Save the Earth. Shut down the EPA.

Today is October 15th – Blog Action Day. Today more than 15,000 bloggers will unite to put a single important issue on the front of everyone’s mind – the environment. Each of the bloggers involved will write a post about the environment that represents their unique perspective and opinions on the issue. For my part, I would like to revisit one of the more devastating facts in my recent post, Sustainability: Economic revolution – Ecological necessity, and I would like to consider the political implications of this fact in light of the upcoming presidential election.

Here is the fact:

“The EPA currently regulates less than 10% of the 191 lethal toxins identified by the 1970 Clean Air Act – (entirely a result of the “influential power” of corporate lobbyists)

If I were writing this blog a few months ago I would have descended into an indignant tirade about the evils of corporate lobbyists and the “profit over people” corporations they represent. However this past summer I experienced a serious paradigm shift at The Rutba House which has redirected my focus away from the social ills caused by government ineptitude and corporate complicity and towards the social ills caused by the ineptitude and complicity of “the church”. I no longer believe that the changes I wish to see in the world will come through presidential leadership or congressional oversight. What I learned at The Rutba House is that the primary catalyst for social change and justice in the world should be the church. More broadly, I believe that anything the federal government is doing to promote social justice, provide poverty assistance, protect human rights, and in this case preserve the environment, could be done with more efficiency and effectiveness by an NGO (non-governmental organization) – a category in which we could include “the church”.

Thus I believe the problem with protecting our environment does not find its solution in reforming the EPA; rather the problem is the EPA. I would rather have the money that I am taxed to maintain the ineffective bureaucracy at the EPA redirected to an NGO with a history of passionately protecting the environment. For example, I wonder if The Sierra Club, (the oldest and largest environmental NGO in the U.S.), were in charge of regulating the 191 lethal toxins identified by the 1970 Clean Air Act, would the number of lethal toxins currently regulated be larger or smaller than 19 – it’s hard to imagine they could do much worse. For those with a political mindset, you might be picking up on some libertarian ideology here – less government more private industry. This is indeed true, but while these views may fall most in line with those espoused by the libertarian party, my particular motivation for advancing such views is connected less with privatization and property rights and more with religious conviction and spiritual optimism. I simply believe the church can and should be about the business of bringing “the kingdom of God on earth as it is in heaven.” I have a strong suspicion that if the church had more liberty to operate and more wealth to operate with, we would see less poverty, less injustice, less violence, less corruption, and less environmental degradation in our world.

So how does this translate into a vote at the 2008 presidential ballot box? I would say that to increase the wealth and influence of NGO’s we must first decrease the wealth and influence of the federal government. For NGO’s like the Sierra Club to gather more financial resources and public support to do their work, the EPA must get out of the way, stop hoarding all the wealth, claiming all the responsibility, and abusing the monopoly power it has on environmental policy. Therefore I will be voting for the individual that I believe will most systematically dismantle wasteful, ineffective, and unnecessary federal organizations like the EPA – organizations that drain U.S. citizens of their wealth and rob them of their liberty. In other words, I will be voting for the candidate that I believe will provide the clearest vision of Hope for America.