Admit it: They seemed just a little subhuman, didn’t they — lying naked in a pile, as a grinning American soldier loomed overhead?
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This fall Chelsea Green will introduce a new line of books focusing on religion. As religion plays an increasingly central role in our political and environmental landscape, we feel it is important to take a deeper look at this religiosity and examine the motivations of those who embrace its fundamentalist wing.

One of our new authors Matthew Sleeth is a leader of the eco-evangelism movement. He is a evangelical Christian who believes all Christians are called to protect God’s creation. Sleeth wrote the following Earth Day editorial which appeared on AlterNet as well as a number of newspapers around the country. His book Serve God, Save the Planet will be available in early 2006.

On April 22, we celebrated the 35th anniversary of Earth Day. This year, however, was also special for other reasons. This year all living things around the planet and secular environmentalists have a new ally: evangelical Christians.

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What does the phrase “Swiss financiers” conjure up: wide-eyed radicals with their heads in the clouds, or steely-eyed realists for whom accurate information is the coin of the realm?
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You’re a certified, granola-crunching tree-hugger. Friday, April 29 is Arbor Day.

You know what to do: Plant a few huggables. Do your part. Make the place prettier, pump up that carbon cycle.

You’ll feel good about yourself, and you should.
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Lord Halifax once wrote that “The best political party is but a kind of conspiracy against the rest of the nation.”

Today, the Republican Party’s conspiracy is running full throttle, usurping hard-won liberties and vital protections that all Americans hold dear.

Their strategy is simple and powerful and two-fold: weaken or do away with laws and regulations that protect us and the environment–virtually ensuring greater harm will come to ordinary citizens like you–while making it more difficult to seek legal retribution–to sue corporations or any wrong-doer to protect ourselves, our families, and our health.
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It’s out there somewhere with my name on it, cavorting in a vernal pool: the larva of the first mosquito that will bite me this year.
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I was striding through a subway tunnel somewhere under deepest Manhattan in early 1970 when I first encountered the term. A poster was mounted on the corridor wall — bearing, if memory serves, one of those riveting Apollo photographs of the Big Blue Marble and the words “Earth Day, April 22.”

My response was concise and easily articulated: “Huh?”
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I stumbled into journalism more or less by accident, in what was supposed to be a brief diversion from writing the Great American Novel.

Twenty-five years went by.

I won’t say some good stuff didn’t happen, but I sure hadn’t realized that quarters of centuries could move so fast.
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Tom Delay wants to revamp the courts and hold judges accountable for not bowing to the political needs of the legislature. President Bush is asserting his executive authority to detain Muslims indefinitely without charges and without representation. It is time for the judicial branch to step up and defend us before Congress and the Bush administration erode all our civil liberties and turn the judiciary into a puppet of corporate and political America.

There is a group of lawyers who are doing just that. The Center for Constitutional Rights lists more than 200 attorneys who are working on 140 Guantanamo prisoners’ habeas corpus petitions and “challenging the government to explain why it is holding them.” Read more about these attorneys and their clients in the Monterey Herlad.