Lost connection with Mother Earth

Meanwhile, also over at the beeb ecologist Stephen Harding waxes lyrical about the Gaia hypothesis and our lost connection to Mother Earth which is responsible for our wanton destruction of the environment.

While I'm sympathetic to the cause, I feel talk like this alienates the layperson from environmentalism. I entertained the Gaia hypothesis when I first learned of it all those years ago, but it's less science and more pot-smoking pseudopaganism than my cerebrum usually deals with. Yes, people have lost their emotional connection with nature (if it ever existed at all), but in this age of internet, iPod and playstation I wonder just how far appealing to people's emotions will get the greens.

What's more, this sort of paganism will never win over a society that is becoming more conservative and reactionary, more religious and more anti-science.

Surely a cold, hard analysis of our human contingency is the best argument: regardless of what we think or feel about the environment, or what supernatural forces we may believe will save us, we destroy it at our peril.