Towards the end of the nineteenth century, when it became obvious to western tribes of Native Americans that the conquest of the continent by European immigrants was pretty much unstop- pable, and the treaties that were supposed to protect native rights were going to be ignored, a mystical resistance movement arose.

Inspired by the visions of messianic shamans, and fueled by the desperate and deluded hopes of people helplessly watching their way of life being wiped out, this movement was called the Ghost Dance.

The name was derived from the spirits of ancestors who guided the shamans’ visions, and from the literal hours -long dancing that their followers would engage in to induce an ecstatic trance. For it was only in the blindly irrational throes of these trances that warriors would throw themselves into suicidal charges against the bristling and overwhelming power of the US Army. Needless to say, the Ghost Dance was quickly and ruthlessly suppressed.

Here in the beginning of the twenty-first century, as we again witness a way of life disappearing under the onslaught of economic globalization, with whole mountains being scraped forever from the face of the Earth, and rivers being buried and fouled with sludge and silt and deadly chemicals, and species disappearing at a faster rate than when the dinosaurs became extinct, and corporate evil running rampant and virtually unchecked, I often find myself thinking about the Ghost Dance. In fact, I sometimes wonder if the environmental movement isn’t a modern version of it.

Perhaps this is simply the fleeting despair of a counterculture veteran, graying with worry that his own youthful vision of leaving a world changed for the better -- a vision that still inspires many of his contemporaries -- is no more real than the delusions of the Ghost Dancers.

Recognizing what a privileged responsibility it is to have this venue to express my thoughts, I usually try to uplift our readers with the hope that, no matter how powerful the opposition, the actions they take to save the environment can effectively counter the stark and bitter realities I so remorsefully chronicle here.

But sometimes a piece of news can hit you like a blow to the chest, and it’s hard to maintain your equilibrium. And for those of us who are all too exquisitely aware of how tenuous our planetary ecology is, we’ve had a couple of serious blows in recent weeks.

The untimely death of Donnella Meadows hit particularly hard. An environmentalist of international renown, she was someone who not only talked the talk, but walked the walk, living out her beliefs as an organic farmer in New England. In 1972, she published her highly influential analysis of the finite nature of Earth’s ecological systems, The Limits to Growth. A professor at Dartmouth University, she was also the founder of the Sustainability Institute.

Many of us in West Virginia knew her from her syndicated column, "The Global Citizen," which appeared weekly in the Charleston Gazette. Her writing was characterized by a clarity of vision and an optimistic spirit that seemed unquenchable. To have her voice stilled now, when she was only 59 years old and was needed more than ever, is an incalculable loss for all of us living on Earth.

The second bit of news we’ve received recently was not as unexpected, and actually came in waves. What was disturbing was not so much the news itself, which only confirmed what some of us have been thinking for years, but the public reaction to it. I’m referring to the reports released by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the United Nations-organized consortium of climate scientists that has spent the past decade monitoring the progress of global warming.

In these latest reports, the IPCC consensus is that the planetary climate is warming much faster than was antici- pated in their 1995 report -- faster than in any other period in the last 400,000 years. The range of projected global temperature increase for the next century is double what was projected earlier, and is directly attributed to human industrial activity. Also, extreme weather events like floods, droughts and hurricanes that have increased in frequency and intensity over the past few decades are linked to global climate change, and they are predicted to occur with even greater frequency and intensity over the course of the next century. In other words, the scientific consensus is that global warming is here now, and it’s getting worse.

If we lived in a world that was guided by common sense rather than transnational profit margins, the release of these IPCC reports would have unleashed a flurry of media dialogue and emergency high-level government meetings about what steps are needed to be taken immediately to address this unprecedented crisis. Instead, the news created barely a blip on media radar screens; and during the same week the reports were released, elected represent- atives in the government of the nation most responsible for choking the atmosphere with fossil fuel emissions talked openly of loosening regulations on pollution-emitting power plants, increas- ing the domestic production of coal and oil, and subjecting one of the planet’s most pristine natural environments to the production of even more fossil fuels.

In an insane world, sanity looks like madness.

I suppose that’s why I see environmentalists as modern-day Ghost Dancers -- driven stark raving sane by a vision of the world that only makes sense when viewed through a sacred prism. Like the Ghost Dance, environmentalism is at its heart a religious movement, based in faith. Ex-governor Underwood was right, for once, when he told an audience of his business cronies that environmentalists see the world differently than they do. Indeed, for us the Earth is not a lifeless commodity to be exploited for its commercial value, but something holy and transcendent, and teeming with a life that when experienced fully -- as a dance, let’s say -- leads to a kind of spiritual ecstasy.

For the pragmatists and utilitarians who rule this world, puffed up with their own power and self-importance, we environmentalists probably look as ridiculous -- and certainly no less threatening -- than the tragic remnant of painted natives dancing for their lives appeared to the heavily armed soldiers of the US cavalry. It’s clear that’s how we’re depicted in their propaganda.

But what has also become clear a little more than a century after the last Ghost Dance uprising, when the destiny of Western culture has made itself supremely manifest all over the globe, is that the truly suicidal impulse was not on the side of the dancing natives, who scattered when they realized that their magic wouldn’t protect them from the soldiers’ bullets. Rather, it was planted like a dark seed deep in the consciousness of their imperial conquerors, and now is coming fully to flower, worldwide, in all its cruelly hideous and destructive glory.

In that light, and in the face of all the mighty powers and principalities arrayed against us, there is only one thing environmentalists can do.

Keep dancing.