atheism, to demonise the idea without the need for rational debate.

What is lunacy is the continual degradation of the environemnt to the detriment of man and other living organisms. We cannot avoid the science, plants return oxygen to the environment - we need forests. We need fresh clean water - we all know what happens to human societies when there is no potable water.

It is about balancing human economic needs (however defined) with the essential human need to care for the planet that sustains them.

Plain and simple - no looney thinking there - only science.