THE ENVIRONMENTAL: Introduction
Society’s relationship with its physical environment is both complex and symbolic. How humans treats Nature is reflected in how their treat each other, and how they treat each other is reflected in how they treat Nature. Even when the impacts are not immediate, they often become manifest eventually.
Problems
Humans objectify and exploit Mother Nature. They disrespect and ignore the Order of the universe that manages chaos. They reduce living things to objects for personal gain. They assume they can do whatever they want with the natural world if they have enough power. With Nature and other humans, they seek self-serving top-down power, desire to dominate, and consider life to be a zero-sum struggle with winners and losers. They worship the so-called “survival of the fittest” and believe the domination of the weak by the powerful is the way of nature. They use resources (and people) until they use them up, and then discard them and move on to the next resource. They dump toxic byproducts into relatively powerless neighborhoods, especially those populated by people of color. The short-term, narrow-minded pursuit of profit proves to be destructive in the long run. These objectifying, domineering attitudes toward the environment reflect and reinforce similar attitudes toward people. This interaction is mutually reinforcing.
Solutions
A deep respect for Life is key to a fruitful relationship with the environment — as it is to a fruitful society. As with social relations, a positive-sum, win-win, harmonious relationship with the environment is more beneficial for everyone in the long run. Even those who appear to benefit from exploitation in the short run suffer severely in the long run.
The life force that drives Nature is awe-inspiring and mysterious. Humans don’t understand how life began and they can’t create life in the laboratory. Through natural selection, organisms adapt to their environment, evolve, become more complex, and are more likely to survive and produce more offspring. This dynamic calls for profound respect. It leads people to worship Nature and speak about the life force with symbols, myths, and poetry to express its beauty and inspire others to join in its worship.
The backpacker’s credo “leave no trace” is a valuable principle. There’s no good reason not to make everything out of recycled plastic. More subsidies for solar and wind power and support for electric cars can hasten the trend away from fossil fuels — and help prevent the most catastrophic impacts of climate change. Support for green energy in rural areas can help strengthen those economies. More farm-to-market projects can boost organic agriculture, which protects the environment.
The bottom line is respect, constantly looking for ways to live in harmony with each other and the environment. If humans partner with Nature, we’ll find that Nature holds an extremely powerful toolbox that can undo much of the damage we’ve done.
These resources focus on ideas, information, and proposals for action to clarify the nature of the environmental problems we face and potential solutions that point the way toward holistic and systemic transformation.
Environmental Resources
Activists
Extinction Rebellion — “a decentralised, international and politically non-partisan movement using non-violent direct action and civil disobedience to persuade governments to act justly on the Climate and Ecological Emergency…OUR VALUES: Regenerative culture includes a healthy focus on mutually supporting categories of:... Self-care: how we take care of our own needs and personal recovery from this toxic system. Action care: how we take care of each other whilst we undertake direct actions and civil disobedience together. Interpersonal care: how we take care of the relationships we have, being mindful of how we affect each other, taking charge of our side of relationships… We actively mitigate for power. Breaking down hierarchies of power for more equitable participation.
Articles/Essays/Op-eds
Can we save the planet by shrinking the economy? Kelsey Piper. “The ‘degrowth’ movement to fight the climate crisis offers a romantic, utopian vision. But it’s not a policy agenda.”
Burn fewer fossil fuels? Great. Here's a ripple effect, Marty Mulvihill, Gretta Goldenman and Arlene Blum. “The petrochemical industry still wants to make money and will turn to plastics and toxic chemicals. These issues must be addressed together. As the United States comes to grips with the climate crisis, fossil fuels will slowly recede from being primary sources of energy. That’s the good news. But the bad news is that the petrochemical industry is counting on greatly increasing the production of plastics and toxic chemicals made from fossil fuels to profit from its reserves of oil and gas…” (read more)
The Convivial Society, L.M. Sacacas. A newsletter. “…some of the interests that inform my thinking: the centrality of the body, how technologies mediate experience, and how they frame and challenge our moral projects. Most of us, I believe, have some understanding of what a just society and the good life entail; I think it’s critically important to understand how technology relates to both…”
Green New Deal — “… providing all people of the United States with —
o (i) high-quality health care;
o (ii) affordable, safe, and adequate housing;
o (iii) economic security; and
o (iv) clean water, clean air, healthy and affordable food, and access to nature.”
