E. O. Wilson's Letter To The Southern Baptist Minister

“The Letter to the Southern Baptist Minister” forced me to raise a number of questions. Rather often, we think of environmental issues as related to political ideology or connect them to personal religious identities, which confuses the matter. In his letter, E.O. Wilson asks this pastor to remove that confusion, and, while they hold different worldviews, to consider his position. Wilson further proposes that both Christian and non-religious individuals can hold a humanist belief of conservation. Whether an individual holds that creation is the offspring of a creator and should be preserved as a work of his genius, or that the world should be preserved because it is the only source of sustenance for the human race for the foreseeable future, they can mutually agree that conservation will have positive effects and that this masterpiece of biology should be preserved. As exemplified by the people of Easter Island, we should not allow ourselves to overuse natural resources, because of not only destruction caused to nature but also because of the negative effects which would be given to our ancestors.
Can we come to an agreement about how the environment should be treated, or are we in such a divided both politically and religiously country to come to a mutual understanding? Do religious beliefs affect the way in which we relate to and understand nature, and, if religious beliefs do affect the way in which we understand nature, how do they do so? Can these religious beliefs be overcome when faced with evidence, or does evidence lack the ability to change or challenge held moral beliefs? Are some of these religious views better, in the sense that it causes visible, positive effects on the environment, than other views? If so, what would these environmentally beneficial beliefs