TSW

musings: ('myü-zi[ng]z) contemplations; meditations

environmental crisis

The one word reason for environmental crisis is Modernity.

Think of how a modernist cannot fathom doing the same thing as our forebears did a thousand years ago. Yet the vast majority of the humans on the planet have that legacy: they live, work and die as their ancestors have for hundreds of generations.

Modernists quicken the pace of change, and now, for the first time, we see the effects of our behavior on the natural world. It is a fallacy to think that the natural world doesn't change. It's just that our activities are forcing it to change much more rapidly. This décalage between our rates of change, and Nature's, is the foundation of environmental crisis.

Conservation is an expression of the two sides of the coin of post-post-modernity: nostalgia for the past and apprehension of the future. Environmentalists hearken to a former, Edenic time, and face the future with not a little trepidation, as the apparent way in which we relate to Nature, the way we are supported by it, will, in our lifetimes, likely change for the worse.

Change is inevitable: how we manage that change, and how many choices we create for ourselves will determine how much of a crisis we face.

Some reading:

Uncommon Ground, William Cronon (Google)

An excellent collection of essays on the sociology of environmentalism. What is wilderness? Is a swamp as worth protecting as a mountain valley?

Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World, Mike Davis (Google)

If people in the "Third World" have been starving all this time, how come they're not extinct? A new view on globalization and weather.

Jared Diamond:

The Third Chimpanzee (Google)

Easter Island's End (full article here)

Paradises Lost (full article here)

These two articles begin to bring to fruition what Diamond suggests in his book, The Third Chimpanzee: let's invest in "ecological archeology" which can tell us why some societies mysteriously failed. Island societies are perfect laboratories for understanding how ecological crisis can lead to the collapse of a civilization. (Update 2005: His Collapse is that book: If his Guns, Germs, and Steel asks the question of how did certain societies flourish and become ascendent, this latest book asks the question, how did certain civilizations falter. While some may argue the answer to the former has a flavor of geographic or environmental determinism, the answer to the latter is cultural: certain practices led to poor environmental choices, which resulted to the society's demise. A good read on a cruise ship!)

The Green History of the World, Clive Pontin (Google)  

If you wanted to know that, once upon a time, to go fishing in any of the Great Lakes all you had to do was take an axe handle and beat the surface of the water; or as recently as during the Roman Empire, whales swam the Mediterranean, read this book.

The Battle for God, Karen Armstrong (interviewed in Shambhala Sun Online)  

Currently in my book bag and on my night stand. The big three Abrahamic religions all experienced fundamentalist movements in the last 500 years. All, Armstrong argues, are a reaction to modernization and the huge success of the Enlightenment. Arguably, religious fundamentalism may share similar roots as environmentalism.

"Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes. And armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few. In war, too, the discretionary power of the Executive is extended. Its influence in dealing out offices, honors, and emoluments is multiplied; and all the means of seducing the minds, are added to those of subduing the force of the people. The same malignant aspect in republicanism may be traced in the inequality of fortunes, and the opportunities of fraud, growing out of a state of war...and in the degeneracy of manners and morals, engendered by both. No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare." --James Madison, April 20, 1795
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Contact: tsesung at yahoo. August 2006