Whether the Republican Party's attack on nature is based on corporate piracy or fundamentalist ideology, the result is similar. With environmental laws removed as braking mechanisms, the role of the federal government as environmental guardian is repealed, and industry is given free rein to destroy.

In such a brave new world, office holders and bureaucrats, embracing the corporate or fundamentalist worldview, will be unable to see, or may even willfully engineer, what many ecologists recognize as the looming global environmental crisis.

In the early days of the current administration, the news was full of instances where Bush appointed foxes to guard the henhouse: Gale Norton, a mining industry lobbyist, became secretary of the interior. Steven Griles, a lobbyist for major coal interests, was appointed Norton's second-in-command. The list goes on.

Now, the Washington Post reports a more disturbing trend. Bush "has begun a broad restructuring of the scientific advisory committees that guide federal policy," says the Post. These largely anonymous committees of scientists, lawyers and academics make recommendations vital to determining health and environmental risk.

Replaced, for example, were 15 members of a 17-member Department of Health and Human Services committee that assesses the impacts on human health of low-level exposure to environmental chemicals. New Bush-imposed panel appointees include chemical-industry advocates and a California scientist who helped defend Pacific Gas and Electric Co. against the real-life Erin Brockovich.

More troubling is W. David Hager, one of Bush's nominees to the influential Food and Drug Administration panel on women's health policy. Hager, says Maureen Dowd of the New York Times, has a résumé "more impressive for theology than gynecology." Hager emphasizes the restorative power of Jesus Christ in one's life and recommends specific Scripture readings to treat headaches, eating disorders and premenstrual syndrome. One wonders how his radical fundamentalism may cloud his scientific objectivity.

The administration has repeatedly turned a blind eye to good science. When the National Academy of Sciences came to Bush in 2001 with a report saying that global warming was real, serious and human-caused, he ignored it. When the Environmental Protection Agency sent a 2002 report to the United Nations saying that global warming will result in "rising seas, melting ice caps and glaciers, ecological system disruption, floods, heat waves, and more dangerous storms," Bush rejected it as a document "put out by the bureaucracy."

Marty Jezer, writing for the Online Common Dreams News Center, notes, "One has to go back to the Stalinist era of the Soviet Union to find such a display of political arrogance and ignorance of science."

At that time, Trofim Lysenko told Josef Stalin that Charles Darwin's theory of evolution and Gregor Mendel's theory of heredity were wrongheaded "bourgeois science," not suited to a communist state. Lysenko's ideologically based science professed that the environment can alter genes and cause evolutionary change within a single generation. Under the right conditions, he said, a wheat seed can produce rye. Or a tropical palm seed, soaked in cold water, can have its genetics retuned to thrive in a chilly climate.

With Stalin's blessing, Lysenko purged Russia's scientific leadership; researchers were silenced, sent to Siberia, killed. His principles were used to guide Soviet agriculture, with disastrous results. While the rest of the world explored genetic science, leading to the green revolution, Russia resisted, declaring evolution's tenets "reactionary and decadent."

Lysenko's theories were practiced on collective farms on a massive scale, displacing traditional agricultural knowledge and killing millions in the Russian famine of 1931-33.

His beliefs were exported to China, says Joseph Becker, author of "Hungry Ghosts: Mao's Secret Famine." Farmers were told that seeds of the same species act like "comrades," and wouldn't compete with each other. Chinese farmers were ordered to plant up to 15 million seedlings per 2.5 acres, rather than the scientifically proven 1.5 million, helping bring on history's worst famine. An estimated 30 million people starved to death between 1958 and 1961.

Lysenkoism, repudiated by the Soviets in the 1960s, stands as a warning to those now controlling the U.S. federal government. When truth in science is sacrificed to corporate ideology or religious-right theology, we ignore the true workings of the natural world at our peril. When the bottom line and/or religious fervor rather than sound science guide our decisions, we are traveling blind and at the mercy of unforeseen consequences.

But it seems that Bush has already taken a plank from the Texas Republican Party platform. In a move to blunt new U.S. global-warming research, he has launched a four-year study to ascertain "precisely how much climate change between 1950 and now was human-caused." Prominent climate experts, like Princeton University's Michael Oppenheimer, say the study may merely rehash issues most scientists consider settled. Critics see the new study as intended to delay federal action on the problem -- years lost in Lysenko-like denial, as we edge toward an unseen precipice that is the threshold of runaway global warming. "The danger is that while they're continuing to do the research, the window of opportunity to avoid dangerous global warming is closing," said Oppenheimer.

Again, look to Texas to see what impact a worldview "based upon biblical principles" can have. Last fall, the Texas Board of Education rejected several environmental science textbooks, including one titled "Environmental Science: Creating a Sustainable Environment," according to Audubon Magazine. Critics forced the book ban primarily on ideological grounds, calling the text "vitriol against Western civilization and its primary belief systems." Another science book was approved only after the publisher agreed to remove entire sections on climate change, which were deemed offensive. The decision reaches far beyond the Lone Star State: Texas is America's second-largest textbook buyer, so the expurgated texts will likely be sold in other states.

In 2000, the Kansas school board briefly removed Darwinian evolution from the state's science standards and tests, while similar campaigns have been pushed in over 20 states, says People for the American Way. Last spring, two Republican congressmen from Ohio, John Boehner and Steve Chabot, pressured their state's school board unsuccessfully to introduce creationism, disguised as "intelligent design," into school curricula.

Here, the parallels with Lysenko become uncomfortably close. Should efforts to de-emphasize the teaching of evolutionary theory actually succeed, one wonders how we could hope to confront tough environmental problems -- training scientists, for example, to fight the virulent new strains of bacteria that have evolved resistance to potent antibiotics. Or, for another example: In his book "The Beak of the Finch," environmental journalist Jonathan Weiner tells how the U.S. cotton industry is threatened with collapse because of Heliothis virescens, a moth that has evolved total resistance to all pesticides. Frustrated entomologist Martin Taylor notes the irony of the equivalence between the Cotton Belt and Bible Belt. "It's amazing," Taylor notes, "that cotton growers are having to deal with these pests in the very states whose legislatures are so hostile to the theory of evolution. Because it is evolution itself they are struggling against in their fields every season. These people are trying to ban the teaching of evolution while their own cotton crops are failing because of evolution. How can you be a creationist farmer anymore?"

For those who think the teaching of environmental science is safe in our schools, or that evolution vs. creationism is a dead issue, listen to this comment from Tom DeLay, one of the most powerful men in Congress. He has suggested that the Columbine, Colo., school shootings occurred "because our school systems teach our children that they are nothing but glorified apes who have evolutionized out of some primordial mud." With such leaders at the helm, it becomes necessary to ask where precisely we are being led.

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