It Seems Odd That We Would Just Let the World Burn, Ezra Klein. “…Decades of climate activism have gotten millions of people into the streets but they haven’t turned the tide on emissions, or even investments. Citing a 2019 study in the journal Nature, Malm observes that, measuring by capacity, 49 percent of the fossil-fuel-burning energy infrastructure now in operation was installed after 2004. Add in the expected emissions from projects in some stage of the planning process and we are most of the way toward warming the world by 2 degrees Celsius — a prospect scientists consider terrifying and most world governments have repeatedly pledged to avoid. Some hoped that the pandemic would alter the world’s course, but it hasn’t. Oil consumption is hurtling back to precrisis levels, and demand for coal, the dirtiest of the fuels, is rising…” (read more)
Our Hidden Wound, Gene Logsdon. "Most of us grew up in a society where farmer was often merely a synonym for moron, and I am quite sure that many farmers are still haunted by feelings of inferiority laid on them by this kind of urban and urbane prejudice. In fact, I suspect that many of the most competent farmers among us continue to expand their farm empires not out of greed or an insatiable desire for wealth, but because they feel compelled to prove again and again that, by God, they are not inferior to anyone. They want to cram that fact as far down the throats of their boyhood taunters as they can, and, sadly, they spend their lives doing it."
Wendell Berry’s High Horse, Verlyn Klinkenborg. [A review of What I Stand On: The Collected Essays of Wendell Berry, 1969–2017.] An evaluation of the strengths and weaknesses of Berry’s writing. In a note, Klinkenborg comments: “A surefire antidote for this unease has been reading the work of Berry’s long-time friend Gene Logsdon. He says much of what Berry says, but he says it as if he’s talking directly to you instead of gazing into the middle distance.”
The Social Life of Forests, Ferris Jabr. “Trees appear to communicate and cooperate through subterranean networks of fungi. What are they sharing with one another?… Humans are not the only species that inherits the infrastructure of past communities.... A passage from “The Overstory” suddenly sprouted in my consciousness: ‘There are no individuals. There aren’t even separate species. Everything in the forest is the forest.’” [A link to the podcast is embedded in the story.]
Wealthier, Whiter Areas Are More Likely to Get Help After Fires, Data Show, Christopher Flavelle. “New research offers further signs that racial and economic inequality leave some Americans more exposed to the worsening effects of climate change.”
Al Gore: Where I Find Hope, Al Gore. “The Biden administration will have the opportunity to restore confidence in America and take on the worsening climate crisis…. Still, all of these positive developments fall far short of the emissions reductions required. The climate crisis is getting worse faster than we are deploying solutions.”
Why Don’t We Just Make Everything Out of Recycled Plastic?, Kaleigh Rogers. “It’s a complicated question, but very smart people are working to solve it.”
What Have We Done to the Whale?, Amia Srinivasan. “The creatures once symbolized our efforts to save the planet; now they demonstrate all the ways we have devastated it.... Driven by a search for the perfectly ‘grammable’ shot, ecotourism is everywhere on the rise, though it rarely delivers on the promise of its name, which is to reconcile the impulse to consume nature with the desire to conserve it.”
Stopping Climate Change Is Hopeless. Let’s Do It, By Auden Schendler and Andrew P. Jones
What Is Animal Cruelty and How Can We Stop it For Good?, Sentient Media
A Future Without Fossil Fuels? Bill McKibben
Books
Earth House Hold: Technical Notes & Queries To Fellow Dharma Revolutionaries (1957), Gary Snyder
Videos
Paradigm Shift: An Overview of Global and Local Ecosocial Challenges, Asoka Bandarage. A Lecture by Prof. Asoka Bandarage, The National Trust, Sri Lanka, March 25, 2021 (1:24:52).
Podcasts
Richard Powers on What We Can Learn from Trees, with Ezra Klein.
Ezra Klein: We live in a system that is always changing us — that our current technologies, our current culture, our current economic system, the religious systems we have and don’t have are rewiring our brains and reshaping our souls and always expanding or contracting the limits of our empathy…
Richard Powers: I was concerned as a younger writer, in my 20s and 30s and 40s, with the human sciences that amplify our ability to control and master and manipulate our situation here and to understand ourselves. And in my 50s and 60s, I’ve become interested in the humbling sciences, I guess I would say, that point our attention away from ourselves and onto other living things… into this more collaborative, reciprocal, interdependent, exterior place… to being fascinated with technologies and sciences of interdependence and cooperation...