The environmental-ethics post below obviously raises more questions than it answers, but I was trying to keep it short, since I'm not sure how interested normal people are in such esoteric matters.
However, in comments both yankee and birdboy raise similar questions, so I thought I'd take a stab at addressing them here.
A common assumption is that anthropocentric environmental ethics leads inexorably to rape and pillage of ecosystems. After all, if non-human nature has only what value we assign it, why can't we just use up all the resources, pave all the wilderness, pollute all the water, and so on? More for us!
I think this assumption is badly wrong, in two overlapping ways:
- First, consider this: treating ecosystems the way we have has expanded deserts, denuded soil, lowered water tables, polluted the air and water, sharply reduced biodiversity, and may warm the entire atmosphere by a couple of degrees in the coming century. All these things hurt people. They cause human suffering. Thus, under any reasonable humanist ethics, they are unethical. It is in humanity's long-term interest to have healthy, functioning ecosystems; it is greed and ignorance, not any value system, that obscure that fact for us.
- Which leads us to the bigger problem with deep ecology: It buys into the very nature/human duality that got us into trouble in the first place. It accepts that the rapacious destruction characteristic of modern mankind's relationship to nature accurately reflects our interests; it conceives of humanity as essentially alien to nature, fallen from it, competing with it, and vows to fight on the side of nature in that zero-sum struggle. This sets up a situation wherein to be good, people must act against their own interests and the interests of those they love. People tend not to do that. Deep ecology sets us up for failure.
My hope is that humanity matures before it destroys itself. Maturing will mean realizing that the linear, brute-force model of industrialization -- resources in, waste out -- is only sustainable provincially, when there's an "outside" to dump all the waste. But there are some 6 billion of us now. There's no outside left. It's all inside, and one does not shit where one sleeps. We're going to have to figure out a way to fit comfortably in the cycles of death and renewal that characterize all ecosystems.
Preserving and restoring nature, living in balance with it, is our self-interest. Self-interest and sustainability are indistinguishable.
(Incidentally, I believe the same basic thing when it comes to interpersonal ethics: enlightened self-interest is indistinguishable from altruism. Not in some fake way, wherein you act nice to get what you want. To be genuinely happy -- and that's the goal of self-interest, right? -- is to feel in one's bones that the interests of one's family, community, species, world are one's own.
When you think about it, it's a little bizarre that "self-interest" is always equated with accumulation of material goods. Is that what makes you happy?)
Comments
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birdboy Posted 11:42 am
07 Mar 2006
No, that would be the result of purely anthropocentric ethics- environmentalists (of all kinds) are supposed to be more enlightened and realize that, as you say, "It is in humanity's long-term interest to have healthy, functioning ecosystems". But as an anthropocentric, you might have a different idea of just what qualifies as a 'functioning ecosystem' or just how much land should be dedicated to serve humanity. If human poplulation continues to grow or if all humans are to thrive, then there is not (even now) enough land to leave 'functioning ecosystems' that resemble what Nature made.
Dave, I know plenty of people who really do (incredibly) see it as 'man against nature'. Why are they killing wolves? Do they not remove forests to protect their homes from a mere threat of fire? Why do we use pesticides at all? For a very long time, people did see life as a struggle against the elements of nature- the beasts, the cold, the dark of the woods, the 'evil that lurks'. They set about to conquer Nature, and for many, the job is not yet finished. Do we not still 'throw away' things we don't want? Most people do not have a long-term view at all- it's live for today, and let future humans clean up the mess (they'll have all that great technology that we haven't thought up yet).
I still don't get the whole 'duality' thing. I see man as a part of nature, maybe not one needed by the ecosystem, since we sit on top of the food chain, but still, an important part. Important because we are capable of harmonizing with Earth forces, of creating and sustaining harmony between all things that share existance in the Universe. I'm sure I've lost most folks here, but I beleive that is why we are here- to aid in this harmonious convergence of consciousness among all things.
