Environment & Energy
Related: About this forumConfessions of a Recovering Environmentalist
This is worth reading in its entirety, especially if you've been feeling at all out of step with the arguments and concerns of mainstream environmentalism. I felt a deep sense of self-recognition as I read it.
[div class="excerpt" style="border:solid 1px #000000"]Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist
If “sustainability” is about anything, it is about carbon. Carbon and climate change. To listen to most environmentalists today, you would think that these were the only things in the world worth talking about. The business of “sustainability” is the business of preventing carbon emissions. Carbon emissions threaten a potentially massive downgrading of our prospects for material advancement as a species. They threaten to unacceptably erode our resource base and put at risk our vital hoards of natural capital. If we cannot sort this out quickly, we are going to end up darning our socks again and growing our own carrots and other such unthinkable things. All of the horrors our grandparents left behind will return like deathless legends. Carbon emissions must be “tackled” like a drunk with a broken bottle—quickly, and with maximum force.
Now it seemed that environmentalism was not about wildness or ecocentrism or the other-than-human world and our relationship to it. Instead it was about (human) social justice and (human) equality and (human) progress and ensuring that all these things could be realized without degrading the (human) resource base that we used to call nature back when we were being naïve and problematic. Suddenly, never-ending economic growth was a good thing after all: the poor needed it to get rich, which was their right. To square the circle, for those who still realized there was a circle, we were told that “social justice and environmental justice go hand in hand”—a suggestion of such bizarre inaccuracy that it could surely only be wishful thinking.
What am I to do with feelings like these? Useless feelings in a world in which everything must be made useful. Sensibilities in a world of utility. Feelings like this provide no “solutions.” They build no new eco-homes, remove no carbon from the atmosphere. This is head-in-the-clouds stuff, as relevant to our busy, modern lives as the new moon or the date of the harvest. Easy to ignore, easy to dismiss, like the places that inspire the feelings, like the world outside the bubble, like the people who have seen it, if only in brief flashes beyond the ridge of some dark line of hills.
But this is fine—the dismissal, the platitudes, the brusque moving-on of the grown-ups. It’s all fine. I withdraw, you see. I withdraw from the campaigning and the marching, I withdraw from the arguing and the talked-up necessity and all of the false assumptions. I withdraw from the words. I am leaving. I am going to go out walking.
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XemaSab
(60,212 posts)What is to be done about this? Probably nothing. It was, perhaps, inevitable that a utilitarian society would generate a utilitarian environmentalism, and inevitable too that the greens would not be able to last for long outside the established political bunkers. But for me—well, this is no longer mine, that’s all. I can’t make my peace with people who cannibalize the land in the name of saving it. I can’t speak the language of science without a corresponding poetry. I can’t speak with a straight face about saving the planet when what I really mean is saving myself from what is coming.
pscot
(21,024 posts)to universalise popeye. Self awareness has always been an individual matter, and not of much concern to the average person.
GliderGuider
(21,088 posts)Dark Mountain is a "cultural narrative" response to the global predicament.
http://www.dark-mountain.net/
Kingsnorth is a very, very good writer on this and related topics. His blog is here:
http://www.paulkingsnorth.net/
phantom power
(25,966 posts)
hatrack
(59,584 posts)
Viking12
(6,012 posts)
phantom power
(25,966 posts)Credit rates are moving up, up, up, and the British pound is the envy of the world!
Bigmack
(8,020 posts)reference. VERY interesting site. Ms Bigmack
You're welcome!
Nederland
(9,976 posts)The irony of this lament is that it is in a sustainable world, not the current world of excessive consumption, where everything must be made useful. In a sustainable world everything must be useful, if it is not, it is a waste of precious resources. The larger irony is that the author's environmentalism is the product of the very affluent society he despises. Take a look at all those old pictures of the people that came flocking to go hiking with John Muir. Do you honestly think those people are middle class? Please. It is the carbon economy that enabled environmentalism to grow to its current sizable numbers. Prior to the age of affluence, environmentalist sentiments like those of the author were restricted to either the nobility or members of the clergy--i.e. people living off the labor of others. It is only after technology improved to the levels seen in the last 100 years that a fair percentage of the population could start looking at nature as something to be enjoyed rather than something to be conquered.
As if more proof of the author's lack of self awareness were needed, consider what he says towards the end of the piece: "I withdraw from the words. I am leaving. I am going to go out walking." These are not the words of someone who is struggling to put food on the table. They are the words of a person that I would not be surprised to learn has a trust fund. A person who is out of touch with the average global citizen. In a sustainable world such a person is doomed.
