Stop your sobbing

Salon: Stop your sobbing

I'd hardly give an unqualified endorsement of this article, but I think it is a fascinating read and a welcomed rejoinder to the environmental apocalypse crowd. Here are a few of my favorite excerpts. I may have to buy the book.

Doomsayers like Al Gore and Jared Diamond aren't doing the environment much good. To save the earth, we need to stop blaming and start celebrating ourselves.

"Silent Spring" set the template for nearly a half century of environment writing: wrap the latest scientific research about an ecological calamity in a tragic narrative that conjures nostalgia for Nature while prophesying ever worse disasters to come unless human societies repent for their sins against Nature and work for a return to a harmonious relationship with the natural world.

Eco-tragedies are premised on the notion that humankind's survival depends on understanding that ecological crises are a consequence of human intrusions on Nature, and that humans must let go of their consumer, religious, and ideological fantasies and recognize where their true self-interest lies.

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For the most part, these environmentalist cautionary tales have had the opposite of their intended effect, provoking fatalism, conservatism, and survivalism among readers and the lay public, not the rational embrace of environmental policies. Constantly surprised and angered when people fail to behave as environmentalists would like them to, environment writers complain that the public is irrational, in denial, or just plain foolish. They presume that the failure of the public to heed their warnings says something meaningful about human nature itself, attributing humanity's disregard for Nature to desires like the lust for power and concluding that, in the end, we are all little more than reactive apes, insufficiently evolved to take the long view and understand the complexity and interconnectedness of the natural systems on which we depend.

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The eco-tragedy narrative imagines humans as living in a fallen world where wildness no longer exists and a profound sadness pervades a dying Earth. The unstated aspiration is to return to a time when humans lived in harmony with their surroundings. That tragic narrative is tied to an apocalyptic vision of the future — an uncanny parallel to humankind's Fall from Eden in the Book of Genesis and the end of the world in the final Book of Revelation.

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There is nothing wrong with human and nonhuman desires for control over the environment. Indeed, we wouldn't exist were it not for our ancestors' will to control. Saving the redwoods and banning DDT were no less acts of controlling Nature than were logging ancient forests or spraying toxic pesticides. The issue is not whether humans should control Nature but rather how humans should control natures — nonhuman and human.

From beginning to end, we humans are as terrestrial as the ground on which we walk. We are neither a cancer on, nor the stewards for, planet Earth. We are neither destined to go extinct nor destined to live in harmony. Rather, we are the first species to have any control whatsoever over how we evolve.

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This faith in science is often accompanied by the antiquated view that there are facts separate from values and interpretations. But the fact that there is a strong international consensus among scientists that global warming is caused almost entirely by humans does not make it any less of an interpretation. Simply deciding what to study, and what kind of hypotheses to form, is a value judgment. The facts one chooses to give greater weight to in the case of global warming are deeply informed by one's values. The facts tell us that global temperatures have been rising over the last century. They tell us that human sources of pollution have probably been in some significant part responsible for those temperature increases. They tell us that global climate change and habitat destruction may be leading to the mass die-off of many plant and animal species.

But the facts also tell us that global temperatures have fluctuated wildly over the five billion years that the planet has existed; that there have been at least five previous mass extinctions during the history of the planet; that asteroids, comets, volcanoes, and ice ages have dramatically changed the climate and habitat at a planetary level; that the earth will very likely be here for billions of years after all traces of humanity have vanished from its surface; and that some form of humanity and human society will likely survive the ecological crises we face.

The questions before us are centrally about how we will survive, who will survive, and how we will live. These are questions that climatologists and other scientists can inform but not decide. For their important work, scientists deserve our gratitude, not special political authority.

What's needed today is a politics that seeks authority not from Nature or Science but from a compelling vision of the future that is appropriate for the world we live in and the crises we face. The idea that we should "respect Nature" implies that Nature has a particular single being to be respected. If we define Nature as all things, then it is not at all clear which natures we should respect and which we should overcome.

We are Nature and Nature is us. Nature can neither instruct our actions nor punish them. Whatever actions we choose to take or not to take in the name of the survival of the human species or human societies will be natural.

Many environmentalists imagine overcoming global warming to be about "saving the planet." But the fate of the planet is not in question. The earth has survived meteorites and ice ages. It will certainly survive us.

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Against the happy accounts of harmonious premodern human societies at one with Nature, there is the reality that life was exceedingly short and difficult. Of course, life could also be wonderful and joyous. But it was hunger, not obesity, oppression, not depression, and violence, not loneliness, that were humankind's primary concerns.

Just as the past offers plenty of stories of humanity's failure, it also offers plenty of stories of human overcoming. Indeed, we can only speak of past collapses because we have survived them. There are billions more people on earth than there were when the tiny societies of the Anasazi in the North American southwest and the Norse in Greenland collapsed in the twelfth and fifteenth centuries, respectively. That there are nearly seven billion of us alive today is a sign of our success, not failure.

Perhaps the most powerful indictment of environmentalism is that environmentalists almost uniformly consider our long life spans and large numbers terrible tragedies rather than extraordinary achievements. The narrative of overpopulation voiced almost entirely by some of the richest humans ever to roam the earth is utterly lacking in gratitude for the astonishing labors of our ancestors.

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The ethics, and politics, born from joy, mystery, and gratitude of overcoming adversity will be radically different from the ethics born of the sadness of living in a fallen world pervaded by fears of the eco-apocalypse to come. The truth is, there are still ancient redwoods to behold and great rivers to swim in. There is still the Amazon and the Boreal. There are still seven billion wondrous human animals, each one of us capable of making ourselves into something utterly unique. And there is still great wildness abounding inside and outside of ourselves.