We are also capable of abusing our powers to satisfy our selfish animal-like needs, of dispelling responsibility for our actions. Humans seem to have chosen this path, and for that reason, we are the cause of much suffering, among humans and animals. I ask again- how does focusing on human prosperity or posterity help to stop the conversion of all things in Nature into human waste?
a liberal in redsville
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Stentor Posted 1:33 pm
07 Mar 2006
We start with the premise that nature needs to be protected. Many people would argue that enlightened self- or human-interest would lead us to protect nature, since degradation of nature utimately hurts humans. Deep ecologists respond that such an anthropocentric rationale will not be sufficient to justify full protection of nature. They maintain that we could get away with a significant degree of degradation of nature before it created a net harm to humanity, and thus the only way to morally rule out that degradation is to give nature itself rights. Yet this justification for deep ecology presumes a more loosely coupled system. The more tightly coupled the system, the less able we would be to escape the consequences of our degradation, and thus the more environmental protection would be mandated by an anthropocentric view.
My own position is preference-centrism -- the only things that count as ends are beings which are capable of forming preferences (which so far as I can tell is humans and some animals).
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dlondonx Posted 1:00 am
08 Mar 2006
ethics is who decides the value. Individual
species, such as ourselves, have always sought
to maximize short term survival, and hence, resource
utilization. The first massive pollution probably
came about when oxygen producing bacteria came onto the scene, and polluted the entire earth with their oxygen. This caused mass extinctions of anaerobic
bacteria which could not tolerate the oxygen.
However, was this a 'crime'? How do you mitigate it. Who is indemnified in this case? I think the
only way forward for us is to find ways of using
liberal property protection laws to fully account for the cost of current activities on future generations of humans, the only entity that is rationally definable as being indemnified for our current wrongdoings against them.
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jdhlax Posted 3:50 am
08 Mar 2006
Humans have managed to destroy a good part of the Earth without causing any tangible harm to themselves. New York City and San Francisco (where I live) are extreme examples, though all areas of civilization are at least somewhat negatively impacted by humans. (Humans even negatively impact areas where they don't live, like PCBs in polar bears and the ecological harms to antarctica caused by the mere presence of a few researhers.) There is virtually no nature in either of these cities, yet humans are able to live there due to importation of food and water. Therefore, humans don't need to control their population or treat ecosystems well in order to survive, unless they take either of those behaviors to such an extreme that the web of life collapses.
I'm glad that Dave makes an effort to understand biocentrism and deep ecology, but defining humans as "alien" to nature or that we should act against our interests are not what defnines biocentrism. Instead, it's defined as a belief that all species -- or all life, if one believes that everything, like air and water, is alive -- have an equal right to life. Thus my comments on other threads that we should not kill anything we don't eat, my belief that humans must drastically reduce their population and get out of some areas in order to make room for everything else, etc. There's a huge difference between self interests and selfish interests. If one conceives of him- or herself as being just a part of all life, then it's against one's self interests to allow ecosystem degradation, even if that degradation would help some humans. What needs to be attacked is selfish interests, those that only benfit individuals or only our species at the expense of others.
Jeff Hoffman
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atreyger Posted 4:47 am
08 Mar 2006
"We are also capable of abusing our powers to satisfy our selfish animal-like needs, of dispelling responsibility for our actions. Humans seem to have chosen this path, and for that reason, we are the cause of much suffering, among humans and animals. I ask again- how does focusing on human prosperity or posterity help to stop the conversion of all things in Nature into human waste?"
Nature and existence is suffering, name one animal that runs with open arms to a predator and says (if they spoke): please take my sirloin, I don't need it. I suffer everyday, sometimes it's masked by a plethora of endorphins, sometimes not. I personally (and heard plenty of others say the same) feel most happy or content, when I am doing. Not thinking, doing. In that I include sports, sex and anything else that involves physical activity (very frequently qualified as pain), where you are focused on the current and next moment without worries about the future. Of course I am forced to think either due to my genetic make-up and my upbringing or the cultural setting that I am in.
