Because the roots of the modern environmental movement, which has caused so much economic destruction, are in California, so well written about by Alston Chase in his seminal books Playing God in Yellowstone and In a Dark Wood—it is helpful to re-examine those roots occasionally.
The essential cosmology undergirding and driving environmentalists developed and grew in California.
Though of ancient Gnostic roots—the primal Christian heresy—which concluded in the expression of its organized faithful, that everything is sacred save modern humanity and most particularly modern humanity shaping and controlling the environment by building dams, skyscrapers, roads and housing.
The ideal for the California Cosmologists—immortalized by Chase who reveals their relentless drive to dominate human activity under the rubric of organic unity—is that nature is allowed freedom and humanity keeps out of the way.
Heaven is that future world where all the rivers run free, flooding being a natural occurrence humans allow and stay away from; all gardens become jungles and the very rocks have their voice.
A perusal of the platform of the Foundation for Deep Ecology, a foundational think tank of the modern environmental movement headquartered in Sausalito, California, reveals the philosophical/theological base.
