I’m afraid I have been writing rather sporadically here… but this was originally intended to be a place to expand on the ideas in my original long missive more than a daily or weekly diary… so there it is. I have written more about my first two precepts – that is, not eating meat and not flying on airplanes; I hope to write more about that last one – not buying stuff you don’t need – as soon as I can, but I feel I need to spend a little more time studying the idea of a steady-state economy before I can write with any assurance. I will say that I have had friends respond to my first letter by saying that if we stopped buying, the economy would collapse; my response at this point would be to paraphrase Herman Daly: we can choose to follow the dictates of the imaginary system that we ourselves created (the economy), or we can follow the dictates of the very real systems that we live in and depend upon (physics and the environment).
In the meantime, there are a couple of articles that I read recently that I would like to share:
The first is The Change Within by the always-dependable and always-interesting Naomi Klein. In this one, she lays out some interesting sociological reasons as to why responding to climate change in any sort of adequate fashion is so difficult, if not nearly impossible (hint: it’s not just because of the rapacious oil barons) – a big one being, of course, consumerism: “The problem is not ‘human nature,’ as we’re often told. We weren’t born having to shop this much…”
The second is The Anthropocene: It’s Not All About Us by Richard Heinberg (who is less well-known than Naomi Klein, but no less interesting). The title essentially says it – we have increasingly cut ourselves off from wild nature, and “as is usually the case in discussions about humans-and-wild-nature, the conversation is all about us.” He somewhat disagrees with Klein’s point about “human nature” and not being born having to shop this much – as Heinberg states, “every species maximizes population size and energy consumption within nature’s limits” – which is one of the major problems in any attempts to voluntarily limit our consumption (before we reach nature’s limits in the form of a massive and catastrophic ecosystem collapse). He also focuses on how we have always re-engineered the world and taken over ecosystems: “paleoanthropologists can date the arrival of humans to Europe, Asia, Australia, the Pacific islands, and the Americas by noting the timing of the extinctions of large prey species.” But the main point of the essay is our anthropocentrism our alienation from nature which is leading to environmental disaster – “when individual human self-absorption becomes blatantly destructive we call it narcissism… Our planetary-scale narcissism is just the latest method for justifying our actions as we bulldoze, deforest, overfish, and deplete our way to world domination.” For someone like me, who fully believes in Daniel Wildcat’s axiom that we began to lose our way when we stopped thinking of other species as relatives and began thinking of them as resources, hearing this idea from another writer is powerful indeed.