Duality of man runs through that as well, our 'animal' side rewards us with pleasure for using our bodies, yet our 'human' side is either satisfied or not with our performance during the usage of the body through thinking. Somehow, I think very few animals have regret, and that in many ways is what separates us out.
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kmp Posted 7:15 am
08 Mar 2006
I think that biocentrism is often misinterpreted as believing that humans are alien to nature because there does not appear to be evidence in biocentric thinking that humans are regarded as highly as nature itself - or indeed as any facet of nature. When does a beehive get too big? When beavers build a dam, blocking water supply downriver and impacting the environment (and livelihood) of countless river plants, amphibians, fish and their predators, do biocentrists sound an alarm? When a bird gathers twigs for a nest, that is OK, but when a human gathers wood for a home, that is not?
I do not disagree that humans have done much to the detriment of Earth's environment. I do believe that humans have a responsibility to not only fix our mistakes but to learn from them and prevent these mistakes in the future. What I am thankful for is that we have the reason to analyze, and change, our behavior. A pity the same cannot be said for the locust.
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birdboy Posted 9:06 am
08 Mar 2006
"The first massive pollution probably came about when oxygen producing bacteria came onto the scene, and polluted the entire earth with their oxygen. This caused mass extinctions of anaerobic bacteria which could not tolerate the oxygen. However, was this a 'crime'? "
The bacteria was not able to alter its behavior and probably unaware that it was changing the face of the Earth. The beaver has few alternatives to his actions. Humans are capable of altering their impact- yet have chosen to ignore or deny that they are doing anything wrong usually because they believe they are more important than any other species.
a liberal in redsville
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David Roberts Posted 9:42 am
08 Mar 2006
It is for exactly this reason that humans are the source of values -- they are beings capable of self-awareness and choice.
This doesn't mean we can't value and respect nature, even unrelated to our economic or practical needs. But it does mean that said value is not "inherent" in nature, like some sort of ghost. The whole notion of values makes no sense apart from beings capable of valuing.
Like I've been trying to say, anthropocentric environmental ethics does not argue against valuing nature. It does not argue for short-sighted selfishness. It doesn't even particularly imply any substantive moral precepts. It just makes the metaphysical claim that values do not exist independently of valuers. Values do not "inhere" in anything -- things are valuable relative to beings that value them.
And, of course, when you realize what's at issue, you realize how little the philosophical argument matters. And if you realize how little it matters, then you ought to simply swallow grand philosophical pronouncements that do nothing but alienate normal people, and instead concentrate on joining together with people of every philosophical or ideological stripe to start doing whatever works to get the ball moving in the right direction.
www.grist.org
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birdboy Posted 12:57 pm
08 Mar 2006
I just don't get your point about 'values'. You assume that only humans assign value to things and claim that this means nothing has value without a human to assign it.
First, I don't believe your assumption is true. If you capture a wild animal, and watch him struggle to be free, can you not see that he values his freedom? If you look into his eyes, do you see only blind instinct, or a desperate, emotional need for the thing he has lost? Is there any difference between 'instinct' and the thing we call 'emotion'? How can we possibly know, unless we get inside the non-human's mind and experience what they do. I'll bet their instinctive compulsion feels just like emotion to them- that their needs feel just like our values.
Regardless of whether other beings can value things, they have lives, existance, and no matter how much we think of ourselves, we should not take it away from them if it can be avoided. We have an obligation to protect things because we can identify with them (empathy), which leads to harmony, which is our purpose.
But you're right, we have an obligation to work together, because we want the same things, even if it's for different reasons. I certainly don't want to scare off any 'normal people'. (Do we have any of those here at Grist?)
a liberal in redsville
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caniscandida Posted 5:47 pm
08 Mar 2006
(Most traditional Christian thinkers have been frustratingly slow in recognizing environmentalism as an important ethical topic; and with regard to what they think of all living beings, they might fairly be called "anthropocentrist." I strongly reject that part of our tradition.)
