Here is an interesting read by Curtis White in Orion magazine.
www.orionmagazine.org/index.p...icle/233
Some snippets:
"The problem for even the best-intentioned environmental activism is that it imagines it must confront a problem external to itself... Believing in powerful corporate evildoers as the source of our problems, we think in cartoons. ... The idea that corporate villains are to blame for the sorry state of the natural world is what Francis Bacon called an "idol of the tribe." An idol is a truth based on insufficient evidence but maintained by constant affirmation within a tribe of believers. "
"The belief that corporate power is the unique source of our problems is not the only idol we are subject to. There is an idol even in the language we use to account for our problems. Our dependence on the scientific language of "environment," "ecology," "diversity," "habitat," and "ecosystem" is a way of acknowledging the superiority of the kind of rationality that serves corporate capitalism. ... My concern is with the wisdom of using as our primary weapon the rhetoric and logic of the entities we suspect of causing our problems in the first place... Unfortunately [this rhetoric] also turns environmentalists into quislings, collaborators, and virtuous practitioners of a cost-benefit logic figured in songbirds."
"Because we have accepted this rationalist logos as the only legitimate means of debate, we are willing to think what we need is a balance between the requirements of human economies and the "needs" of the natural world. It is as if we were negotiating a trade agreement with the animals and trees unlucky enough to share space with us."
"What if such language were actually the announcement of the defeat of what we claim to want? ... In the end, environmental science criticizes not only corporate destructiveness but also (as it always has) more spiritual notions of nature."
"Environmentalism concludes that the best thing it can do for nature is to make a case for it, as if it were always making an argument before a jury with teh backing of the best science. Good children of the Enlightenment, we keep expecting Reason to prevail (and in a perverse and destructive way, it does prevail). We even seem to think that the natural system should work in concert with our economic system... Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth may have distressing things to say about global warming, but subconsciously it is an extended apology for scientific rationality, the free market, and our corrupted democracy. Gore doesn't have to defend these things directly; he merely pretends that nothing else exists."
"There would be nothing inappropriate or undesirable in understanding our relation to nature in spiritual terms or poetic terms, or, with Emerson and Thoreau, in good old American transcendental terms, but there is no broadly shared language in which to do this. So we are forced to resort to what is in fact a lower common denominator--the languages of science and bureaucracy."
"The truth is, our idols are actually a great convenience. It is convenient to imagine a power beyond us because that means we don't have to examine our own lives. And it is convenient to hand the work of resistance over to scientists, our designated national problem solvers."
"Perhaps the most powerful way we conspire against ourselves is the simple fact that we have jobs."
And so on...
"What lies beyond the environmental movement is not only the overcoming of capitalism but self-overcoming... It is important to know that there is a problem more fundamental than a perverse "power" standing opposed to us. That deeper problem is our own integration into an order... that makes us inhuman and thus tolerant of what is nothing less than demonic, the destruction of our own world. A return to the valuable human things of the beautiful and the useful will only be accomplished, if it is ever to be accomplished, by the humans among us."
www.orionmagazine.org/index.p...icle/233
Some snippets:
"The problem for even the best-intentioned environmental activism is that it imagines it must confront a problem external to itself... Believing in powerful corporate evildoers as the source of our problems, we think in cartoons. ... The idea that corporate villains are to blame for the sorry state of the natural world is what Francis Bacon called an "idol of the tribe." An idol is a truth based on insufficient evidence but maintained by constant affirmation within a tribe of believers. "
"The belief that corporate power is the unique source of our problems is not the only idol we are subject to. There is an idol even in the language we use to account for our problems. Our dependence on the scientific language of "environment," "ecology," "diversity," "habitat," and "ecosystem" is a way of acknowledging the superiority of the kind of rationality that serves corporate capitalism. ... My concern is with the wisdom of using as our primary weapon the rhetoric and logic of the entities we suspect of causing our problems in the first place... Unfortunately [this rhetoric] also turns environmentalists into quislings, collaborators, and virtuous practitioners of a cost-benefit logic figured in songbirds."
"Because we have accepted this rationalist logos as the only legitimate means of debate, we are willing to think what we need is a balance between the requirements of human economies and the "needs" of the natural world. It is as if we were negotiating a trade agreement with the animals and trees unlucky enough to share space with us."
