The great revival has already begun. It promises to continue without let-up until well into the twenty-first century. It is a religious revival in the strictest sense. As George Grant pointed out several years ago, a religion is a system of belief that may or may not include a reference to a "higher power" and may or may not be true. In Latin re-ligare is "to bind together" and so religion is understood as binding individuals together in such a way that their lives are provided with a consistency of purpose and meaning that otherwise they would lack. The most important religious revival is not that of the Promise Keepers nor of any other element of what is conventionally called the "religious right". That term is usually employed by those who consider themselves in one way or another outside the "religious right" and so has critical and polemical connotations.

By comparison to the great revival, however, the religious right is small stuff indeed. The focus of the great revival is not so trivial as the family, decent domestic politics, or the Quebec Question. It is ecumenic, even cosmic in its concern, as all such evangelical movements should be. It seeks to save the very planet, as though the planet should be saved like the soul of a sinner.

I am referring, of course, to the religious revival that we usually refer to as environmentalism or the green movement. In essence it is a political religion that is accompanied by extensive sermons and proselytizing in the idiom of "science". But it is not science in the proper sense of the term, namely, a rational account of reality. On the contrary, environmentalist rhetoric seeks to bind together the population of the planet-itself a religious symbol-and mobilize them in salvific action. The costs of failure are as inflated as the promises or hopes of success. Life on earth will be extinguished or transfigured beyond redemption. Failure of the green movement entails ecological disaster, global warming, and other apocalyptic outcomes.

So step up and save the planet!

No doubt a romantic rejection of the benefits of an industrial economy or of "capitalism" helps inspire some of the religious converts, much as Stoicism had an impact on early Christianity. More important, however, is the experiential core of environmentalism, the search to harmonize the life of a human being with non-human beings, which may be alive, as with animal rights advocates and tree-huggers, or merely in being, as with those who consider pollution to be exclusively a chemical rather than spiritual phenomenon. Ritual pollution, however, could be washed away by means of appropriate rituals, penance, or effort. The new kind of pollution, our new revivalists say, needs a different kind of abatement effort and a different kind of penance, called de-industrialization. Hence the Yellowstone to Yukon, Y2Y, corridor, bereft of human footfall, is but a first step in saving the planet.

To non-believers in the new religion, however, these efforts are comic precisely because the votaries, advocates, and missionaries cannot see their activities as ritual. Perhaps even more comic, the environmental revivalists seek to recover an experience of nature and of the cosmos that antedated neolithic culture. A conscious return to unconscious or proto-conscious experience looks like an unpromising endeavour to reasonable human beings-but then, as Socrates pointed out to Euthyphro, reasonable human beings are unlikely to be bound together by such beliefs or even systems of belief, in the first place. The sobering reflections of reason, on the other hand, are unlikely to influence the intoxicating appeal of environmentalism. Which is why the mania of the great revival will continue well into the next century.

Barry Cooper is professor of political science at the University of Calgary.