Possibly it may help to distinguish "what is in our interests" from "what is good for us." I suggest the former means "doing or getting what it takes to stay alive, no matter what," and the latter means "living well," including admiring what is beautiful, and loving ... whatever, whatever one loves.
Diondonx will ask, "So who decides what is beautiful, what is lovable?" Good question, but anyway the answer is not us. We are, as it were, instructed, somehow, in those things.
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jdhlax Posted 7:35 pm
08 Mar 2006
Have you ever been to New York or San Francisco? They are almost all concrete. Aside from birds and animals small enough to hide, there is no wildlife. Here in SF, what vegitation exists, mainly trees growing out of sidewalks, is not native. Using public transit instead of driving is great, but that doesn't make up for destroying native ecosystems or paving over all of the land. Even across the Bay in Oakland or Berkeley, there is much more vegetation than here in San Francisco.
This points out a major flaw in the argument of those who claim that we can solve the problems that overpopulation causes in ecosystems by merely living in denser ciites. These extremely dense cities would be nothing but ecological sacrifice zones, like SF and NY are.
Jeff Hoffman
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WAL Posted 11:06 pm
08 Mar 2006
BTW, I love the term "ecological sacrifice zone," and I will be more than happy to live in an ESZ if it allows for the conservation of large-scale ecosystems outside the zone.
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atreyger Posted 1:31 am
09 Mar 2006
Growing up in an ESZ does not promote environmentalism, at all. Period. It promotes consumerism and perception that cities are the best thing ever. Which they are not. They are quite a miserable place to live in, both from an environmental and community-oriented perspective.
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dlondonx Posted 2:07 am
09 Mar 2006
the duality problem in an attempt to frame this
question. WAL succinctly sums up the problem.
If we are purely animal, then we live purely by
the evolutionary drive to ensure that a copy
of our genes makes it into the next generation,
period. Everything that we have tacked onto that
is subservient to this need, regardless of whether you are the poor farmer slash/burning the Amazon
forest to raise crops to feed his/her children, or
the CEO of a large multi-national corporation. There is no real 'ethics' here. There, especially, is no concept of 'reducing our population substantially', an idea that really makes me queesy when I think about the practice of some group of humans deciding which people would be allowed to reproduce, and which would not, or which groups should just be destroyed to be even more efficient in meeting this goal. In this light, it doesnt matter if, as birdboy mentions (and I agree), the animal values its own life, as we must value ours and our children's lives over everything else. However, as a Christian, like canis candida, I have a framework for believing that other living things have value in God's eyes. This forces me to think about ways to mitigate our behavior, even in ways that go against our self interests. Now, how do we go about creating practical, real world systems to mitigate our impact, without agjectly limiting or even pre-empting the lives of others who, as a right, should be able to live as comfortably as we do? The first step, in my opinion, is to take the already expansive laws regarding property, and extend them to account for the property of future humans. Yes, I agree, that it is still homo-centric, but it gets us a hell of a lot farther than standing around arguing about offing ourselves, or just supporting the status-quo.
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kmp Posted 2:28 am
09 Mar 2006
I lived in Manhattan's lovely Upper West Side for three years - in fact, I only moved out of the City two months ago.
Prior to that, I lived in Boston for many years, during which time I spent a year dating a man who lived in San Francisco's Noe Valley. I still have a nearly endless supply of frequent flyer miles....
Suffice it to say, I am quite familiar with both cities.
I don't consider either NYC or SF an "ecological sacrifice zone." This story suggests that there are 836 species in Central Park. Running through the Park in the Spring and enjoying all of the trees in bloom, "ecological sacrifice zone" would be the last thing to come to mind. The National Park Service has this to say about Golden Gate National Recreation Area:
Golden Gate National Recreation Area is also rich in natural resources--it is comprised of 19 separate ecosystems in 7 distinct watersheds and is home to 1,273 plant and animal species. With 80 sensitive, rare, threatened, or endangered species --including the Northern Spotted Owl, California Red-legged Frog, and Coho Salmon-- the park has the fourth largest number (33) of federally protected or endangered species of all units in the National Park System.
