Comments WAL has made

  • strong environmental ethic = strong sense of place

    "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 achieve sustainability living in cities--we will no longer care."

    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.
    On Environmental ethics II: The humanist strikes back posted 3 years, 8 months ago 37 Responses

  • The definition of fine

    It seems to me that we now have to debate the definition of "fine". I stand by what I said about the earth being "fine" before and after humans. I do understand the implications of that statement, and I have also heard this argument used by the enemy to justify intense resource exploitation. However, that's not the argument that I'm making. My point it merely that humans have more faith in their knowledge and understanding than they should. I also recognize, as birdboy points out, that stating the earth will be fine after humans implies knowledge of that fact. And this is where we get into how we define the term "fine".

    Who is to say what fine means? As humans, we all have a subjective definition and we use the term to describe things that fit our definition. If there were no humans to assign value, would anything be capable of being fine? People have argued in other posts that things would still be fine, based on the needs of non-human animals. That is, whether or not other animals have rational thought, they still value the things that allow them to survive, so some extent. However, this is all based on life on this planet. Perhaps in several thousand years the surface of the earth will look like Mars. How can we assume that this will not be fine? Obviously we won't exist, along with a lot of other life that currently exists today. But perhaps there will be highly complex forms of subterranean life. Perhaps one of the other planets in the galaxy will suddenly blossom with life. In the larger scheme of things, everything will be fine. The earth could be a dead ball of rock, but still be fine relative to the galaxy, or some larger plan.

    By the way birdboy, I don't necessarily mean it. I like the philosophical discourse created by these blogs, and I'm just tossing ideas around.
    On To boldly go where no man has gone before posted 3 years, 8 months ago 19 Responses

  • preservation vs. conservation

    I think there is a distinction between preservation and conservation.  "Preserve" implies a static, unchanging state, which is impossible to achieve in a dynamic world like we live in. If anything, we have a chance at conservation.

    However, I think discussions of preservation and conservation simply expose the hubris of humanity. The earth was fine before we evolved to our current form, and it will fine after we go extinct or evolve into something else. Any talk of preservation and conservation is inherently anthropocentric because it is designed to maintain conditions on earth that are necessary for supporting humans as we currently exist. I don't believe people who claim to be trying to conserve the earth for the earth's sake, and the sake of other species. And what makes you think you have the ability to do so anyway? To get at something that was being discussed in a post about environmental ethics, even if we really believe that we are acting in the interests of species that don't have a voice or the rational though necessary to save themselves, perhaps we're really just acting on our own pure survival instinct. The fact is that by conserving the earth in a manner that supports other life that lives in this time period, we are also conserving conditions that support human life. I find it hard to believe that humans have evolved to the point that we are beyond basic survival instincts. We've simply dominated nature to the point that we have more time to spend thinking about it (the ideal form of civilized life, according to the old school Greek philosophers).

    Having said all this, I'm still all about conservation. And I'm OK with the fact that I'm ultimately in it for me and the rest of humanity.
    On To boldly go where no man has gone before posted 3 years, 8 months ago 19 Responses

  • I think we give ourselves too much credit...

    To follow up on a point made earlier by birdboy, I think we tend to make a lot of assumptions about our ability to be objective. In fact different people all lead very different lives and experience the world in very different ways. Even minor differences can lead to significantly different value systems. This is all to say that human values are very subjective, and in fact I don't believe that we have very much control over them. We can use our minds to convince ourselves that we know the difference between right and wrong, and that our ability to think rationally opens us to criticism when we make bad decisions. However I'm not convinced that we have the ability to remove ourselves so completely from life that we can actually analyze our actions to rate them on a moral scale. Perhaps humans are much more closely related to the rest of the natural world than we let ourselves believe, and all this debate about ethics is really just instinct and evolution.

    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.
    On Environmental ethics II: The humanist strikes back posted 3 years, 8 months ago 37 Responses

  • Everyone's right

    I think that Tom and BioD are both making valid points. I'm sure there will be people who will jump at the chance to buy relatively cheap, locally grown produce, given the opportunity. I'm also sure there are people who will want to have nothing to do with fresh veggies. Different people simply enjoy different foods. However, nowhere in the description of this proposed plan did I see anything about diminishing the availability of cheap, overprocessed, unhealthy food. Mayor Livingstone is simply providing an additional option to those people who are looking for fresh produce. Perhaps his scheme will drive up the cost of fast food, but I have to think that major fast food operations, and mainstream snack producers will not take all that large a hit.

    At the end of the day I think food choice is all about personal preference. And people should have the option to obtain the food that they prefer.
    On Once the global capital of bad food, London shows the way forward. posted 3 years, 9 months ago 10 Responses