Dave - good first draft and a helpful excercise.

The absence of anything on climate change seems notable. Even if your assumption is that by implementing your manifesto we'd solve that problem, it seems worth being explicit about it, maybe in ecological restoration.

On a more nit picky level, this statement is not true.

Our economy must move from reliance on a single concentrated source of energy (oil)...

Our energy - for electricity, transportation fuel, manufacturing, heating, cooking, etc. - comes from different sources, although the majority are fossil. If you mean for the diverse clean energy bullet to be just about transportation, which would make the statement true, than you should clarify it.  

And if you mean diverse clean energy to be all encompansing than, in my mind, a smart grid is a crucial part of that and maybe doesn't need a separate bullet.

Your electric vehicle bullet differs from the others in being very prescriptive. In the long term we need transportation that is sustainable. Electric cars might play a big part but who knows? I think the green manifesto might be better served for a call for sustainable transportation that could encompass all sorts of private and public transportation options.

for the feedback.

As for global warming, the decision not to mention it was deliberate. I do think that implementing the manifesto would address it. But the recommendations are meant to be positive. Global warming gets plenty of press elsewhere, and I'd like for greens to have at least one part of their program that doesn't revolve around fears of apocalypse. I think you're right that it might fit neatly into the eco-restoration bit, though.

Re: the energy bit, you're right, it's a bit muddled. The overall point is that (in my opinion -- not sure how idiosyncratic this is) in the long term, all power is going to be electric, and derived from renewable sources. Fossil fuels and biofuels may both be necessary in varying proportions during the transition, but I think it's important to be explicit that they are transitional, lest we build (or just continue to grow) a subsidized infrastructure supporting them that will be difficult to dismantle.

The all-electric thing is what's behind the electric car bullet, but yeah, since I'd like this to be acceptable to a broad array of people, maybe I'll make it more generic.

Thanks again.

Oh, and if anybody out there is knowledgeable about agriculture, I think that bit could use some work.

www.grist.org

David,
You might add food to your statement on green cities ("self-sufficient in terms of water, energy, and food.")

On local ag, you sound a bit prescriptive re: people's behavior ("people must...."). Better to stick to public policy. You might say something like: "Redirect the $10-$20 billion per year now spent subsidizing energy-intensive industrial agriculture toward rebuilding sustainable local and regional food networks."

Generally, I think this Exercise  is a great idea and something that a pub like Grist could really add to the national debate. At a time when Dem. politicians are floundering in their efforts to elucidate an agenda--any agenda--it's up the intellectuals to step in and make something happen. After getting lots of commentary and honing it real well, submit it to the NYT and other powerful national outlets. Careful not to tone it down much. We need an honest agenda, not some focus-grouped-to-death, endlessly framed nonsense that neither offends nor appeals to anyone.

I disagree with people trying to "hold Bush to" his statements about our "oil addiction," because his speech amounted to a load of bollocks.  There's nothing there to hold him to. But his speech did, I think, open space within the national discourse, within opinion-making media organs like the NYT, to talk seriously and critically about energy policy. So let's get on with it.

I've got a post brewing in my head about why the energy markets are anything but free, exposing the absurdity of John Tierney's powerful-sounding argument about how the free market's going to sort out the energy mess. I've got a busy weekend ahead, but I'll try to get something out early next week.  

Peace, and I'm out.

This is a great list and it really gets to the heart of the matter; most importantly, by offering up the first wave of thinkable alternatives.

To me, there may be two additional questions that need to be asked in and around these changes:

What are the material consequences of our technological choices?  Technology is always just reconstructed nature from somewhere, is it not?  What are the ecosystem costs of electricity, computers, automobiles, etc.?  We seem to have adopted a great local ethic for our food consumption; let's begin to recongnize that what we surround ourselves with has the same kind of politics as what we eat.

What are the implication of an "efficiency" ethic?  This question may sound heretical, but a careful look at the history of the efficiency idea finds it closely linked to a whole package of cultural changes that came with the industrial revolution or the machine age.  Let me propose the idea that "efficiency" is  problematic because it imposes a machine metaphor into the center of our value system.  I think it is important to use metaphors that value the kind of world we want.  In that case, we do not want energy "efficiency," we want sustainable energy.  We do not want technological "efficiency" we want technologies of life.  Etc.

Kent "Kip" Curtis
Massachusetts

I wonder if it is worth fleshing out both of these ideas a little more? As categories, are we using them in ways that serve our ends? What are the 50% of the human population to make of a political philosophy that frames species loss as a "crisis" in demand of immediate steps to "stop the bleeding," but describes their condition of poverty as a "worthy goal," "if" we can afford it.

I don't think this hierarchy of values is unique to the list above; I think it is common to our perspective as environmentalists.  But I also think that it may be the single most difficult conceptual obstacle we face in framing a workable future.

Hannah Arendt in On Violence makes the point that in politics we can never really know what the ends are going to be; all we have are means, and politics is the ongoing negotiation of those changing conditions.  Her point was to emphasize the political irrationality of warfare and violence in the wake of World War II.  I wonder if it doesn't also help environmentalists locate their processes a little better.

Our end is not a nature free of humans, is it?  Then why would we make that idea a part of our means?

Isn't it more encompassing to recognize something like: poverty is our environment and so, by extension, social justice should be a de facto cornerstone of sustainability?  

Rather than a trade-off (which is really their argument, not ours), we could imagine a continuum of healthy, vibrant habitats, including our own...?  And I'm not sure how we have a healthy human habitat without confronting the conditions of wealth and poverty extant today.

Kip

Kips comments belie a non-environmental real agenda.

"Technology is always just reconstructed nature from somewhere ..."

This is the same anti-environmental attitude that says that "everything is natural."  It's just an illegitimate excuse for causing ecological and environmental harm and destruction.  Technology as used by humans is, in fact, a perversion of nature, twisting science to produce short term benefits that kill other forms of life and pollute our planet.

"What are the 50% of the human population to make of a political philosophy that frames species loss as a 'crisis' in demand of immediate steps to "stop the bleeding," but describes their condition of poverty as a 'worthy goal,' 'if' we can afford it."

Because humans are grossly overopopulated and are also causing the sixth great extinction in the history of the Earth, non-human species are at risk while humans are thriving.  Sure, some individual humans are not doing well, but the loss of species always greatly outweighs the loss of individuals.  It is non-humans that need priority.

"Our end is not a nature free of humans, is it?  Then why would we make that idea a part of our means?"

First, a planet free of humans would be far better for all other species, unless we end our gross overpopulation and overconsumption.  However, I haven't seen anyone on this site advocate an end to the human race, so who's making it a part of our means?

"[P]overty is our environment and so, by extension, social justice should be a de facto cornerstone of sustainability ..."

Human poverty has virtually nothing to do with the natural environment, aside from peasants who've been forced out of their natural lifestyles destroying the natural environment when they can't earn a living in civilization.  This false conflation of the human environment with the natural one is a favorite of those who are trying to guilt trip conservationists into becoming leftists.  Don't fall for it!

These types of comments are exactly what I've come to expect from leftists who value humans above all else.  My opposite point of view is one of the main things that makes me an Earth First!er, even though I haven't worked with that group since 1987.  A humans first attitude is not an environmental attitude.  If you want to work for social and environmental justice, I fully support you and hope you're successful, as long as your success doesn't add to environemntal or ecological problems.  However, environmentalists need to concentrate on non-human problems, because it's the non-humans that are most at risk.

Jeff Hoffman

I think the key conceptual problem here is that poverty and wealth are probably linked, interdependent. I don't think you can have magnates with $50 billion in the bank without a vigorous race to the bottom, without vast reserve armies of the unemployed and underemployed. Lots of people, somewhere, have to work real hard and real cheap, if we are going to have a small class of people who command huge resources. So what is the answer? Should David add a plank about "ending wealth"? I deplore the obsession with "framing," but even I can see that that's a bad idea.
The answer may be to think small. Get out your EF Shumacher, your Jane Jacobs, your Masanobu Fukuoka. Let's subvert the dichotomy of wealth/poverty by pushing an emphasis on neighborhood, local and regional economic development. The Bono philosophy of "makepovertyhistory.org" has always rang false to me, as if the world's hunger problems could be solved by US industrial agriculture, by say, diverting a year of defense spending to buying a bunch of low-quality corn. No! Sustainability will be achieved, and poverty ended, by building a global network of largely self-sustaining small economic units.

As for Jdhlax, I think by separating humanity and nature, you mimic traditional western thinking and reify human-based environmental destruction. Your thinking owes more to the likes of Exxon execs than you care to imagine. Environmentalists like you fixate on overpopulation as the greatest evil; yet it's always somebody else you wish would vanish without a trace.

Poverty and wealth are certainly linked, in that they are both hotly-contested boundries of what is "too little" and what is "too much."

But no, as long as we have machines and energy to drive them, we do not need "Lots of people, somewhere, have to work real hard and real cheap, if we are going to have a small class of people who command huge resources."

As a mental model, consider the first guy with a water powered grain mill ... who was he exploiting?

"As a mental model, consider the first guy with a water powered grain mill ... who was he exploiting?"

Not sure. Maybe that feudal lord suddenly had some servants?

That's the kind of thing I might think of ... illustrative of human nature, but orthoganal to innovation and wealth creation.

I mean, when is a "feudal lord" a captialist and when is he a "maximum commander" of the people's army?

;-)

It is a mistake confuse deeper elements of human nature with the organizing instituions which might contain them.

I gotta run, but two brief notes on poverty:I find it borderline-obscene to worry about "spreading the consumerist lifestyle" or whatnot when billions of people in the world don't have sufficient food or clean water; for them, I imagine our bourgeois worries about consuming too much are rather distant.The poverty connection is simple: The poor reproduce more and destroy more natural resources -- forests are dying to make simple heating fuel, not for luxury condo patios. The only way to slow and reverse population growth is through sustainable development.My only worry in including the poverty thing on this list is that it strikes people as rather grandiose and far-off. Part of the point of the soon-to-be-renamed manifesto is to offer something tangible and reachable.

www.grist.org

David,
Are you sure that the "the poor ... destroy more natural resources"? As I understand it, we in the industrialized north consume many times more resources, both per capita and absolute, than people in the global south. Doesn't the guy driving an SUV deep into the suburbs to his mini-mansion have a larger "ecological footprint," by orders of magnitude, than even a poor person in Brazil cooking with wood cleared from a rainforest?

One of the reasons I like simple (3 or 4 line) statements of goals is that the simpler they are, the more inclusive they tend to be.

In my opinion, chasing details only serves to highlight increasingly meaningless differences at increasingly smaller scales.

I agree poverty is a huge problem.  I could digress that "poverty" in one country is "wealth" in another ... but really to what point.

I don't believe "An index-card manifesto" should serve to highlight differences in what is potentially a working coalition.

I have to second Tom's question, Dave.  I cannot find a single measure that supports your claim:

"The poverty connection is simple: The poor reproduce more and destroy more natural resources -- forests are dying to make simple heating fuel, not for luxury condo patios. The only way to slow and reverse population growth is through sustainable development."

But perhaps you intended irony...?  I hope so.

Michael: I think "The Trouble With Wilderness" is a good place to start this kind of discussion.  Especially the heart of the quote from above:

"Wilderness gets us into trouble only if we imagine that this experience of wonder and otherness is limited to the remote corners of the planet, or that it somehow depends on pristine landscapes we ourselves do not inhabit. "

I do not agree with William Cronon's insistence throughout much of his recent writing on these topics, that what marks 'nature' is its profound 'otherness' - I for one find nature moments to be about profund sameness - but his point that we do not require pristine landscapes to have such experiences is valuable.

It has logical implications, as well, does it not?  Non-pristine lands are non-pristine because...?  because they have been used and/or inhabited by humans.  I hear him saying, and I guess I agree, that any environmentalism that forgets about human habitat is going to walking around only partially prepared to deal effectively with the world it finds.

As for the Arendt reference, the "processes we are trying to locate" are the political processes that will achieve a sustainable society.  Arendt's caution is that as we develop, articulate, and engage these political processes (writing essays, engaging in activism, teaching sustainability, discussing issues on blogs, lobbying our political leaders, etc.) we don't sacrifice the present for an imagined future.  (e.g., If we want a just and democratic sustainable society, we must get there through justice and democracy.)

I put Cronon and Arendt together and I find a global environmental crisis that is rooted the question of wealth/poverty.  Humans are not the problem, in this view, human habitation is.  Further, the problem with human habitation is not the fault of the poor, the problem with human habitation is the responsibility of the wealthy.

The problem with human habitation is that a few million people control most of the resources and all of the markets of the world.  Most of the rest of us are powerless in our own landscapes.

To notice that there is a nature out there being abused and destroyed by the forces of this society should not lead us to despise human beings, because, in point of fact, we too are being abused and destroyed in the very same process by the very same society.  It should lead us to despise the forces that leave us, and the majority of our fellow human beings, living, as Henry Thoreau put it, "what is not life."

A sustainable future requires the immediate attention to unsustainable social problems, because they lie at the heart of the unsustainable ecological relationships we have constructed.  

Life itself will survive us, it is tenacious and has been challenged by bigger forces than the human imagination.  The question is, will we survive ourselves?

Kip

Sorry I said stupid things and then ran off earlier. And now I need to go to bed. Just a few things.

My poorly articulated point on poverty had to do with the fact the the poor tend to use more resources per unit of work (food, heat, etc.) created. Though our immense wealth makes the Western world, and particularly the U.S., by far the lead resource consumers, we are actually highly efficient relative to the rest of the world.

Anyway, there are two overlapping problems here: One, you've got, after years of progress, the number of people in severe poverty again expanding. So too with the number of failed states. Desperate people and failed states do not pay much heed to resource conservation. We need to stabilize those states and raise those people out of poverty.

Also, there are millions of people in stable-but-poor states like China and India whose incomes, quality of life, and of course resource consumption are rapidly rising. We need -- quickly -- to do everything we can to help those countries leapfrog to sustainable technologies and practices. If they follow the same path we followed ... well, they can't. The world will simply run out of resources first. But it will get very ugly long before then.

What's questionable, in re: the topic at hand, is whether it's wise to try to shoe-horn these points into the index-card manifesto.

www.grist.org

"[B]y separating humanity and nature, you mimic traditional western thinking and reify human-based environmental destruction."

I didn't separate humaninty from nature; those who decided to do things like substitute agriculture for the hunter/gatherer lifestyle or kill trees or dig into the Earth did.  It is our actions that separated us from nature originally, but most humans are now so disconnected from the natural world that they don't even know where their food or water comes from.

"Your thinking owes more to the likes of Exxon execs than you care to imagine."

How so?  Without an explanation, this makes no sense.

"Environmentalists like you fixate on overpopulation as the greatest evil; yet it's always somebody else you wish would vanish without a trace."

I never said anyone should vanish.  I've said that all families should be limited to one child until the human population is greatly lowered from its current size.  People should not be everywhere on the planet; no species anywhere near our size occupies anywhere near the area that we do, not to mention that human destruction, often euphamistically called "development," is just about everywhere.

Jeff Hoffman

I'm very grateful for this disussion. Thanks all.

Green Architect William McDonough approaches all his projects with this guiding question:

"How do we love all the children, of all species, for all time?"

That is a question that, for me, has become like a pebble in my shoe. I don't come close to living the answer but it is working its way deeper into how I look at my choices.

Hip Hop artist and activist Rha Goddess says:

"The revolution is to be well."

A young species, some of us seem to be growing toward wellness but many of us are not. Without better understanding and skill working with this, our amazing self reflective mind, the tides of emotion, hormonal drivers, etc, we will continue crashing car after car(civilization after civilization). Be active, be passionate, but be well in mind, body and relations. Wiser choices come from healthy minds, bodies, and communities.

Native Californian elder Alvino Siva told us something like this:

"Watch what you're eating. You've got to pay attention to what you are eating. If you don't pay attention to what you are eating pretty soon you won't be eating."

All the best.

This is a good dialogue to have.  I know a couple of you have expressed impatience and/or frustration with having to "unsimplify" the manifesto or "shoehorn" a side issue into what you believe are the true first steps of environmentalism, but I appreciate your staying with this.  Without dialogue, the best manifesto in the world will fail.  Sound bites and simplification only serve opposite ends than ours.

