Noah Was an Environmentalist

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


Shortly after Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, I was touring the ravaged Lower Ninth Ward with local environmental justice advocate Margie Eugene-Richard. Convinced that God needed to be reinserted into the environmental debate, Richard had recently graduated from theology school. We were driving that day through a post-apocalyptic landscape of boats dangling in trees and houses smothering cars, and God was clearly on her mind. “Wake up,” she said to an unseen congregation. “As it was in the day of Noah, so shall it be on the day of the Son of Man. Get together.”

Nearly a year after the hurricane struck, many evangelical Christians seem to have heeded Richard’s advice. Or at least started listening to some unlikely prophets. An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore’s global warming opus, has earned rave reviews on the aptly dubbed website Inconvenient Christians. The website is helping build on the work of the Evangelical Environmental Network, a group that has angered some fundamentalists by seeking to broaden the right-wing conception of family values. Some interesting blogs have begun to chronicle this nascent movement, among them, God’s Green Thumb, published by a student at Pontifical University in Rome.

WE'LL BE BLUNT:

We need to start raising significantly more in donations from our online community of readers, especially from those who read Mother Jones regularly but have never decided to pitch in because you figured others always will. We also need long-time and new donors, everyone, to keep showing up for us.

In "It's Not a Crisis. This Is the New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, how brutal it is to sustain quality journalism right now, what makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there, and why support from readers is the only thing that keeps us going. Despite the challenges, we're optimistic we can increase the share of online readers who decide to donate—starting with hitting an ambitious $300,000 goal in just three weeks to make sure we can finish our fiscal year break-even in the coming months.

Please learn more about how Mother Jones works and our 47-year history of doing nonprofit journalism that you don't find elsewhere—and help us do it with a donation if you can. We've already cut expenses and hitting our online goal is critical right now.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

We need to start raising significantly more in donations from our online community of readers, especially from those who read Mother Jones regularly but have never decided to pitch in because you figured others always will. We also need long-time and new donors, everyone, to keep showing up for us.

In "It's Not a Crisis. This Is the New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, how brutal it is to sustain quality journalism right now, what makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there, and why support from readers is the only thing that keeps us going. Despite the challenges, we're optimistic we can increase the share of online readers who decide to donate—starting with hitting an ambitious $300,000 goal in just three weeks to make sure we can finish our fiscal year break-even in the coming months.

Please learn more about how Mother Jones works and our 47-year history of doing nonprofit journalism that you don't find elsewhere—and help us do it with a donation if you can. We've already cut expenses and hitting our online goal is critical right now.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate