Mark (Steyn), regarding environmentalism as a religion, I was struck by this passage in the New Yorker profile on Van Jones. He had an existential crisis as a mere community organizer until he was struck with the revelation of Julia Butteryfly Hill and her sacrificial love. The crisis:

Around this time, as Jones was winning the “superjail” fight, he began to suffer a crisis of confidence. The crisis was not just professional; some days, he felt barely able to get out of bed. “Nobody does this stuff for pure reasons,” he told me. “You may eventually wind up with a more pure outcome, like a Gandhi or a Mandela, but no young radical is running around with pure motives. I certainly wasn’t motivated only by love for the people. I was trying to find some kind of community, or some kind of sense of belonging, or some sense of redemption through heroic deeds. I wasn’t being honest with myself about it, and it all just proved to be incredibly fragile.”

And then he went to hear Hill speak:

Listening to Hill that evening, Jones found his gloom lifting. “She was just radiant,” he recalled. “She talked about seeing all these trees cut down. She talked about the helicopters they put up, trying to blow her out of the tree. She talked about the timber workers whom she befriended from her perch. And how she won. And what was remarkable was there was not a trace of bitterness in her for these people who had destroyed this forest, and whom she had to spend two years of her life—not two weeks, not two days—putting her body on the line to fight.

Also, in his switch to environmental activist, Jones made an incredibly shrewd career move. A black community organizer with a focus on civil rights doesn’t have a very unique marketing niche. But a black environmental activist? That’s an eye-opener:

He began contacting environmental groups. Most were so eager to shed their all-white image that, knowing next to nothing about him, they invited him to speak to their members and put him on the programs of their conferences.

Here’s my column on the Jones controversy today, by the way.