Beautiful and diverse city parks aside, cities are full of people who are, after all, animals on the planet and a part of nature. I'm sure there are some cities that would be appropriately descibed as "eco sacrifice zones;" Newark, NJ springs to mind. But NYC and San Francisco have to be two of the most beautiful and ecologically diverse cities in the world. We should be looking to these cities as examples, not vilifying them as concrete jungles.
Kaela
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Backcut Posted 3:17 am
09 Mar 2006
I DO remember seeing an entire skunk family in downtown Berkeley, tho.
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birdboy Posted 11:05 am
09 Mar 2006
Anyway, I too like the Ecological Sacrifice Zone concept, in part because it has a dual meaning- Nature gives up some real estate to humans and humans give up close contact with Nature while living there. Cities CAN be fairly low impact (per human), and the more people who are happy to live there, the less crowded it is on the outside! Suburbs could be given back to Nature while people are concentrated in the cities or living very simply outside them (perhaps tearing down the big houses and recycling the materials). It could work for the environment as long as land is given back to Nature somewhere nearby, and is preserved in a high quality state. We could even 'do time' in the ESZ, working to save/earn our vacation time (spent enjoying Nature on the outside, working on a small CSA or living in a cabin deep in the woods). Sign me up!
a liberal in redsville
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jdhlax Posted 4:22 pm
10 Mar 2006
One of the main problems caused by human overpopulation is that it has destroyed the wilderness and wilderness corridors necessary in order to keep ecosystems healthy. I don't think that creating many massive ESZs would solve this problem, even if we were to give everything else back to nature.
Jeff Hoffman
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jdhlax Posted 4:54 pm
10 Mar 2006
No one on this site has ever advocated "some group of humans deciding which people would be allowed to reproduce, and which would not, or which groups should just be destroyed," as you state. Instead, I advocate a carrot/stick approach: empowerment of all women so that they totally control their own reproduction, including free birth control and free, unrestricted abortions on demand, coupled with a strict one child/family policy. This would apply to everyone, so there's no group deciding who gets to reproduce, because everyone gets to have one child. Furthermore, no one advocates destroying anyone.
A hysterical response to a call for lower human population, like yours, is strong evidence of extreme anthropocentrism, to the point of failing to value anything but humans. Why the extreme distortion of what I or anyone else here said?
Jeff Hoffman
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caniscandida Posted 5:10 pm
10 Mar 2006
I agree with Kaela: there are cities, and then again there are cities. As an essay in the series on Poverty told us, the underprivileged get shut up in the blighted areas, an injustice that we should recognize. But for those of us who are more fortunate, cities have given us a much happier mix of civilization and non-human nature. I have lived here on the Upper West Side of Manhattan longer than I have lived anywhere else, and Kaela is right, there is nothing impoverished, nature-wise, about our lives here. Coyotes and raccoons are in Central Park; Pale Male, the celebrity red-tail hawk, is our mascot.
This discussion perhaps requires a review of an interesting article in the New Yorker of about a year ago, on how much more energy-efficient it is to live in a city such as NYC than to live, say, in even the greenest of houses in the Colorado Rockies. Sorry, I cannot find the reference right now. Probably there is something on it in the Grist archives.
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jdhlax Posted 5:35 am
12 Mar 2006
Caniscandida and Kaela are refusing to recognize the harms done by things like paving over the Earth or concentrating humans in such unnaturally large numbers that their waste becomes a major environmental problem, just like CAFOs. Too many of any species in an area creates environmental problems, and that's multiplied many times over with humans, due to our unnatural behaviors, like paving over the Earth. Furthermore, relatively small areas like Central Park are no substitute for small, more Earth friendly towns with little pavement and much native vegetation. (BTW, coyotes and deer thrive in human-disturbed areas, so it's not unusual to seem them in or near cities.) Nor do city parks make up for all the harm caused by massive pavement. (BTW, Golden Gate Park here in SF is completely unnatural. It was created by destroying the native dunes and planting trees, which are not native to the area. I don't know about Central Park, but I'll bet there's a similar history there.)
