Conservatives, fundamentalist Christians may be predisposed to apathy toward environmentalism, says researcher

Unfortunately, Whitehurst says, this fear-based response is only effective toward short-term threats, and cites a study showing conservatives tend to be people less able to deal with contradiction and ambiguity than Liberals. Whithurst says the only response is for people to stop assuming God will clean up their mistakes, and to understand that environmental degradation is not just something that affects future generations anymore. It's now a more immediate threat.

• Why do so many conservatives yawn, laugh derisively or change the subject at the first mention of Earth Day?
• Reactive thinking is a rehearsed mental security system of sorts, composed of unexamined assumptions and learned replies that defend the individual from complex, unpleasant or frightening realities.
• Reactive thinking accounts for most of the trouble that environmentalists are running up against, now that the pollution-friendly Bush administration is in control.
• This applies especially to the conservative Christian Bush supporters who should, being Christian, care that human beings are ruining the world that they believe God created in seven days.
• Conservative Christians need clean air and water as much as anyone else (the former is especially difficult to package for the rich), but many have been taught to sneer at even the mention of environmental protection.
• Human beings are designed to react to dangers by immediately scanning their environment for threats and escape routes, then using either the "fight" of "flight" response, and then, once the threat is minimized, avoided or eliminated, reflecting on what caused that particular danger and how to avoid it in the future.
• More anxious individuals will resort to reactive thinking for reassurance and anxiety control.
• A recent study found that conservatives tend to be more anxious and less able to tolerate conflicting facts and ambiguity, than are liberals.
• Yet another is the reality that more and more Americans are coming down with asthma, emphysema, lung cancers and other horrors because the nation's air is becoming saturated with something called "particulates", tiny little nasties that blow around in the wind, do not respect state boundaries, and lodge in your lungs.
• As we watch pollution ruining our world while our leaders do nothing to stop it---especially when it's harming not just a fish we've never heard of but our own health---progressives get the blues.