What Rebecca Solnit is arguing in her excellent Orion Magazine article this month is that environmentalists have become the caricature the right paints of them. They often really are a Tax-Raising, Latte-Drinking, Sushi-Eating, Volvo-Driving, New York Times-Reading, Body-Piercing, Hollywood-Loving, Left-Wing Freak Show.
And, Solnit adds: they hate country music, without actually knowing country music. [To a southerner like me, that's a lot more unforgiveable than a penchant for four-dollar cups of coffee.] Liberal elites don't much like poor white people, or their music.
Solnit isn't addressing issues of faith, but I know many folks who have often felt similarly despised by the left for their evangelical beliefs.
Such elite, exclusivist attitudes have weakened the environmental movement. It might even be time to get beyond the idea of an "environmental" movement and to think more broadly about family, economics, class, race, simplicity, and justice than the title "environmental" allows.
Spend some time with the article–it's free on the Orion Magazine website, but I'll tell you, there is no more valuable use of forest resources than the print version of Orion, and this issue is still on the bookstore shelves. You have permission to buy the dead-tree version, just keep it or pass it on.
Tilling and Keeping 