My point is simply that while packing people into cities is probably preferable to allowing them to destroy every bit of wilderness, doing the former will not solve the ecological problems caused by human overpopulation, and it might cause some environmental problems. Problems are only truly solved by attacking the root causes, not by dealing only with symptoms.
Jeff Hoffman
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caniscandida Posted 3:03 pm
12 Mar 2006
On the contrary, we city-dwellers are more and more trying to insert green spaces into our cities, such as pocket parts, community gardens, and rooftop gardens and arboretums. Here in downtown NYC on the West Side, for example, an unused elevated trackway, instead of being torn down, is being converted into a park with trees, varied smaller plants, and fresh water.
Look, Kaela and I know very well that our parks are not pristine wilderness. Nor do we think that walking in a park is a wilderness experience. A number of wild species that can find their way to our parks, e.g. migratory birds, seem grateful that they are there; but of course we understand that there is no comparison to the original, pre-Euro-American ecosystem.
Ideally, urbanization after the Mediterranean pattern, before the modern period when population growth got out of hand there as well as elsewhere, struck a pretty decent balance: relatively small urban centers, cultivated lands, and wilderness, all in close proximity. Modern cities are much larger, strike no such balance, and are not at all models for what to do with our growing global population. I am certainly not endorsing any such idea as that just because huge earth-stifling masonry complexes were erected in the past, that is justification for doing the same thing elsewhere in the future. I would only like to make a very different kind of point, which is that many humans for many centuries have liked living in urban centers, and that civilization, a characteristic phenomenon of those centers, is for many human beings a good thing. Therefore, so long as there are human beings such as we know them to be, there are always going to have to be something like cities, at least conceptually, if not physically.
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dlondonx Posted 2:02 am
13 Mar 2006
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kmp Posted 3:53 am
13 Mar 2006
I whole-heartedly agree that reproductive education, access to birth control and safe and effective abortion should be made available (and kept available!) in this country and abroad. But it's a funny thing that word "freedom" - it goes both ways. Reproductive freedom implies the freedom to choose, yes or no, to the birth of a baby. Sometimes, the choice may be "yes."
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David Roberts Posted 4:08 am
13 Mar 2006
empowered, educated women
prosperity
www.grist.org
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atreyger Posted 4:56 am
13 Mar 2006
I have read an article (which makes me an expert, right?) from a psyc/socio magazine, which compared understanding and caring about nature by people from rural and city areas and found that overall a much smaller percentage of people 'get' it in cities. That occurs largely due to formation of a child's brain through early childhood experiences. When you experience the concrete jungle for the formative years of your life, what does that teach you regarding nature?
Plus, energetically efficient? Did they count the food that HAS to be trucked in from at least 100 miles away? I'm not saying that it doesn't happen outside of cities, but at least there are local options, which are way closer than that, I get probably 75% of my food at the farmer's market, where most of the farms are within 20-30 miles of Syracuse (which is an ESZ anyway, except for some of the residential neighborhoods). The closest farms to NYC (thinking Union Square farmer's market) are about 60 miles (Orange, Dutchess Counties and a few in LI) and that is very much a specialty market. I doubt any of these close-by farms could feed even 100,000 people in NYC.
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Backcut Posted 5:57 am
13 Mar 2006
How can American government answer this "fundamental" problem? You can also extraploate this to a worldwide problem, especially in second and third world countries whose religions basically mandate large families.
I certainly don't have any answers but, it's surely something to think about and factor into any potential solution.