Two points:

1. Dave, I'm still not convinced by your description and demotion of of 'poverty.'  Notice how you used the machine metaphor ("efficiency") to represent the flaw of poor people? They are 'inefficient".  Isn't it possible that the value system informing you that our society (the one you yourself admit no one else can aspire to) is better in any way may be the source of the flaw?  What is 'efficiency,' after all?  Anyway, I refer back to my original post about this concept.  Efficiency is for machines, we are organic.  We require things like health, vigor, and sustencance to operate well.  In my opinion, the problem with poverty is that it denies people these fundamental qualities.

I still maintain - and would hold this instance as a representative example - that getting our language and metaphors right is crucial.

2. I would also ask you to re-examine the assumptions embedded in your explanation of the "poverty problem."  Your logic goes:

Poverty is growing world wide, the problem with poverty is that poor people and "failed states" don't care about the conservation of resources, therefore ... what?  We must impose ourselves upon them so that they recognize the truly universal value of nature in their midst?  What is the logical outcome of this train of reasoning?  I follow it every time to environmental authoritarianism...  Back to Arendt: if we construct authoritarian means, we will have authoritarian means in our midst.

Worse, this view pits the disempowered of the world against your very western notion of 'environmentalism' (e.g., land conservation).  In the larger international dialogue about sustainability, you won't get out of the starting gate with these assumptions.

The other problem with poverty you present, is that large masses of people in the world are at the cusp of becoming wealthy (They do so with our billions, I might add: we float the Chinese miracle).  We must prevent them from becoming like us, lest they ravage the earth as we did.

Ok, I know it was late, but can you now see how this is exactly the opposite argument as the first?  If we are the most efficient, why wouldn't we want them to be like us?  Ah ha!

Because at its heart, I think your manifesto still alienates people from nature.  I don't say this to make idle arguments, or simply to be contrary.  I say it because when I look carefully, that is what I find.

I am worried that you are unintentionally restating an environmentalism that does not take human habitat seriously, and that does not include human life as a valued part of its ethical obligations.  I think any successful environmentalism will have to.

I have been a dedicated environmentalist since the 1970s, which is only to say I have spent an inordinate amount of time thinking about environmental issues and working toward environmental goals.  I also happen to believe very strongly in the principles of justice and democracy.  These values and my experiences lead me to the views and criticisms I present here.

I, as much as anyone reading this, want us to get it right.  And I hope everyone can read and engage these questions and ideas in that light.

Dialogue is good.  We want it in our ideal society, do we not?  Let us practice it then.

Peace,
Kip

To Kip,
Your critique of the current liberal conception of the poverty problem is spot on, I think: We're asking the poor to be more like us ("efficient") and less like us (ravenous users of resources), without, well, consulting the poor. The next challenge is, how would you have David knit your vision into the manifesto?

To Jdhlax,
By my comment about Exxon execs I meant this: Like an Exxon exec, you claim that "humanity" and "nature" occupy distinct positions. To the Exxon exec, that means, let's use, consume,  nature, for, though it is not us, it belongs to us. Nature is commodified as "property" and then sold to the highest bidder for consumption. You do something quite different with the same underlying assumption: humanity is distinct from the landscape, from "nature." If the Exxon ethic is explicitly anti-nature, yours is purely misanthropic. Yet you're playing with the same philosophical set of marbles as the Exxon exec. A more interesting, effective and radical approach is laid out above by Kip. We are part of nature, like it or not. So how should we live, how should we make our habitat? I think there are many answers to that question, and that's why I advocate the local over the universal.

I've been reading this blog for a while now, thought about jumping in, then became overwhelmed by the words needed to express what I'm feeling. And I don't have time now because I'm headed off to work. The basics of what I'd like to say are this: The kind of manifesto being discussed here has been created and discussed for many years now, by Greens and by other activist groups/movements. For many years I was active in the Bioregional movement. Each year we gathered in congress to create a platform of values and actions that we agreed to, by concensus. What was exciting is we were representatives of organization, communities, and groups of people doing what they could to live their values, at the time, mostly in the US and Canada. Many of these folks were "poor" monetarily but definitely rich in spirit. Anyway, if you aren't familiar with this work check out the web for "bioregionalism" and folks such as Peter Berg, David Haenke, Kirkpatrick Sale, and New Society Publishers which has an excellent selection of books, many written by those with Earthy, bioregional perspectives. This is not to say what's happening here isn't valuable. But I'm also saying that getting these ideas into the mainstream is difficult. Language is very important, but so is maintaining the values, qualities, and from the heart sensibilities that we want to communicate.

Since Tom asked... here are the priorities through the lens of human habitat, if means mean anything, these sorts of things ought to create a much better working environment:

WHAT A GREEN WANTS: IMMEDIATE PRIORITIES

Educate, tax progressively, budget honestly, and nurture.

Hasn't it worked for you?

Kip





]]> Green Card

Since Tom asked... here are the priorities through the lens of human habitat, if means mean anything, these sorts of things ought to create a much better working environment:

WHAT A GREEN WANTS: IMMEDIATE PRIORITIES

Educate, tax progressively, budget honestly, and nurture.

Hasn't it worked for you?

Kip





]]> http://www.grist.org/article/what-a-green-wants-an-index-card-manifesto-first-draft/ Tue, 21 Feb 2006 01:47:15 -0800 http://www.grist.org/article/what-a-green-wants-an-index-card-manifesto-first-draft/28 Kip,

I have to get going on my day job, but just a note: Thanks for all your feedback. I appreciate your efforts to guard against imperialist, paternalist notions about poverty. Though my language has been imprecise, I don't think I'm guilty. If I had to sum up, I'd say this: There is no extant example of the lifestyle I'd like to see. I want to move toward a life wherein communities can be self-sufficient, and in a relationship of nurturance rather than depletion of surrounding ecosystems. Getting there means very different things for us in the Western world than it does for those in poverty and failed states. We need to move in that direction because right now we're sucking the earth dry; we need to help them move in that direction because if we don't, their numbers will expand and overwhelm our best efforts. I wouldn't presume to tell them how to live, but I don't think it's a stretch to assume they don't want to be poor, and at the same time don't want to be dependent on foreign aid or forever scurrying on the treadmill of debt-driven globalization.

Nobody's gotten in right. It's something new -- to all of us -- that we're shooting for, which is why it's so important to have a relatively short, clear picture of it. Back later.

www.grist.org

I am not so sure that living off the land is so new for us. I have to say that agriculture is not the devil everyone makes it out to be, neither is forestry nor mineral extraction. The scale of resource use can either be sustainable over the long run or exploitative, due to carelessness or overpopulation.

Sustainability comes from knowledge on specific issues and not broad-scale sweeping assumptions regarding the 'entire' environment. In other words: 'think globally, act locally', in other words: 'S#!| ain't the same everywhere'. Water usage is an issue out West, yet in the Northeast, water shortages (at least in quantity) have never been a major issue. Forests grow back after being cut out around here, not so much in Brazil. Etc.

Poverty is an issue everywhere, but it is not something, see my last post in 'Walk this way', that is dependent on your purchasing power. It is, rather, effectively a 'harder' (physically and mentally) way of life, whether chosen or not, and some people choose a 'poor' lifestyle despite having money. There's another saying (a true one by the way) that some of you might have heard (and I do not mean to make this a racist thing, more in terms of Chris Rock explanation of what a N!33a# is): 'You can take a N!33a# out of the ghetto, but you can't take the ghetto out of the N!33a#'. No disrespect to blacks this applies to whiteys too, but that's why heads in the rap industry and pro sports get shot up in their limos, on the set, outside the casinos, rape girls, kill wives, smoke crack, whatever.

I digress: Stick to "think locally, act globally" and know the issues at hand. If you live in a poor neighborhood, get involved in the community outreach programs, teach the people about why they should worry about their environment and let them know how they can improve it. If you live in a rich one, explain to them why they should consume less (they are probably already in the know, sort of, on environmental issues: I like to live next to a beautiful clean lake, ahh). In a rural one, explain why organic is better and why they should hire a forestry consultant. But I am pessimistic on the effect that this will have in the long term on global sustainability (Bush is still in power). Please, prove me wrong.

