Lord May of Oxford, the president of the British Science Festival, said that although religion may have once helped to stabilise human societies, the rise in fundamentalism could make it more difficult to bring about the sort of high-level co-operation needed to tackle the global problems of climate change and a growing human population.Actually, I suppose fundamentalism could help if a religion has a new revelation from God telling them to stop making so much CO2!
But I can't be too critical: I did make some comments here recently worrying that religious inspired fatalism (eg, encouraged by the belief that the world is about to end) acts as a disincentive for big projects to help ensure the survival of humanity.
To that extent, fundamentalism could be a danger to environmental causes. But there is one comment in the article that seems far off the mark:
The rise of fundamentalism, not just in the Muslim world but in the United States, and within the Catholic church, could actually make global co-operation more difficult at a time when an unprecedented level of teamwork was needed, Lord May saidI don't see a hell of a lot of evidence for a surge in "fundamentalism" in the Catholic Church.
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