Welcome to Doomsday

The influence of the evangelical Christian right on the Bush administration has had a mostly unnoticed impact on America's environmental policy. While some take God’s granting of dominion over the earth to man as a call to good stewardship of our planet, many evangelicals distrust science and disdain environmental protections. They live in anticipation of one event: the Rapture, when Christ will return to cleanse the earth while the true believers are transported to heaven. For those who believe that the Rapture and the destruction of the world are imminent, there is no need to be concerned about saving the planet from environmental catastrophe.

Welcome to Doomsday is an investigation into the coupling of ideology and theology, in particular the intrusion of religion into political life, in America today. Global climate change is a rapid, possibly irreversible occurrence, yet the stance taken by the White House in both international and domestic arenas is one of both ignorance and disbelief. Appeasing the influential agendas of corporations, as well as the uncompromising dominant beliefs of evangelical groups, the Bush administration has firmly established a disastrous record of ignoring the urgency of potentially devastating changing climate.

Welcome to Doomsday is a passionate call to save the planet from the forces not only of greed and exploitation but from those who associate its destruction with a spiritual apocalypse. Written by the compelling and articulate Bill Moyers, this is essential reading for anyone interested in the current dismal state of environmental policy as well as in the growing power of the evangelical movement in the United States.

BILL MOYERS is the former host of NOW with Bill Moyers on PBS. He was one of the organizers of the Peace Corps, spokesperson for President Lyndon Johnson, publisher of Newsday, senior correspondent for CBS News, and producer of many of public television’s groundbreaking series. He is the winner of more than thirty Emmy Awards, and the author of the bestselling books Listening to America, A World of Ideas, and Healing and the Mind. He lives in New York.

BILL MCKIBBEN is a former staff writer for The New Yorker. His books include Hundred Dollar Holiday, Maybe One, The End of Nature, The Age of Missing Information and Hope, Human and Wild. McKibben is a frequent contributor to a wide variety of publications, including The New York Review of Books, Outside, and The New York Times. He lives with his wife and daughter in the Adirondack Mountains of New York.