A perfect example of conservation and 'acting locally, thinking globally' as it works, or hopefully will work is William McShea's (Smithsonian and WCS) conservation effort with Eld's deer in SE Asia. He, with his part-US and local team, went down ther to a) learn about the habitat, behavior and social structure of the endangered deer. Then after collecting data, he b)applied the knowledge to conservation through education and monetary support to the locals.

You write:
"There's another saying (a true one by the way) that some of you might have heard (and I do not mean to make this a racist thing, more in terms of Chris Rock explanation of what a N!33a# is): 'You can take a N!33a# out of the ghetto, but you can't take the ghetto out of the N!33a#'. No disrespect to blacks this applies to whiteys too, but that's why heads in the rap industry and pro sports get shot up in their limos, on the set, outside the casinos, rape girls, kill wives, smoke crack, whatever."

I think this statement is racist without a discussion of the history of the ghetto. What is the ghetto? Where did it come from? Who has benefited from its existence historically? Whose ends did it serve? Whose ends does it serve now? I think it's a bit much to talk about "ghetto mentality" as if it sprang up in a rap video in 2001. And the blanket statement about "heads in the rap industry and pro sports," which at first glance looks intended to serve as a proxy for black folks in general, just makes you sound ignorant.

True, I have never myself lived in the projects, but I have lived close enough to them (a few blocks) in order to suggest that these statements are true. Why? Chris Rock said it best, and if you don't know what I am referring to, then maybe you should watch his specials. That controversial statement that I stated, I have heard from both blacks and whites and it does not apply to blacks specifically. It has numerous meanings, not only a word that blacks call each other, not a racist term used historically, but also a mentality that applies to people that are blatantly 'ghetto' and if you don't know what that is, go to Bed-Stuy, deep Coney Island or parts of Harlem.

Furthermore, people choose to live 'poor' outside of the context of the above. Like I said, poorness is a lifestyle, not monetary income, and while you may choose to live below the poverty line, it does not make you 'poor' per se. Please look at the meaning behind the words not at the words.

Sorry to post twice in a row.

I think that you are right, a socio-economic background is obviously required to talk about the 'ghetto mentality'. I apologize for somewhat reactionary post, but there are plenty of people out there who do not appreciate the tension that occurs due to that mentality. I have been robbed more than four times and while I escaped with all my possessions (as a kid $20 is a hell of a lot of money) and without harm (and sometimes it was just plain comical), I have heard of numerous people that have not been so lucky.

For example, just yesterday I heard about some guy on the south side of Syracuse who got surrounded by some people and got stabbed several times and is now fighting for his life with a collapsed lung. They took $12. While that may not be representative of every person that lives in the 'ghetto', that is the mentality that I am talking about.

For what it's worth (which isn't much), I grew up in Austin, Texas' primarily African-American east side, and lived for a year in Crown Heights, Brooklyn.

And I still think it's absurd, ahistorical, and useless to declare poverty  or the ghetto a "lifestyle," like something you might try out after reading a fashion magazine or watching Yo! MTV Raps.

And that's all I have to say about it. Just wanted to go on record so people know not everyone on Gristmill countenances such garbage.  

What I meant to say was: 'RICHNESS' or 'POORNESS' does not come from money, it comes from the HEART!!!

I sense from your tone that you've tired of discussing this issue, but here goes anyway:

"Getting there means very different things for us in the Western world than it does for those in poverty and failed states..."  And "we need to help them...because if we don't, their numbers will expand."

This way of understanding it is the problem, in my opinon:  I believe that this statement is the same kind of binary construction that pits people against nature (to no useful end).  We need to deal with poverty, David, because it denies fellow human beings the right to flourish.  There's no us or them here; your ability to live (relatively) luxuriously is part of the same package that renders more than half the human population radically alienated from place.  Systemic, entrenched poverty (the denial of the basic necessities of life: food, shelter, clothing, education, and health) is immoral and unethical by any standard.  But your construction of the problem here renders these wrongs a problem of mathematics; another mechanical metaphor to describe organic life...  And another residual of the latent mysanthropy embedded in our environemntalist constructions.

Attacking this problem (poverty and human suffering) as part and parcel of our manifesto  strikes me as the only moral and ethical way toward sustainability.  Anything else is paternalistic imperialism.  How can it be otherwise?  Without the full participation of impacted populations, your are not describing a democratic process.  Whether or not you feel it in your heart, it is there in your expressions.  That's why language is so important: it exposes our unexamined assumptions we carry.  

Let me say it plain: I think poverty and the human condition has to be the central problem of environmentalism today or environmentalism will fail.  Right now, your manifesto doesn't effectively do this. (But I know you  are revising...)

This is not about race or racism or political correctness or shifting the long term goals of environmentalism.  It is about finding a way to honestly and truly understand and confront the problems we face.  It won't be easy, but I think it is our only sane choice.

Peace,
Kip

Yes, that is exactly the sentiment that people should be getting behind with regard to poverty and environmentalism, also socialism (not to be confused with communism):
Access to shelter, clothing, food, medicine, education and allowing people to be a useful part of society while providing them with more than bare necessities are key to bettering everyone's lives, and by proxy (with education) the environment.

The question is how to exactly go about it?

To Tom from Jeff (as opposed to jdhlax):

This discussion has become very complicated and convoluted.  Of course we are part of nature, what isn't?  Everything in the universe came from something natural at some point.  The fact that we're a part of nature is thus meaningless but, it does serve to make a very anti-environmental point: because humans are part of nature, everything we do is natural and therefore OK.  I couldn't disagree more.

As I said earlier, by their actions humans have separated themselves from the natural world.  There's nothing natural about being able to overpopulate without some natural controls lowering the population (starvation, lack of water, disease).  There's nothing natural about killing trees, digging into the Earth, or any other aspect of industrial society.  There not even anything natural about agriculture -- no other animal lives that way.  There's nothing natural about paving over the Earth.  I could go on till I starve.  Humans have used their grossly overdeveloped intellect -- compared to their grossly underdeveloped sense of wisdom -- to manipulate the natural world.  This would be OK, except that doing it has caused massive ecological and environmental harm.  Judging by many of the comments here, I wonder if the commenters even know how bad things are and the fact that humans are the cause of the problems.

The fact that it's clear to many of us that humans have separated themselves from the natural world does not mean that my ideology has anything significant in common with that of an Exxon exec, or any other exec for that matter.  We all believe that the Earth is round and orbits the sun, but so what?  The fact that people have purposely acted unnaturally in order to make things easier for themselves is uncontestable; the issue is how we need to change so that we can stop destroying the Earth.  And BTW, a misanthropic attitude comes from a love of life, which we misanthropes see humans destroying.

I find nothing interesting, effective, or radical about Kip's approach.  It's the same leftist crap that the Death of Environmentalism jerks were spewing.  The basic premise is that humans are better and/or more important than everything else, so we need to concentrate on helping out the less well off ones, and this somehow is supposed to pass as a new type of environmentalism.  For those of us who constantly strive to help those in the greatest need, non-humans clearly deserve our attention far more than humans.  Watering down the environmental movement by concentrating on things like poverty is no way to protect the non-humans.  I understand and agree that desperately poor people will do desperate things, including destroying the environment, but that's only one small cause of environmental destruction and doesn't get anywhere near the roots of the problems, which are overpopulation and overconsumption, the latter also being consuming anything we have no business consuming, like oil.

Finally, I agree that we need to find a much better way to live, because our current lifestyles, even those of non-wealthy people, are neither sustainable (a very low standard that allows as much destruction as you feel you can get away with) or in harmony with nature or the Earth (a much better standard).  I agree with the poster who advocates bioregionalism, but notice the "bio" portion of the word.  It doesn't mean that people in a certain area should be allowed to cause a certain type of environmental harm just because doing so is traditional in that area or because they can't figure out another way to earn little green pieces of paper.  It means that people have to learn to live within the constraints of their particular ecosystems and sub-ecosystems.  We still need universal prevention of things like pollution, destruction of ecosystems, and harm to wildlife.

Jeff Hoffman

I'm starting to agree with Jeff (surprise!) on the poverty issue; should it really be a focus of the environmental movement?

