 What's Wrong with Environmentalism: Curtis White starts off a two-part article in Orion with a brilliant and moving explanation of why we environmentalists are part of the problem, not part of the solution. Excerpt:
We
can, however, look at ourselves and see all of the ways that we
conspire against what we imagine to be our own most urgent interests.
Perhaps the most powerful way in which we conspire against ourselves is
the simple fact that we have jobs. We are willingly part of a world
designed for the convenience of what Shakespeare called âthe visible
Godâ: money. When I say we have jobs, I mean that we find in them our
home, our sense of being grounded in the world, grounded in a vast
social and economic order. It is a spectacularly complex, even
breathtaking, order, and it has two enormous and related problems.
First, it seems to be largely responsible for the destruction of the
natural world. Second, it has the strong tendency to reduce the human
beings inhabiting it to two functions, working and consuming. It tends
to hollow us out. It creates a hole in our sense of ourselves and of
this country, and it leaves us with few alternatives but to try to fill
that hole with money and the things money buys...
Needless to
say, many people with environmental sympathies will easily agree with
what Iâve just said and imagine that in fact they do what they can to
resist work and consumption, to resist the world as arranged for the
convenience of money. But here again I suspect we are kidding
ourselves. Rather than taking the risk of challenging the roles money
and work play in all of our lives by actually taking the responsibility
for reordering our lives, the most prominent strategy of
environmentalists seems to be to âgive backâ to nature through the
bequests, the annuities, the Working Assets credit cards and long
distance telephone schemes, and the socially responsible mutual funds
advertised in Sierra and proliferating across the environmental
movement. Such giving may make us feel better, but it will never be
enough... Weâre willing to be generous in order to âsave the worldâ but
not before weâve insured our own survival in the reigning system...
Even
when we are trying to aid the environment, we are not willing as
individuals to leave the system that we know in our heart of hearts is
the cause of our problems. We are even further from knowing how to take
the collective risk of leaving this system entirely and ordering our
societies differently. We are not ready. Not yet, at least.
Read the whole article, and stay tuned for Part Two. And in the meantime, the NYT tells the story of a couple of writers in NYC trying hard to be really green (thanks to Melisa Christensen for the link).
"We're Sitting On a Powderkeg Here": George Packer's astonishing article from the New Yorker about the horror of modern Lagos (my review here) is finally available online -- on a Nigerian discussion forum.
How Cuba Survived Peak Oil: The
combination of the collapse of the USSR and the US embargo left Cuba in
a crisis, bereft of the essentials that had made its economy work, with
starvation omnipresent. A new film shows how the Cuban people clawed
their way back through The Power of Community,
and in so doing developed a model for survival that may be valuable to
us when we all face the End of Oil. Thanks to Don Hayward of the Green
Party for the link.
Peak Oil Movement Speaks to Big Oil: Randy Udall's and Richard Heinberg's respectful, credible and expansive comments to the National Petroleum Council on Peak Oil. Excerpt from the former:
Humans
have always sought perpetual motion, and for a moment, the petroleum
industry has given it to us. The problem is that you have 300 million
Americans who take $2.50 gasoline for granted in a country whose
architecture, land use patterns, agriculture, prosperity, and cast of
mind have been have been built around cheap oil. These oil tribe
people, and their political leaders, don't care about peak oil, they
care only about price. Meanwhile, the Chinese are where we were in
1910, with car sales doubling every three years.
Thought for the Week:
To demand that our children feel well in the world which we leave them is an insult to their dignity.
-- Ivan Illich (cited at altruism.org)
Photo:
A 'beauty strip' at the edge of a devastated clearcut forest, used to
hide the destruction from the view of canoeists and (when used
alongside highways) drivers; photo by Steve Gorman for Orion. |
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
