Move Over, Thoreau — Rationalist environmentalism better prevail, and fast.

[OKIsItJustMe]

http://www.slate.com/id/2207168/

Move Over, Thoreau
Rationalist environmentalism better prevail, and fast.

By Johann HariPosted Monday, Jan. 12, 2009, at 6:55 AM ET

… it isn't often noted that American environmentalism splits early into two contrasting schools—and I can see no way to reconcile them. In the 18^th century, there was a dramatic shift away from viewing the world through the prism of faith and spirit and God toward understanding it through empirical data gathered and sifted and rationally analyzed. This movement, the Enlightenment, made it possible for humanity to understand the world far better—and to log and build on and conquer it, for a time.

Environmentalists are still divided between those who blame the Enlightenment for our environmental crisis and those who think it offers us the only map to safety. This is a showdown between romantics and rationalists.

The romantics—a tradition you can peel back to Wordsworth's daffodils—see environmental crises as primarily spiritual. They believe concrete and cities and factories are fundamentally inhuman, alienated habitats that can only make us sick. They cut us off from the natural rhythms of the land, and encourage us to break up the world into parts and study them mechanistically—when, in fact, everything is connected.

…

The rationalist wing of environmentalism comes from an entirely different direction. Its members fully acknowledge that early Enlightenment thinkers like Francis Bacon or Rene Descartes thought of nature as so much booty for humanity to pillage and condoned eco-cidal acts. But these thinkers also set in train the practice of empirically observing the world and following the evidence wherever it led—and this inevitably punctured their rape-the-natural-world mania. If you are rigorous, you soon find that there are limits to what the environment can endure without collapsing.

…

[razors edge]

1. 30 hamsters living in a cage

will eventually need someone outside the cage to bring them food, water, and fresh bedding, or they will get sick and die. You can find that out from not being rigorous about their upkeep.

It seems to me that ancient cultures with great cities discovered these truths long before we ever contemplated them. But they didn't have the electron microscope to develop new and wonderful petrochemicals and the likes to power and delight.

I don't believe this level of consumption is sustainable and the results will get ugly.

[GliderGuider]

2. As usual, the best response is probably a synthesis of the two positions.

The pre-verbal awareness that all of nature, including humanity, is a single, interdependent entity is a powerful motivator for change. The fact that the power of the awareness is emotional rather than intellectual makes it a natural vehicle for spiritual expression. So, rather than dismiss the spiritual interpretation as being simple woolly-minded romanticism, we should instead recognize and try to harness its power. The philosophical path does not have to lead back to the trees -- in fact it can't, given our current situation with technology and population. Unfortunately, as the author of the article hints, rational thought tends to be a poor motivator. So we need to use the unscientific spiritual perception to galvanize support for the rational changes that are needed to bring about some improved balance in the biosphere.

For me, the bridge philosophy (in the sense that it incorporates both the right-brain spiritual sense and left-brain rationalism) is Deep Ecology. The other possible candidate I've been exploring, anarcho-primitivism, is much less effective. While it has much of value to say about where we came from and how we got here, its prescriptions are useless insofar as they recommend a voluntary renouncement of technology -- which just ain't gonna happen in this or any other lifetime.

Again, for those rooted in the Enlightenment worldview but with some curiosity about how we got to this sorry state, I would recommend Charles Eisenstein's remarkable online book The Ascent of Humanity.

[Delphinus]

3. Thanks for the link, Glider.

I'd not seen it before.

From his site, this paragraph is quite remarkable (and exciting!):
In the book, I write of a coming shift from a profit-taking economy to a gift economy, from an economy of "how can I take the most?" to "how can I best give of my gifts?" This future, in which the anxiety of "making a living" no longer drives us, will arise out of the transformation in the human sense of self that is gathering today. But it is NOT ONLY A FUTURE. We can live it now too.

After reading the original post, I realized I am much more the right-brain spiritualist - the other one sounds too much of 'power over' way of living.

[bloom]

4. The prevailing "rationalist" view of nature in the 20th C was anti-nature.

People in philosophical and artistic circles including theosophists who inspired Mondrian and hard-edge painting, as well as Bauhaus and other pro-industrial ideas were about humans being better than nature. Mondrian blamed nature's irregularities for humanities problems.

I don't see anything wrong with people appreciating nature (with or without "God"). I think that it is the rational to do. There is no reason that science can't be a part of it. The problems happen when people put themselves above nature (as if that were possible), IMO.