CAMPUS SUSTAINABILITY: “It’s the new religion, and it’s the new home of the entire liberal agenda,” Katherine Kersten writes in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune of all places:

The Church of Sustainability derives many of its major themes from Judeo-Christianity. It teaches that the Earth — once a pristine Eden — is now fallen and polluted because of human sinfulness, and that an apocalyptic Judgment Day looms unless mankind repents. Absolution and salvation are possible if humans heed the enlightened saints and prophets who warn us of impending doom.

As sustainability spreads beyond the campus, we increasingly see it touted in coffee shops, celebrated by major corporations and embraced by urban planners. For example, it’s the ideology driving “Thrive MSP 2040,” the Metropolitan Council’s new 30-year plan for development in the Twin Cities region, with its pervasive themes of top-down planning and rule by “experts.”

It’s ironic that college campuses are home base for the sustainability movement. For higher education is among the least sustainable of our contemporary institutions. Colleges and universities are caught in a death spiral of rising costs and declining benefits. Nevertheless, they obsess about recyclable napkins, solar panels and fossil-fuel divestment, and pour $3.2 billion annually — frequently without assessing effectiveness — into achieving their dreams of sustainability, according to the NAS.

Hey, I know somebody’s who’s written a bunch of books about that! But it’s not all that ironic that colleges are obsessed with “sustainability” even as they’re dying as institutions themselves. It tends to occur wherever the left congregates. Here in California, over half the residents seem to act like kids living in a giant dorm. As Victor Davis Hanson recently wrote, Sacramento can’t be bothered to address the myriad real-world issues tearing the state apart at the seams. It has a state-wide drought, despite bordering an ocean, because desalinization plants give environmentalists the vapors. Its roads and schools are some of the worst in the nation. But the state’s politicians sure are obsessed with fantasies such as high-speed rail, aren’t they? As Victor Davis Hanson recently wrote in an article titled “Goodnight, California,” it’s as if Sacramento is telling voters, “I am too bewildered by your premodern challenges, so I will take psychological refuge in my postmodern fantasies.”