Put aside for a moment the very real concern that some people will not join our cause if saving humans is not first on our list- I won't argue with that. The question is not how to enlist the most folks to our cause, but to state our cause succinctly. There are many things that could be done to end poverty and human suffering around the world- but if you ask a conservative, a liberal, and an independent what is the best way to do it, you will get very different answers, and I believe every one of them would do little or nothing to help the global environment. If fact, it is likely that most people's solutions would end up doing more harm to the Earth's ecosystems than good.

So is it really true that ending poverty will ease the strain on the environment? Maybe I missed it- tell me again how ending poverty is necessary to saving the Earth from man's selfish and destructive behavoirs? Poor lifestyles do not tax the Earth the way luxury does. So let's say we've done it- we've ended poverty for all humans on Earth- how does it follow that the Earth can relax and begin to heal itself?

It might suit our cause better to propose an end to luxury, (which is the real cause of both poverty and environmental destruction) than to include an end to poverty (which might hurt the environment more than it helps).

a liberal in redsville

"When dealing with a species that is so obviously self centered, how else [aside from offering human-centered policies] do you expect to motivate them so that they change their behavior?"

If you're strictly discussing strategies regarding recruiting people into a cause, I don't disagree.  However, I'm concerned about not watering down the conservation movement by getting people to move from that to social issues, which will, at best, do very little for wilderness and wildlife.  To strike a middle position between Chris and Birdboy, we need to recruit more people while not compromising our ideals.  I think one of the best ways to do that is by example, though I don't have any magical answers.

Jeff Hoffman

To all the posters,
A definition of poverty is something that I have been trying to argue for (quite stupidly I might add). Poverty depends on more factors than money, I know it's harder to quantify the other ones, but it could be done. There are too many ways to define poverty. Are you impoverished because you are below the official US poverty line? No, to use an example outside of US: a person living in a rural community in Costa Rica with the same or lower income than a person in San Jose (or NYC for that matter) is definitely less impoverished, because of a higher quality of life, due to clean air, fresh food, clean water: I can attest to all of these, especially the clean water. Man...

The people that are suffering from being poor in some communities (I'm thinking rural mostly, but urban also: fast food, incinerators, etc.) are the ones who are attacked by corporations (both metaphorically and physically) in order to provide for the rich. Nothing new there. But what in effect has to happen is that there should not be any rich (monetary terms), and all should be poor (monetary terms) in order to reduce consumption, which is both destroying the natural capital and the poor's (monetarily poor) quality of life. In other words by not addressing the issue of poverty from different angles (including a more succinct definition of poverty), we are ignoring the effects of impoverishment on life on earth in general. How can we convince all people that this is a legitimate goal?

I do not think it is possible. And that is why we need some sort of a paradigm shift in governmental policy (or something, I don't even know) regarding that. In the meantime, we have to live with the system the way it is and be selfish within the system in order to progress the punishments to the ones who are too selfish in order to achieve any level of control on environment/poverty issues. I am basing this off David Wilson's and Omar Eldakar's work on empirical and theoretical models of social control, which I do not think has been published yet, except for O.E.'s M.S. thesis, but there are more ways to interpret D.S. Wilson's work.

How to define the selfish control on a movement scale level (except that we are all sort of doing it, see digression at the bottom)? Hard to say, but maybe it should be defined by individual involvement (which is something that I have been saying) with the section of culture that we are most familiar with. Ironically, most environmentalists are in the middle-class/white category, a demographic that benefits the most (total, not per capita) from our economy. I've run out of gas here, pun intended.

This is another digression:

With real poverty come other more important things: violence, crime, etc.
I am not fully sure how to address violence, since on one hand it reduces the human population and is quite natural to our species, but on the other there is something inherently wrong with it (at least that's what I have been taught all my life).

Another thing to remember: Life and diversity of life on earth will rebound in one way or another, it has done so before and will continue doing it again. Will the human species? Probably not, so in effect when you are concerned with the environment, you are concerned with human species survival and the way that you remember things (selfish control). Great example of that: clearcuts -> everyone thinks of them in terms of what was there once, but maybe the focus should shift to what can be there in a few years (referring to NE US mostly, but other temperate forests also). I can go on about this, but this is just another digression.

Thanks for the reply.  I normally limit my comments to the issues and apologize for the "jerks" comment.  I have a special problem with the "Death ..." authors that stems from a long time enviro activist's (who's also a close friend) experience with one of them.  I won't discuss that here, because the "Death ..." person can't defend himself, and because even though I totally trust my friend, my info is second hand.  However, EVERY environmentalist I respect has dismissed the "Death ..." theory, both for the reason I gave and for other reasons.  Now, onto your substantive comments.

Re the origin of environmental destruction:

I guess the veracity of this statement depends on one's point of view.  From the point of view of anything non-human, the problem began at least 10-12,000 years ago, when humans discovered agriculture and began overpopulating.  (I will ignore human overhunting of animals to extinction before that.)  At that time there were only 10 MILLION people on the entire planet!  Adding to this number caused overconsumption by definition, because the 10 million people were living in equilibrium with the natural environment.  By manipulating nature with agriculture, humans circumvented a natural population control and were thus able to overconsume without immediate consequences to themselves, even though, by definition, they had to destroy natural ecosystems in order to practice agriculture. Overpopluation also caused a lack of space for other species.  My sense of ecological morality, for lack of a better term tells me that large mammals like homo sapiens should not cover the entire planet.  To put it intellectually, ecosystems need large areas of wilderness in order to be healthy, and need wildlife corridors between those areas of wilderness.  These large areas and corridors are not possible with anywhere near the numbers we now have.  Humans can live in wilderness, but only as pre-industrial hunter/gatherers.

Re wealth, education, and freedom creating an environemental ethic:

This is utterly untrue.  When I worked with Earth First!, I also worked with the American Indian Movement and the International Indian Treaty Council.  My friends in those groups had the same Earth First! attitude re human destruction of nature that I did, though some had less misanthropy.  These people were very poor by American standards.  On the other side of the coin, I have discussed these matters with rich people, and they have what I consider to be a very anti-environmental attitude.

My environmental ethics began when I rode my first horse around the woods in northern Illinois.  (Before you go off on wealthy horse owners, the horse cost me $365 and I paid $60/month board.  None of the people I knew from horses were rich as far as I knew.)  I was never formally educated about environmental matters, aside from the first Earth Day, for which we had an assebly in our high school.  Empathy for others comes from within, along with from some experience in natural areas, not from being wealthy or educated.  I've always identified with those most in need, first working on civil rights and poverty, then moving on to non-humans when I realized that they are in much greater need of help than humans.

"By assuming that most people would not come to your (our) conclusions about the importance of the earth, given the right context, you diminish your own basis for caring about nature (it is one that must be imposed on others)."

Well, most people have not come to our conclusions.  What's your solution, just let them continue to destroy the Earth and hope that they get it before they destroy life as we know it?  Just as society regulates other behavior, we should prohibit ecological destruction.  That said, of course it would be ideal for humans as a whole mentally and spiritually to evolve to at least the point of traditional indigenous hunter/gatherers, who love and respect all life, and who consider other forms of life to be relatives, not "resources" to exploit.

"What kind of environmentalism is it that patently ignores the world's most prevalant species?"

Humans shouldn't be ignored.  Instead, they need to reigned in.  I assume you meant ignoring human problems.  The reason I don't give priority to those problems is precisely because humans are the most prevalent species.  Humans are thriving.  It's everything else that's suffering and needs our help.

Jeff Hoffman

Kip, I forgot to mention one thing.  The term "locking up land" was coined and is used by hardcore property rights, anti-environmentalists like the Wise Use group, who are either wealthy landowners or those who earn money by directly destroying the Earth.  Their point of view is that they should be able to do whatever they want with their land, regardless of the effects on other people, species, the land itself, the air, or the water.  I find this point of view highly immoral and utterly despicable.

In order to be entitled to a right, people have to fulfill the attendant responsibilities.  Because humans as a whole have been totally irresponsible in their use of land, they don't deserve the right to unfettered us of it.  Creating large wilderness areas is not "locking up" land, it is preventing its destruction.  Human use is only compatible with wilderness if people live there as pre-industrial hunter/gatherers and without any manipulation of the land, which even many hunter/gatherers practiced.  Otherwise, their mere presence will destroy the wilderness qualities of the land.  Let's create large areas of wilderness that exclude humans and see what evolves there over the next million years or so!

