Sermon from the height of hypocrisy

As actor Toni Collette proved last week, a green religious mania is on the loose — one that threatens our reason, and much more.

Collette, who first won fame in Muriel’s Wedding, told of filming part of her latest movie, Japanese Story, at BHP’s giant Mt. Whaleback iron ore mine in the Pilbara.

“That’s a disgusting mine, where they actually shot a huge explosion while we were there and I just felt sick about it,” she told ABC television’s Enough Rope. “Let’s all rape the earth.”

Later she added: “Well, most of the time I do have voices in my head. Um, there was one kind of stand-out moment where the type of pseudo-spiritual experience you hear people talking about kind of happened to me.

“We were actually driving from Karratha . . . and it was just stunning. We had some beautiful music on and we were just watching this land unendlessly passing. It was just unbelievable and I just had tears . . .

“I had this overwhelming sensation I wanted to hug everything, love everybody. I felt so connected. . . . It’s much more natural to be out there or in any kind of nature than live in cities.”

As you’d know, I’ve quoted dozens of other culture-makers saying much the same thing. And in telling Enough Rope’s studio audience of her religious ecstasy, Collette clearly assumed, and rightly, that they’d be sympathetic. They’d felt that pull, too.

Yet in this one passage is all the irrationality of the green religion, all its self-absorption, contempt of humans, and lazy condemnation of all it took for our society to make the life-sustaining goods no green devotee could give up.

The “disgusting” Mt. Whaleback mine not only helps to provide some 2,700 jobs in the Pilbara alone, but gives us enough ore each day to make steel for 100,000 cars — cars just like the one Collette drove around in to see the bush.

In fact, almost everything about Collette’s religious experience was a product of our rich, capitalist society, and not the empty Outback she was gazing on through her tears.

Without a car, Collette wouldn’t have seen what she saw. Without a modern electrical car stereo, she couldn’t have heard the “beautiful music” that put her in the mood. Without land-raped petrol, she’d have got nowhere, and without airconditioned pampering, the Outback would have felt a lot less homely. And what did she eat out there?

It’s no coincidence that not one Aborigine now chooses to live in the “natural” way Collette seems to recommend without living it herself. Nor is it trivial that what made her want to “love everybody” was not a human, but a desert.

This is the self-hating, irrational, nature-worshipping religion creeping up on us. How frightening that it has so many powerful defenders.

— Andrew Bolt is a columnist for the Herald Sun in Melbourne, Australia. This column originally appeared on Sept. 29.