Last
month I reported on the first part of Curtis White's two-part article
in Orion, lambasting self-righteous and passive environmentalists,
called The Idols of Environmentalism. At that time I included these extracts:
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 'the visible
God': 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 I've 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 give back 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... We're willing to be generous in order to 'save the world' but
not before we've 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.
Now Orion has posted the second part of the article, entitled The Ecology of Work.
White is so eloquent that, rather than try to paraphrase, I wanted to
tease you to read the full article (and to subscribe to Orion) with
these additional extracts (emphases mine):
I
don't believe that capitalism can become green, simply because the
imperatives of environmentalism are not part of its way of reasoning…
Ever the optimistic gambler with other people's money, the capitalist
is willing to wager that, while there may be costs to pay, he won't
have to pay them. Animals, plants, [future generations], impoverished
people near and far may have to pay, but he bets that he won't. If
called upon to defend his actions, he will of course argue that he has
a constitutionally protected right to property and the pursuit of his
own happiness. This is his "freedom." At that point, we have the
unfortunate habit of shutting up when we ought to reply, "Yes, but
yours is a freedom without conscience."
[And so
the world of nature is externalized in our minds to become merely] a
place to go for a weekend hike before returning to the unrelenting
ugliness, hostility, sterility, and spiritual bankruptcy that is the
suburb, the strip mall, the office building, and the freeway (our
"national automobile slum," as James Howard Kunstler puts it).
The
violence that we know as environmental destruction is possible only
because of a complex economic, administrative, and social machinery
through which people are separated from responsibility for their
misdeeds. We say, "I was only doing my job"… It is only possible to
conclude from our behavior for the last two hundred years that ours is
not a human society; that it is a society outside of the human in some
terrible sense...The kind of work provided by capitalism [is]
alienating. That is, it [has] made us something other than what we are.
It [has] dehumanized us… We all have our place, our "job," and it is an
ever less human place.
We have two options:
First, we can simply wait for the catastrophic failure of global
capitalism as a functioning economic system…[Or] we can start providing
for a different world of work now, before the catastrophe. We need to
insist on work that is not destructive...[This requires] leaving a
culture based on the idea of success as the accumulation of
wealth-as-money. In its place we need a culture that understands
success as life… Most of us
want to believe that our quarrel is just with [a few] rogue
corporations…and not with capitalism as such. But thinking this is
simply a form of lying. We deny what we can plainly see because to
acknowledge it would require the fundamental reshaping of our entire
way of living, and that is (not unreasonably) frightening for most
people.
The risk I propose is simply a return to
our nobility. We should refuse to be mere functions of a system that we
cannot in good conscience defend. And we should insist on a recognition
of the mystery, the miracle, and the dignity of things, from frogs to
forests, simply because they are. [This] would entail a
refusal to play through to the bloody end the social and economic roles
into which we happen to have been born. What lies beyond the
environmental movement is not only the overcoming of capitalism but self-overcoming…The
deeper problem is our own integration into an order of work that makes
us inhuman and thus tolerant of what is nothing less than demonic, the
destruction of our own world.
White is telling us we must do what Daniel Quinn has been telling us to do for a decade: walk away
from civilization culture. He acknowledges how frightening the prospect
of doing this is. He acknowledges that instinctively we know that this
is what we must do. And he acknowledges that what I have called
Let-Self-Change is the first, hardest step. It requires that we let go
of the only life we know, to pursue, as a matter of intuition and
faith, a better way of living, one that, for now, we know nothing
about, that we are not equipped for, and which could, in the short run,
cause us and our loved ones considerable hardship. We will be like the
pioneers first landing on a new continent, except, unlike them, we in
our overcrowded world will have to do that pioneering right in the midst of the culture we are walking away from,
and liberate the land and ourselves from that culture. And we will have
to do it with almost none of the self-sufficiency skills that previous
pioneers had.
We will be looking (we are already
looking) for leaders who can show us the way. We will look in vain
until it is too late, until our culture collapses and we have no choice
but to try to create a new one in its ruins, when we will have no
resources or time left to do so and when all our energy will be
expended just trying to stay alive. We'll be carried along on the long
right tail of all civilizations in their slow, final slide into
oblivion.
Though there are no leaders to follow, there is a model on which we could, together with other brave new pioneers, create a new culture, now.
It is the model by which every non-human creature on the planet lives,
if we only cared enough and paid close enough attention to see it. It
is a model where land and the rest of nature and all-life-on-Earth are
treated with respect. It is a model of abundance, not scarcity, of
living in balance, not in conflict. It is a model of joy, not
suffering. It is a model of partnership, not hierarchy. It is a model
of caring for, not competing with, each other. It is a model of
responsibility, not exploitation. It is a model of steady-state slow
evolution, not rapid growth. It is a model of community, not empire. It
is a model of well-being and self-sufficiency. It is a model of
constant learning and adaptation. It is a model of love and of peace.
It is a model where we are always home, and never homeless. It is a
model that exists and thrives all around us, in the midst of our culture, yet is not a part of it, is free from it, untouched by it, indifferent to it.
If we learn, quickly and soon, to listen, to imagine, to pay attention, at least some of us might,
in community, find the courage (and courage is really just not having
any other conceivable choice) to walk away, to live lightly and freely
and joyfully, to join our fellow creatures in another, thriving,
healthy culture in the midst of our terrible, struggling one. The
answer is right in front of us, and our patient, furred and feathered
fellow citizens of Earth are calling us, waiting to welcome us home.
I
will be writing another article on how we might do this, soon. In the
meantime, help me imagine how such a Next Culture, much more radical
(in the true sense of the word) than anything White or Quinn has
envisioned, might emerge right in the midst of dying civilization
culture. What if we just opted out of civilization's economic and
political systems, like the Anasazi and some others who saw their
civilizations collapsing did. Renounced citizenship, liquidated all we
owned and put it in a shared trust, for emergency use only, by a
trustee we could really trust. Refused to recognize 'ownership' of
land. Commenced a long migration to a land where we could gather
natural, healthy food naturally, where we would need no permanent
shelter, no heat, no clothing, nothing to buy or own, no place to have
to stay. Where we could spread out so that our presence would have a
light touch and not oppress the land we occupied. A new tribe
relearning how to live in balance with the rest of life on Earth.
Can you imagine that?
|
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
