Terry Cowgill

The Eco-Unity Platform

October 29, 2006 on 5:53 pm | In Global Warming, Main, National |

Amid the polarizing din that passes for political discourse these days, it is encouraging anytime a subject emerges that has even the remote possibility of uniting left and right. And speaking of common ground:

My colleague Tom Shachtman wrote a very interesting piece on the op-ed page of last week’s Lakeville Journal. In case you missed it, Tom took a look back at a 1967 essay by a UCLA historian arguing the roots of much of the earth’s environmental problems were the result “the Judeo-Christian tradition that gave man permission to dominate the earth and all the creatures in it.” The historian’s theory was that man’s hegemonical tendencies had their roots in Genesis 1:28. That would be the same verse in which man is given “dominion over the earth.”

I can already hear my conservative friends shaking their heads in disbelief at such heresy (is it possible to hear heads shaking?). Not to worry. Tom is nothing if not fair. He uses the professor’s thesis as a springboard to examine a growing trend among conservative Christian leaders to take “up the cudgels of environmental issues,” such as global climate change, because they see a moral imperative to do so. And they see a responsibility for preservation in man’s “dominion over the earth.” A sort of Christian take on environmental stewardship.

I hope the idea gains currency among leaders of the religious right because it’s not in anyone’s interest to wreck the planet, Genesis 1:28 notwithstanding.

And there are other areas in which the right and left have agreed. How about the strange alliance that developed in the 1990s between conservative Christians and feminists on the subject of pornography?

And there may another subject that has the potential to unite left and right — immigration. An Oct. 19 letter to the editor in the Boston Globe was recently forwarded to me. It contained some very fierce and unfair rhetoric about corporations — a favorite target of the left — but it also contained a sliver of hope:

During the last 20 years, illegal aliens have wiped out African-American janitors in Southern California, dry-wallers throughout California, and meat packers throughout the Midwest, just to name a few displaced American worker segments. Hourly wages have fallen in all those sectors.

See the potential here? Liberals can oppose illegal immigration on the grounds that it’s “wiping out” economic justice for U.S. citizens, particularly the working class and people of color. Conservatives can oppose illegals for the same reasons they always have — the strain they put on the social services and the reluctance of too many illegals to assimilate.

Not bad. Now if the two sides can only find common ground on the war in Iraq.