“Recently I was foolish enough to try to reason with an environmentalist,” wrote Stanford economist Thomas Sowell. “But it became obvious that he had his mind made up and didn’t want to hear any evidence to the contrary. The pope is more likely to have read Karl Marx than an environmentalist is to have read even a single book that criticized environmentalism.”

One might say a lot about the Pope and Marx, but I want to focus on Sowell’s juxtaposition of the ideologies of socialism and environmentalism. Socialism is an economic and political ideology, but surely environmentalism is just a concern for the environment?

Sowell conflated these ideas because socialism and environmentalism have become opposite sides of the same coin. Socialists want to ban private ownership and favor government ownership and control over the means of production. Socialists believe that removing individual freedom of economic and political action results in a reduction of inequity and thereby brings about a just society in which everyone is equal.

But that seems a million light years away from the idea of cleaning up a roadside, protecting rare birds, or concern about polluted water. In such context the word ‘ideology’ seems inappropriate to apply to concern for a healthy environment. Most people, like myself, believe that it is proper and good to seek a fruitful and beautiful environment. If that is environmentalism then count me in.

Patrick Moore, a founder and past president of Greenpeace who has since left the group, prefers to call himself a ‘sensible environmentalist’ because he appreciates that the environmentalist movement has changed. It is, he says, no longer science based but “a political activist movement.” It has taken on the form of a total ideology erasing boundaries between radical activism and sensible environmentalism.

Moore identifies the point where the ideology of socialism co-opted ‘sensible’ environmentalism. In an interview with the Vancouver Sun he said, “The collapse of world communism and the fall of the Berlin Wall during the 1980s added to the trend toward extremism. The Cold War was over and the peace movement was largely disbanded. The peace movement had been mainly Western-based and anti-American in its leanings. Many of its members moved into the environmental movement, bringing with them their neo-Marxist, far-left agendas. To a considerable extent the environmental movement was hijacked by political and social activists who learned to use green language to cloak agendas that had more to do with anti-capitalism and anti-globalization than with science or ecology.”

Dany Cohn-Bendit, co-president of the group European Greens–European Free Alliance, exemplifies the all-too-common Marxist-Green connection. When he transformed himself from Dany the Red into Dany the Green he surfed the fashionable green political wave onto a deeper Red tide.

Cohn-Bendit said, “We have a project for Europe, an idea—the ecological transformation of our way of production and our way of life.” Says Dany the Green: “It’s for the survival of mankind.”

Self-described socialist activist Tom Athanasiou, director of U.S.-based EcoEquity, wrote “[E]nvironmentalism is only now reaching its political ...