Jeff Hoffman

Jeff's comments are exactly why Greens should back a serious change in what passes for 'property rights'. While those who 'own' the land should have the right to use it for personal benefit, (to feed themselves and their family) they should NOT have the right to rape the land for financial gain. Any activity that might alter the ecosystem should have public approval- it should be deemed necessary and unavoidable before being allowed. Native peoples were right- no one can 'own' the land- it is part of us, and we belong to it- if we damage it, we damage ourselves. Put THAT in your manifesto (and take cover).

Regarding the issue of poverty, isn't it odd that plenty of folks who are not poor, in fact wealthy folks who own lots of land, do not support conservation efforts? They have time and food and education, yet wish to consume the Earth for personal gain. I'm pretty sure that means that eliminating poverty does not necessarily result in an environmental conscience.

  "Give people active and meaningful control over what they eat, how they live, what they learn, and what happens to their local landscape and I believe that they will oppose most of the worst ravages worldwide - they already do, but are presently powerless to stop it."

This is totally unsupported by evidence, in fact, evidence abounds to contradict your 'belief'. Most poor people would love to consume mass quantities, and if they should decide to restrain themselves in order to aid the Earth it will be because they became enlightened through experience or education that focused on that goal.

You are right about the need for education- public schools should be teaching children (too late for adults) to respect the Earth and all her creatures, and that human life depends on a healthy ecosystem. This might help as much as anything else in the current manifesto.

I'm still waiting to hear how eliminating poverty necessarily helps the Earth. It may be easier to argue that our methods which focus on saving the Earth from humans will necessarily help reduce the suffering of 'poor' humans around the world. Instead of a specific 'goal', it may be a direct 'result'.

a liberal in redsville

One (of the many) things I've noticed over the past two decades of activism, organizing, and publishing "Earthy" books, newsletters and articles, is that there seems to be two kinds of people (well, maybe three, the third being those concerned only with wealth and power but I haven't worked closely with these folks, just opposed them). There are human-oriented folks and there are Earth-oriented folks. This is not to say it's an either/or thing, but when it comes down to it most of us fall along one perspective or the other. I'm Earth oriented. And while I love my family -- my sons, my grandsons (I'd give my life for them), and my friends -- and while I feel for the suffering of humans, my heart and soul are with the Earth. If I have money to donate or time to give it's going to be for non-humans. After Hurricane Katrina, I gave money to a local vet who made several trips to the Gulf coast to rescue animals instead of the Red Cross or other human-oriented relief efforts.
  While everyone knows, intellectually, that nothing thrives if the Earth doesn't thrive, there's a huge disconnect between that intellectual knowing and feeling it deep in your heart. What we need to do is reach those who can be reached.
   The Earth, the Universe, is a magical place. (And I use that term fully understanding that some will immediately dismiss what I have to say.) We understand so much and at the same time we understand so little. For many years my focus was on "creating an economy for the living Earth". I worked with folks initiating community based projects like community currencies, land trust models, revolving loan funds, etc.  I saw my role as speaking for the Earth because just because a project is great for people and the local community doesn't necessarily mean it is (or will be) good for the Earth. It might be, certainly. But I wanted Earth awareness to be part of the foundation of community-based enterprises so that down the road Earth awareness is integral to the project, not added as an afterthought.
  I haven't worked in this area for about ten years but many of the projects just getting off the ground back then are thriving now. Some have more Earth awareness than others. Even so, despite the growth of revolving loan funds, community based credit unions and other models of  community economics, our situation today is even more dire than it was ten years ago. I would not have thought that was possible back then. But at the same time as community-based efforts were growing, corporate control, so-called "free trade" agreements, reactionary politics, etc. were also growing and gaining in power. It was not enough to create our own little spheres of influence even though they definitely benefited thousands of people in numerous communities around the world.
   For the past ten years I've struggled with the reality we face that is getting more and more frightening, especially the impacts of climate change. How to convince people to change, to see their lives differently, to take risks, to do something, anything to open to the ecological reality that we are rapidly destroying the ability of the Earth to support, not just life as we have come to know it, but any form of human life.
   I'm one of those people who believe that the purpose of life is the evolution of consciousness, human consciousness being just one strand, not better and not worse, than any other strand. I believe that we have the potential to create and inhabit a world of peace and beauty. I believe that a healthy Earth would be a balance of inhabited and wilderness environments and that even now a future that includes humans is possible, and I would even go so far as to say desireable, despite how we've been over the past few hundred years. I say desireable because we are a strand of the consciousness of the Universe, we have evolved on Earth for a reason and I can't believe the reason is to destroy it or ourselves.
   I think that those of us who are Earth oriented need to be clear where we are coming from. It's okay to love the Earth first. We can empathize with human issues, and love human beings. I don't think it makes sense (and it certainly isn't going to win us any converts) to trash humans but, as has already been said here, there are plenty of organizations that already benefit humans. The Earth and nonhumans need all the help they can get. As far as population goes, I sense the Earth will be taking care of that over the coming years with disasters, diseases and the like. I only wish we would stop funding outrageous medical research (like genetically altering animals like goats to make some kind of life-saving medicine for humans, and pouring billions into fertility research when there are plenty of children already born who need a loving family) and put the money into on-the-ground projects that would benefit the Earth and local communities. It's ironic, and sad, that often the people most hurt by corporate activities are those who are the least destructive in the way they live. In other words, they are people we could learn from.
   We also need to integrate spirit into into the discussion. It's the glue that's missing. We are spiritual beings. The Earth is a spiritual being as are all creatures here. At a stop Hydro-Quebec conference I helped organize many years ago in Burlington, Vt, Winona LaDuke, a Native American activist you may have heard of, spoke about the indigenous world view versus the industrial world view. In the indigenous world view, everything has spirit and "standing", as she put it. Everything is alive and purposeful. Whether we live in a rural or urban place we need to reconnect with the Earth and participate with Earth rather than dominate. How do we do this?
   One final note: Pretty much everyone knows the shit is getting ready to hit the fan, especially after the past few days of mainstream media focus on the melting of the Arctic and how that is speeding up climate change. But if my conversations with friends and co-workers is any indication, the impact of such devastating news is disempowerment. While I'm thinking, "Great. Now people will know, as I have known for years, that we MUST change if we are to survive", other folks are thinking, " Oh my God. There's nothing I can do." And so they put up a barrier on the knowledge, and the fear in their heart, get in their car and drive to work, asking, "What else can I do?" Most people I know are making changes in their daily lives to benefit the environment. But as individuals and families we feel that the little we are able to do makes no difference. And it's true. While we must change at the level of the individual, we also need to transform the larger political, economic, and social systems. Which is what this index card manifesto is about, I think. So keep the Earth focus and find a way of integrating spirit.

Re: "I'm still waiting to hear how eliminating poverty necessarily helps the Earth. It may be easier to argue that our methods which focus on saving the Earth from humans will necessarily help reduce the suffering of 'poor' humans around the world. Instead of a specific 'goal', it may be a direct 'result'." -- Absolutely! And educating the children is key as well. Although I don't think it's too late for adults. For some, yes, but it had better not be too late all of us because we can't wait for today's children to grow up for things to get better. It's experience that changes things. I think one wonderful thing we can do is to share our Earth Stories -- experiences we've had that remind us of our true place here that perhaps we've filed away under "too weird" or "no one will believe it" or "I must have imagined it". It's amazing how many people have had what some might call mystical experiences in nature, but who don't have the words for them or have dismissed them as fantasies. Sharing our stories reminds us that there's more to this world than meets the eye or that science can define.

Just ran across this quote in Lester Brown's Plan B 2.0:In an increasingly integrated world, eradicating poverty and stabilizing population are national security issues. Slowing population growth helps eradicate poverty and its distressing symptoms, and, conversely, eradicating poverty helps slow population growth. With time running out, the urgency of moving simultaneously on both fronts is clear.There you have it.

www.grist.org

Inspiring comments from SMLowry; it's nice to hear from other people who've experienced the magic in Nature. If only we could share these experiences with the 'indoor' folks without freaking them out. One of the most impressive projects I've heard of is Sierra Club's outings for inner city kids. It gives them a chance to experience the peace and beauty of nature, something they never get deep in their world of concrete, traffic, and peer pressure. If only the schools mandated such outings for all kids, the love for Mother just might spread like a wildfire. I don't believe their poverty is a barrier to their ability to feel the Earth rhythms; it is their unhealthy environment and the lack of any opportunity to escape that environment that keeps them isolated from nature.

