What clarity of purpose?  David, we were bamboozled by unscrupulous men who took advantage of a deep tendency in United States culture to seek violent revenge.  The response to the attack six years ago was not about "lizard brains," it was about poor education, successful hegemony, a lack of a critical politics, and a deep failure in our culture.   So many of us are utterly intoxicated with ourselves at the expense of the rest of human kind -- many enviros on this list included -- and it does us no service to naturalize this essentially cultural tendency.

Remember: Spain was attacked too, the Spanish responded with humanity and voted the war mongerers out of power in the very next election.

I'm all for the messy chattering of democracy, but let's at least begin with an informed conversation about the character of our reality.  The clarity you describe is not instinct; it's bad learnin'.

We don't have to fight nature, here, we need to get over ourselves, take a cold hard look at what this nation has done to other people everywhere, recognize how we are all culpable, and try to rebuild on a foundation of decency...if such a thing is even possible after all these years of training otherwise.

Peace,
KC

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Yes, DR, chipmunkocracy is the way to go.  But we need to have the patience to let all the chipmunks get through their time-consuming chatter.  And we need to have the courage to live with the upshot, which is likely to be some sort of compromise not really satisfactory to anyone.

Much more efficient would be an enlightened dictatorship, the monarchy of a philosopher-king.  The problem there is, there is no such thing as an enlightened dictator.  And even if there were, as Lord Acton warns us, chances are the dictator will not stay enlightened for long.

Two quibbles:
Let us not give in to the prejudice that what is "modern" is clearly better than anything that preceded, or that "modern" people are obviously more intelligent than their pre-modern ancestors.  Not all pre-modern people were tribalist troglodytes -- in the bad sense.  Even the troglodytish Cro-Magnon cave painters at Lascaux and Altamira, and the ivory carvers who produced the Stone-Age Venuses, had brains as large and brilliant and creative as our own.  And classical Greek philosophers and their Christian intellectual heirs in the Middle Ages venerated Reason at least as profoundly as anyone in the Modern period.

While there are unfortunately many signs of intoxicated bellicosity and the excessive influence of the "lizard brain" in post-9/11 America, we should remember that there was nothing at all violent or reptilian in the reactions of very many of us.  Here in Manhattan, compassion, gentleness, shared sorrow and the desire to assist anyone in need were the common emotions.  Downtown, every busstop, every firehouse and many a blank wall became shrines, richly decorated with pictures of the fallen, poems and expressions of love, flowers, candles.  But GOD FORBID that there should be "another 9/11."  Sure, we comforted one another, as best we could.  Still, how could anyone reasonably suggest that we need another long episode of that grief-struck solidarity, just for the sake of unity?

Chickens are our cousins! So are other sensitive animals! Enough is enough! No more factory farms!

Kudos.

It is absolutely disgusting that anyone would suggest that we need another 9/11 or Katrina or other disaster that might kill thousands innocent people just for the sake of unity.

I do not want to imagine what right-wing pundits will do with an "environmental" commentary like this. It severely undermines progressive efforts to improve our quality of life, bring about social justice, and protect and restore natural habitat.

Forward!

I don't read it as David suggesting we need another 9/11.  

I read it as "in order to save the planet, we need transcendant unity, which only big bad events provide...but we shouldn't trust that unity anyway because it can lead us in a bad direction."  

His conclusion is therefore that all we can do is stumble around best we can and try to fix the problem in fits and starts.

We'll find a lasting commUNITY at the local level.  The world can unite behind this concept as an effort to prevent global collapse foretold by 9/11 and Katrina.