"What if such language were actually the announcement of the defeat of what we claim to want? ... In the end, environmental science criticizes not only corporate destructiveness but also (as it always has) more spiritual notions of nature."
"Environmentalism concludes that the best thing it can do for nature is to make a case for it, as if it were always making an argument before a jury with teh backing of the best science. Good children of the Enlightenment, we keep expecting Reason to prevail (and in a perverse and destructive way, it does prevail). We even seem to think that the natural system should work in concert with our economic system... Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth may have distressing things to say about global warming, but subconsciously it is an extended apology for scientific rationality, the free market, and our corrupted democracy. Gore doesn't have to defend these things directly; he merely pretends that nothing else exists."
"There would be nothing inappropriate or undesirable in understanding our relation to nature in spiritual terms or poetic terms, or, with Emerson and Thoreau, in good old American transcendental terms, but there is no broadly shared language in which to do this. So we are forced to resort to what is in fact a lower common denominator--the languages of science and bureaucracy."
"The truth is, our idols are actually a great convenience. It is convenient to imagine a power beyond us because that means we don't have to examine our own lives. And it is convenient to hand the work of resistance over to scientists, our designated national problem solvers."
"Perhaps the most powerful way we conspire against ourselves is the simple fact that we have jobs."
And so on...
"What lies beyond the environmental movement is not only the overcoming of capitalism but self-overcoming... It is important to know that there is a problem more fundamental than a perverse "power" standing opposed to us. That deeper problem is our own integration into an order... that makes us inhuman and thus tolerant of what is nothing less than demonic, the destruction of our own world. A return to the valuable human things of the beautiful and the useful will only be accomplished, if it is ever to be accomplished, by the humans among us."
posted by:
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SF Bay Area
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Re: The Idols of Environmentalism
Sun, July 22, 2007 - 5:06 AM"Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth may have distressing things to say about global warming, but subconsciously it is an extended apology for scientific rationality, the free market, and our corrupted democracy. Gore doesn't have to defend these things directly; he merely pretends that nothing else exists."
This is very true. Gore ignores chemtrails like so many others do, yet it is his own friends and relatives who are instigating such programmes for the sake of 'weather control', and are doing so virtually unquestioned/unchallenged.
And as for 'Democracy', the actual concept was created by slave owners, so any belief in it is the perpetuation of economic slavery. Democracy itself is part of the capitalist system, the illusion of possession and the illusion of separation from nature. Democracy is fundamental to central control because it gives license to the 'elected' rulers to do whatever they want in the period of their office. And as they are not the true rulers, but represent private structures that control the entire world economy, the whole thing is illusion.
So Gore himself is an important part of the true rulers agenda, to dupe people into so much guilt and shame that they give even more taxes and allow even more nuclear expansion and centralisation of systems, etc.
As one ecologist and scientist friend of mine remarks on, the media hype and environmentalist campaigning about humans causing global warming has resulted in direct responses from governments in their 'war on climate change'. The responses include massive nuclear power expansion, massive biofuel programmes, green taxes, further centralisation, millions being spent on conferences and resolutions, etc etc, while the governments and elite build massive underground shelters and select those whom they want to survive with them, knowing full well that the coming 'cataclysm' is not preventable at all!
Clearly answers to many problems facing humans are not found in the system or rationality, and are not going to be resolved by appealing to any 'leaders'.
As the wise Hopis and Mayas and others have warned repeatedly, the present changes are part of something far greater that is coming. That coming event, or series of events, has not happened before except that cataclysms have happened before and each one has been devastating but different to the last. This time will be different again. Now we have other important factors.
But while we humans need to face plenty of practical considerations and preparation, we can count on plenty of input from the mass of consciousness in the 98% of reality that humans do not readily perceive. After all humans are an integral part of the greater reality (like it or not) and it is only the 'freewill' of so many which has caused so much destruction and refusal to abide by essential natural laws of existence.
For me and many other, so much 'environmentalism' has become like ranting zealotry rather than useful contribution, and as the commentary suggests, continually reinforces the power of the systems that are so much the cause of the problems facing humans.
I prefer the wise words "prepare and survive", and that means community, common purpose, tending the garden, sustainability, taking care of children (the future), respect for natural forces and the unseen, the giving of thanks and celebration for the bounty of nature. And it means heeding the warnings of the traditional elders on all levels. They specifically refer to the power of human thought and the movement to a new Age of OneHeart and of balance and harmony, for those who chose to remain.