Dave; maybe I'm a fool to question Lester Brown (blaspheme?), but while it is obvious that reducing population CAN reduce poverty (more is at least available for everyone), it is not so obvious to me that reducing poverty is effective at reducing population. Is this assumed to follow from the observation that rich countries have smaller population growth than poor countries? Doesn't that ignore all the other influences, like better education and the accelerated population growth that occurred while those countries were attaining their higher standard of living? At some point, most of those countries largely saturated their space and resource availability, and THEN reduced their population growth.

It seems likely that while a poor country is being lifted out of mass poverty, there will be an initial increase in population growth, as food becomes more readily available, health care improves, and infant mortality decreases. If your first two children died of malnutrition or disease, will you not try again when food and medicine are available? As the growing population saturates their resource input (i.e., drains as much as it can from the Earth), then they will (might) begin to reduce their population growth. But without education about the importance of birth control and the means to do so, bringing people out of poverty may not be very effective at controlling population growth.

Please don't misunderstand me- I advocate poverty reduction out of compassion for humanity. I think it can (and should) be done without further harming the Earth, by re-distributing the wealth already accumulated- stop feeding the Earth's bounty to animals that eventually feed humans and just feed humans.

But I still think that poverty is the result of a lack of human compassion for humans and not some environmental indiscretion. Our spiritual evolution should go beyond simple compassion for our own kind and flower into a compassion for all things existing in the natural world; without this, our work will never be appreciated by most of humanity.

a liberal in redsville

Great roaring onslaught!  Thanks for all the thoughtful replies.  Lots of things come to mind in response:

Jeff - How can you possibly know the view of non-human nature (Which you have, incidentally, anthropomorphised and given an individual opinion about human history)?

In terms of rhetorical strategies, you have substituted "non-human nature" for yourself and your cohort's opinions about human development.  In terms of metaphors, you have imagined a pure, untouched (can we say 'virgin' since that is your basic principle) nature who is ruined by the penetration of man and the plow, and rendered "helpless" by man's actions.

Unfortunately: A.) It has no basis in ecology.  B.) It is so familiar a narrative trope (and a touch sexist at that) that you probably can't claim it to be uniquely yours or unique to environmentalism.

However, I think that the fact that you believe that you can know something about nature and speak for nature is crucial.  I believe you can too.  Why?  Because it is you, and you are it.  ...unfortunately, so is the rest of humanity.

As for the rest of your post.  I think you haven't looked around at the world situation very carefully if you think we have tried to feed, clothe, shelter, and educate people.  And, if you'll pardon my forcefulness, isn't it extremely arrogant and self-centered to presume you have superior knowledge of nature to the rest of humanity?  Just for contrast, how do you think the 1,000 or so people out there who subsist daily on the same resources you as an individual use each day would respond to your claims of special insight to how people should behave?

Finally, you offer two choices:  A.) Do what you want with the land or B.) you, with this special insight to nature's feelings, keep people from the land.  How about a 3rd?  Manage land and ecosystems with representative democratic institutions.  You may not get "wilderness" as American's define it, but you probably won't need it.

Birdboy - Same metaphor problems.  Plus, what's your standard for good behavior in nature?  Spell it out.  Because I think, in feminizing and anthropomorphizing nature, you also create an anthropomorphized masculine human culture that in your thinking somehow acts in a unified fashion (well, except for you and your small sect of true nature knowers) against nature.  By doing so, I think you so diminish the true complexity of our challenge that we cannot (indeed, by your telling are not even allowed to) analyze the multiple nuances of human behavior.  'Save nature from humans'...to me, it is of the same quality an idea as 'fight terrorism'.

SMLowrey - I agree with much of what you say.  Our culture does not cultivate a sense of miracle in nature, and yet every spring up here in Massachusetts the trees start to bud, birds return and the cycle of the season begins anew, people wander outdoors and feel a sense of renewal in their spirits - there are miracles all around us that go unnoticed or barely noticed.  We need to cultivate that lost sense of wonder at the wild.  Where I disagree is with this notion of "Earth-centered" somehow being distinct from human centered.  I think you end up conflating human beings as a species with the current structures of power that are destoying us and our ecosystems.  Your own post talks about "earth-centeredness" as a focus on the earth, and then you go on to point to humans and human activity in the aggregate, which are going to be punished by an Earth that takes care of things (Gaia, presumably).  These kinds of binary constructions (I believe) actually serve the forces of social power who have no interest in our vision of nature.

Maybe things are getting worse, not because we don't have ample great ideas about how to love nature and the wild and not because there aren't millions of people out there who don't recognize the vitality of our place in nature (and their place), BUT because we have simplified the problem into a human's v. earth conflict, which, unfortuanely, isn't an accurate rendering of things to most people - because it isn't actually true.

Dave - Hear hear!  My only quibble with Lester is this idea of "National Security Problem."?   Human poverty is a moral and ethical problem (and so is nationalism, for that matter).  But the circular link he draws makes good sense to me.

Gracias por la conversacion muy interesante!

Paz,
Kip

Kip, re your comment: "Where I disagree is with this notion of "Earth-centered" somehow being distinct from human centered. . . .  Your own post talks about "earth-centeredness" as a focus on the earth, and then you go on to point to humans and human activity in the aggregate, which are going to be punished by an Earth that takes care of things (Gaia, presumably)."

Language does create problems. If we talk about one thing and not the other then it's assumed that they are two separate, distinct things. When I say "Earth centered" I'm not excluding people because, to me, we are part of the Earth. We're separate as physical and spiritual beings from other living beings, and we have a unique strand of consciousness, but we're part of the whole regardless. And what benefits the whole, benefits humans. As a writer, language is something I've thought long and hard about. Many of the projects I worked with and supported in various ways back when I was in the alternative economics movement were very human-centered. This wasn't necessarily bad -- they did good work and had a postive impact on people, communities, and even the environment. But the Earth was not part of the language. Yes, many of the individuals involved loved the Earth and had an Earth sensibility but when it came to writing mission statements and policy and all that, the Earth was, for the most part, left out. The assumption was that if the project was human-scale, cooperative, and "alternative" that it would be, at the very least, benign for the Earth. That wasn't good enough for me.
   I don't believe the Earth (yes, Gaia) will punish anyone. I believe the Earth is alive and conscious but I have no illusions that this aliveness is personal with regard to human beings. If we're in the wrong place at the wrong time during a hurricane or earthquake or any other natural disaster, regardless of how "good" or "bad" we may be, we'll be hurt. Shit happens and sometimes it gets us. Neither do I believe that the Earth loves me personally, although I do love the Earth and have had many wonderful experiences that confirm to me that we do participate in the life of the Earth and vice versa. It's a matter of being aware and open and not putting preconceived ideas on our experiences.

"I think you end up conflating human beings as a species with the current structures of power that are destoying us and our ecosystems. . . . These kinds of binary constructions (I believe) actually serve the forces of social power who have no interest in our vision of nature."

I'm not exactly sure what you mean by the above. What I think you're saying is that we need to somehow be able to separate humans as a species from the human-created "structures of power", and that to fail to do so feeds and supports those who "have no interest in our vision of nature" as you so politely put it. I agree -- I think.
   As a human who loves the Earth and knows way too much about what we're facing and who and what are responsible (I spent several years doing corporate research and had an article selected by Project Censored a few years ago about corporations destroying the rainforest), I absolutely connect the people in power with the actual destruction that goes on. I also understand that it probably wouldn't matter who is in power because the system is self-perpetuating and the names and faces change every once in a while. This is especially true at the corporate level and with the revolving-door policy of government and industry. However, I also understand that the system is human-created and can therefore be changed. There are all kinds of debates of how to go about this. Some say we should create alternatives on the "outside", others say we have to work from within. I think we have to do both and we have to build bridges; and at the same time, time is of the essense. It's a conundrum for sure. Looking at the situation logically, rationally, the search for solutions is frustrating and probably hopeless. Which is why I believe we need to integrate spirit into picture. There's so much more to life than our physical senses can know. It is with the unknown that our hope and future lie.

