ON THE OTHER HAND, as the economic worldview of Father Robert Sirico's Acton Institute goes to show, the crew doesn't always get along on Noah's ark. Founded in 1990, the institute champions the belief that God supports free-market capitalism. Two years ago Sirico gathered more than two dozen theologians, economists, and environmental experts at a conference center in West Cornwall, Connecticut, to discuss what they saw as the alarming direction of religious environmentalism. Out of that meeting came the Cornwall Declaration on Environmental Stewardship, a statement of principles that attacks many of mainstream environmentalism's most deeply held assumptions. "Many people mistakenly view humans as principally consumers and polluters rather than producers and stewards," according to the Cornwall Declaration. "Consequently, they ignore our potential, as bearers of God's image, to add to the earth's abundance." Overpopulation and rampant species loss are "unfounded or undue concerns." On global warming, they point out that some scientists believe the worldwide rise in temperatures may be connected more to solar activity than to the human release of greenhouse gases.

"We've witnessed the rise of 'green spirituality,' which is supposed to blend nicely with traditional faith," says Sirico, a 49-year-old diocesan priest who heads up a religious community called the St. Philip Neri House in Kalamazoo, Michigan. While he repudiates the tendency of right-wing antienvironmentalism to reject the moral necessity of good stewardship, Sirico charges that left-wing groups—"epitomized by the work of some in the leadership of the National Council of Churches"—use environmental rhetoric to forward agendas having more to do with class warfare and anticorporatism than with healing the planet.

"Increasingly, sermons are integrating this political worldview, which is hostile to a free economy and human creativity, to the detriment of the natural world and the human family," Sirico warns. "I saw the need to chart a balanced course between these two extremes [of left and right], one that is grounded in sound theological reflection and recognizes the scientific method and the free economy as essential to achieving sound environmental stewardship and furthering the health and welfare of man."

Looking for verses to quote? ICES member Robert Royal, president of the Faith and Reason Institute in Washington, D.C., and author of The Virgin and the Dynamo: Use and Abuse of Religion in Environmental Debates, can supply them. Consider Genesis 1:28: "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it." Or the passage in the Sermon on the Mount in which Jesus asks his followers to consider the birds of the air: "Are you not of more value than they?" (Matthew 6:26). "The Bible asserts both a hierarchy with humans at the top among the earthly creatures (though not the heavenly), and the greater value of human beings than other living things," writes Royal.

What galls some ICES members is the holy aura that has settled upon issues like global warming. "I oppose the elevation of environmentalism to an unchallenged spot on a sacred hierarchy," says Rabbi Daniel Lapin. "It's as if open-mindedness and a willingness to explore all areas of a problem are virtues except when someone intones 'environment' in a prayerlike posture. All of a sudden all bets are off? I don't think that's intellectually honest.

"I also don't care for the pantheistic theme that runs through certain areas of the debate—the tendency to view human beings as scabs on the face of the earth," Lapin continues. "As one who comes from a tradition that's had experience with being identified as undesirable, I don't think it's healthy to assert that people are of questionable moral legitimacy."