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SMLowry Posted 9:02 am
13 Mar 2006
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birdboy Posted 11:07 am
13 Mar 2006
As for ESZ's, what if we use trains (remember those?) that carry food and other needed materials into the city from small towns that serve as collection points? We could truck food from 30 miles or less, to be sold, loaded onto the train, and whisked into the city. Wildlife corridors could surround the trains, which would have elevated wildlife-crossing points. Farms could be spread out between the wild zones. It could support a lot more people than suburbs. I just hope somebody really IS making those holograms that may be all some of us get to see of Mother Nature at Her best.
a liberal in redsville
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bookerly Posted 6:15 pm
13 Mar 2006
To Kmp, a couple of points. First of all, India does not have a "one child" policy, but still has all the ills that Kmp ascribes to it. Secondly, the one child policy in China has worked (if the desire is to slow and then reverse the growth of population). The policy itself is often misunderstood and misreprsented in the American press (which seems determined to turn China into a "demon" or "enemy".).
As to population itself, it isn't the numbers strictly speaking that are the problem. It is the way people live. More species destruction has occured in Africa thanks to the endless wars than to the population alone (while population is a factor in some of the wars, they often have more complex factors as well). Americans live in such a way that one American equals five Chinese or Indians (on average, this doesn't say anything about YOU). The problem is how people live.
Interestingly, China has begun to turn the population curve and faces an increasingly aging population, as does Mexico.
Lifestyle, not numbers.
Patrick
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amazingdrx Posted 6:31 pm
13 Mar 2006
My feeling is if population growth is left to the women who have the children of their own free will, then balance will be restored.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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CowsEatGrass Posted 4:32 am
14 Mar 2006
I did some study on this myself--this doesn't make me qualified to say much, but makes me interested nonetheless.
A couple of clarifying points:
-Golden Gate Park and Golden Gate NRA are not necessarily the same thing. GGNRA is also across the bridge in the headlands, etc.
-I believe Jeff said just within this post:
1)"we should not kill anything we don't eat"
and
2)"I advocate...unrestricted abortions on demand"
Hmmmm.
-The population issue is a tough one. We obviously can't just keep breeding all willy-nilly, but it certainly isn't right for anyone to tell someone what to do with their..you know.."stuff". I certainly agree that "empowered, educated women" are needed, but how about empowered, educated citizens of both (all?) sexes?
-Living in cities cannot possibly be the end-all answer. I grew up in the Rural midwest and now live in SF. My soul is slowly leaching into the urban environment and I only hope that I can escape city life before it leaves me entirely. There is no way that we can acieve sustainablitily living in cities--we will no longer care.
-I am not much of an organized religion kind of guy myself, but I strongly believe that this discussion is evidence of why people like birdboy's example of "'believing' is all they really have to do." This stuff is hard, it's confusing, and when it comes right down to it we don't know the answer to where Value comes from. I could present a pretty strong argument that we CANNOT know where value comes from. That is, at it's heart, a pretty scary prospect for most people (mostly rooted in a fear of death (death=the unknowable)).
-Finally, this quote from Dave deserves some more attention:
"And, of course, when you realize what's at issue, you realize how little the philosophical argument matters. And if you realize how little it matters, then you ought to simply swallow grand philosophical pronouncements that do nothing but alienate normal people, and instead concentrate on joining together with people of every philosophical or ideological stripe to start doing whatever works to get the ball moving in the right direction."
RIGHT!
When we start talking about this stuff or really even bring it in to our practical discussions, we just end up with aroused emotions that get in the way of actually getting something done.
Of course it's involved in our motivations, and of course it's important and there needs to be a place to discuss it, but let's work on a middle path to actually achieving something instead of spouting inflammatory personal ideology.
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jdhlax Posted 4:20 pm
14 Mar 2006
Jeff Hoffman
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CowsEatGrass Posted 12:09 pm
21 Mar 2006
The absolutes just never work out. There's always grey area...sorry, I know it's hard to deal with.
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caniscandida Posted 4:41 pm
21 Mar 2006
"There's always grey area": Amen, Sister/Brother! Why, we cannot even come down definitely on whether it should be "grey" or "gray."
