Michael Crichton claims that the tenets of environmentalism are all about quasi-religious belief:

Eden, the fall of man, the loss of grace, the coming doomsday---these are deeply held mythic structures.

I'm not sure how much I agree with that, but he's right when he says:

I know you haven't read any of what I am about to tell you in the newspaper, because newspapers literally don't report them. I can tell you that DDT is not a carcinogen and did not cause birds to die and should never have been banned. I can tell you that the people who banned it knew that it wasn't carcinogenic and banned it anyway. I can tell you that the DDT ban has caused the deaths of tens of millions of poor people, mostly children, whose deaths are directly attributable to a callous, technologically advanced western society that promoted the new cause of environmentalism by pushing a fantasy about a pesticide, and thus irrevocably harmed the third world. Banning DDT is one of the most disgraceful episodes in the twentieth century history of America. We knew better, and we did it anyway, and we let people around the world die and didn't give a damn.

I can tell you that second hand smoke is not a health hazard to anyone and never was, and the EPA has always known it. I can tell you that the evidence for global warming is far weaker than its proponents would ever admit. I can tell you the percentage the US land area that is taken by urbanization, including cities and roads, is 5%. I can tell you that the Sahara desert is shrinking, and the total ice of Antarctica is increasing. I can tell you that a blue-ribbon panel in Science magazine concluded that there is no known technology that will enable us to halt the rise of carbon dioxide in the 21st century. Not wind, not solar, not even nuclear. The panel concluded a totally new technology-like nuclear fusion-was necessary, otherwise nothing could be done and in the meantime all efforts would be a waste of time. They said that when the UN IPCC reports stated alternative technologies existed that could control greenhouse gases, the UN was wrong.

But it's not just the environmentalists. Compare the materialistic American consumer: Sandra Tsing Loh writes,

In twenty-first-century America our stories have become one and the same: we work to consume, we live to consume, we are what we consume.

She quotes one writer:

"Materialism is not the opposite of spiritualism. Materialism is what you spiritualize when you have plenty of stuff."

I would argue that the far left also serves to fill a similar vaccuum. Nick Cohen slams Noam Chomsky's hypocrisy, summing up his argument as:

Capitalism, particularly American capitalism, is responsible for the world's problems, it runs. Resistance, however perverted, is inevitable. If the resistance is barbaric the barbarism is the fault of capitalism.

And the far right fills a similar vaccuum for others, no doubt. (All 3 links via Arts & Letters Daily).