As for your posting of March 14, towards the end of which you approve of an anti-philosophy statement by Dave, itself philosophical: You are both right if, by "philosophy," you mean ideology (as Dave suggests), or obstinate over-intellectualized self-assuredness; that sort of attitude is indeed not helpful; crush those people like bugs. (Ha ha; so to speak. Don't even crush bugs "like bugs," i.e. without thinking of what you are doing.)
Philosophy is something that most, if not all, human beings do. (And who knows, maybe some animals. On animal intelligence, including animal philosophizing, the court will be out for a long time. In general the sciences of psychology and neuro-science are at the same stage of development as chemistry was in the twelfth century.) Philosophy is illuminating; it is liberating; it belongs to everyone freely, and to no one to the exclusion of anyone else who enjoys thinking.
Anyone who tries to compel the actions of others, with the justification of allegedly philosophical reasons, is, you can be sure, abusing philosophy.
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WAL Posted 11:06 pm
21 Mar 2006
First off CowsEatGrass, you live in a city, and you obviously still care. You are cognizant that you care and you are fighting to continue to care. By adding your voice to this discussion you are educated others who live in cities; explaining your values to them. Hopefully they will take something from your concerns and begin to value the earth as you do.
I used to hate cities and I spent most of my life trying to avoid them. I wanted to spend my time vast, open spaces. Then I spent some time thinking about why I felt this way. I realized that I was really just intimidated by the social interaction inherent in city life. I spent my childhood wandering in the woods instead of conversing with friends. I felt more closely connected to the non-human natural world than to my fellow humans. I think a lot of preservationist ideology comes from similar life experiences. John Muir was basically a hermit, for example. We grow up with a close connection to the land and we feel like this connection nurtures our soul. But humans are inherently social animals, and social interaction can be just as healthy.
I'm not going to tell anyone else how they should feel, but I know that for me the soul draining that I experienced when I moved to a city was not due to simply living in a city. Rather it was due to the fact that I had left the place I used to call home. People have not historically been as transitional as we are today. We used to live and die in basically the same location. We felt a strong sense of place and cared about the environment we called home. We knew how to live there and we taught the next generation how to do the same.
More recently we've become nomadic. We move from city to city and coast to coast. We no longer have a single place that we call home. We may only spend a few years in any one place and we never come to feel connected and we never learn anything about the environment. In my mind, this is what saps the human soul. We don't feel like we are connected to anywhere, city or countryside.
My point, CowsEatGrass, is that at least for me, cities themselves are not the problem. The problem is the transitional nature of human life today and the loss of a sense of place. If people felt more connected to their environment, be it a city or a farm or whatever, I believe they would care more for the future of that place. Think about the people we see fighting the fiercest battles in conservation; they are the ones who have lived for three generations on the same city block, or have been tilling the same land since their great grandfather first acquired the farm.
I believe that having a strong environmental ethic is directly related to a strong sense of place. It's not enough to be "connected to the earth." We have to be in a place where we can recognize the gradual effects of global warming; where we can witness the inner city deteriorating as the suburbs expand into agricultural lands, or the selling-off of our neighbors' farms to feed the need for poorly planned housing developments. Unfortunately many of us don't get the opportunity to stay in any one place long enough, so we try to file the void with material things we can take with us each time we move. We value our home entertainment system instead of valuing our "home". So we have become a materialistic culture with no sense of place, and we therefore consume resources at an alarming rate and think nothing of the damage we inflict on the earth as a whole.
Again, it's not a case of human-built vs. non-human environment. For the most part we give little thought to either. If we can re-enchant people with a sense of place, we can take a big step towards a sustainable lifestyle.
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CowsEatGrass Posted 12:22 am
22 Mar 2006
My initial point with the statements you quote was simply to oppose earlier comments (and a mentality that I know exists out there) that cities are the answer to our environmental problems -- or at least that we'd be better off if nearly everyone lived in them.
I think that point got lost in excessive wordiness on my part.
I absolutely agree with the centrality of settling in, connecting with, and living in fellowship with a Place on Earth.
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