Quite a 'deluge' of criticism, most of it seeming to be directed at Earth-centered spirituality (which is a little out of place on this blog, but I am quite used to it) and yet no helpful ideas offered...

As for 'good behavior in nature' I suggest we follow the lead of civilizations that have survived in harmony with nature for many centuries- take no more than what we need, and put back what we take- in balance and harmony. We take nutrients from the soil with our gardens and we put them back as compost. We plant trees, carry water, and combat disease and infestations to make up for the dead wood, seeds, berries, and meat that we take. I realize it cannot work for 6.5 billion people, and it may not work for even a few million humans. I've offered many ideas for reducing our footprint and supported many more, but I don't pretend to have all the answers- should I?

"anthropomorphizing nature" is your interpretation of my statements, from your human-centered viewpoint. Apparently, if we give consciousness, awareness, and spirit to anything non-human, then we are humanizing it- the implication is that only humans can have these qualities- I believe this is wrong. What you call anthropomorphizing is in fact honoring, respecting, and loving the Earth. Does the Earth know she is being abused, consumed, and disrespected? Of course- but that doesn't make Her 'human-like', it makes humans 'Earth-like'. As for feminizing the Earth, I didn't invent that- the male-female thing is as old as life on Earth, and the nurturing aspects of the Earth are pretty obvious. It is not that I feminize the Earth, it is that the Earth gives us the loving, nurturing security that we associate with femininity.

I'm sorry, did I anthropomorphize humanity? As for 'masculinizing' human culture, that wasn't my doing- it was Christianity. The notion of a male God and the suppression of feminine worth is pretty obviously their doing.

That humanity 'somehow acts in a unified fashion' is again your interpretation. Does cancer act in a unified fashion, or does each virus act alone, unaware that the collective action of all of it's kind is killing the very host on which it feeds?

Kip, 'saving nature from humans' is much more difficult and urgent than terrorism will ever be. Humans, (like the viruses), knowingly or unknowingly, are in fact destroying the Earth. There is no other comparable threat that acts on the time scale that humanity is acting- be afraid- very afraid. I cannot see how this in any way diminishes the complexity of our task- I may be guilty of believing it to be impossible, but not simple.

Finally, I suggest we focus on our common goals, and save the discussion of who is a 'true knower' of nature for another thread, eh?

a liberal in redsville

Though I'm having more fun with this than I normally do.  Sorry to be the last to answer, I've been busy trying to save the Earth on my paying job.

"How can you possibly know the view of non-human nature (Which you have, incidentally, anthropomorphised and given an individual opinion about human history)?"

I never claimed to "know" how other forms of life felt, but anyone with empathy toward other forms of life can certainly have a good idea.  Imagine how any wild animal, plant, river, whatever, would feel about being killed by humans destroying its ecosystem, or about polluted.  The only excuse for killing is to eat.  Otherwise, we shouldn't be killing anything.  You talk about humans being a part of nature; well, those groups who live without killing except to eat are doing that.  The rest of us are destroying nature.  We are a part of her the same way a cancerous tumor is a part of the person's body.

Your sexual metaphor is strictly your own.  I never imagined nature to be a female being raped my a male human race.  I realize that others, generally women, have propounded that metaphor, and I agree with it, but it doesn't describe how I feel.

"I think you haven't looked around at the world situation very carefully if you think we have tried to feed, clothe, shelter, and educate people."

I didn't say anything like that.  (While doing that feels like a good idea, doing it would cause even more ecological devastation considering how grossly overpopulated humans are.)  What I said was that very poor Native Americans I worked with have the same environmental ethics that I do, and that rich people are usually very anti-environmental, so that poverty, at least as defined in this country, is not what causes lack of an environmental ethic.

"[I]sn't it extremely arrogant and self-centered to presume you have superior knowledge of nature to the rest of humanity?"

I never claimed superior knowledge of nature.  Traditional indigenous people, wildlife and marine biologists, arborists, etc., and many others I can't think or don't know about have better knowledge than I do.  It's not about just knowledge, though that's certainly important to a point, it's about ATTITUDE, dude!  Where we differ is that I don't think that humans should kill anything they don't eat or should pollute anything.  This of course would require a much lower human population and an end to industrial society and probably even agriculture, but my priority is the entire Earth, while yours clearly is humans.

"[H]ow do you think the 1,000 or so people out there who subsist daily on the same resources you as an individual use each day would respond to your claims of special insight to how people should behave?"

You shouldn't make statements like this when you don't know to whom you're writing.  I've been poor enough to go hungry to the point of losing weight and lived in the slums of west Oakland, purportedly the worst in California.  I have no kids, no car, no cell phone, and the only reason I have this computer is that I'm an environmental lawyer and need it for my work.

That said, I realize that aside from the brief time I couldn't afford to eat enough to maintain my weight, I've never been poor on the level of a large portion of people in Africa and Asia.  However, their poverty does not change the fact that humans are destroying life as we know it.  Most people wouldn't like my opinions on how humans should behave, either, but that doesn't mean that my "insight, as you put it, is any less valid.

"Finally, you offer two choices:  A.) Do what you want with the land or B.) you, with this special insight to nature's feelings, keep people from the land.  How about a 3rd?  Manage land and ecosystems with representative democratic institutions.  You may not get "wilderness" as American's define it, but you probably won't need it."

Your choice leaves nothing for other species except what humans allow.  First, this is not sustainable, let alone in harmony with nature.  Again, without large areas of wilderness and sufficient corridors between them, ecosystems can't be healthy.  This is not my opinion, but a biological fact.  Second, this point of view lacks any sense of morality from my point of view and, more importantly, from the point of view of everything but humans, to the extent that we can know that.  You're saying that humans are godlike and should decide what lives and what dies.  This attitude begins to get to the heart of what's wrong with the human race.

Jeff Hoffman

Hi all - Thanks for all the thoughtful and impassioned responses.  Just to be clear, I'm not accusing anyone of being insincere or not embracing their convictions.  I really believe you all mean well and best; I just think we all need to assess the contours of our convictions a little more critically.  I'm challenging my own assumptions here, not just yours.

SMLowrey: Um...Ok.  So tell me what it means to "love the Earth."  Not in an abstract way, but in terms of action.  When I started working in environmental education, this is precisely what we wanted to teach all children: love the earth.  But does "love" do enough?  Don't we sometimes hurt those that we love?  Don't those that we love sometimes hurt us?  Isn't love a bittersweet emotion?  And, secondly, and perhaps more importantly, what exactly do you mean  that it doesn't matter who is in power because the "system" is itself "self-perpetuating?"  It is?  Where does the momentum come from?  That to me is precisely the kind of taking people out of the structrues of power that concerns me.

Birdboy: I have no qualms with earth-centered spirituality.  I just don't see how it helps us out of our difficulties on its own.  Please don't conflate my critical questions with my rejection of ideas.  And, I beg to differ about your accusation that I offer no ideas.  That's what got this started in the first place, go back and look.  As for the rest of your post...maybe you're right, but what is "harmony?"  How do you know when you see it?  How do others?  Tell me where harmony and stability exist out there in nature so I can begin to use that standard as my baseline and begin measuring my behavior and others against this standard.  And, yes, if you are giving human qualities to nature, you are anthropomorphising nature.  What else would you call it?  Nature is not an individual, it is not a human beings, and as far as my experiences have revealed to me, there is no accessible conscience or consciousnes out there, only the one I have in here and you have in there.  They are human characteristics.  And yes, you anthropomorphise humanity too.  Humanity is not a human being either, and it does not act according to a single interest, yet your construction suggests that it does (e.g. humanity as cancer: if that is true, how do you explain you?).  And, just because western culture moves along masculinist lines does not mean you are either obligated to do the same or excused from the accusation when you do.  Finally, I am happy to dispense of thinking that anyone has a special insight into nature; that's my point.  You don't, I don't.  No one does.  And that's why "saving nature from humans" is as empty a slogan as "fight terrorism," both are meaningless phrases that lead to other bad behaviors and not the purported end.

Jeff - Day jobs are good.  Mine keeps me busy too.  But, ok, well...I'm trying to imagine how a river feels when it is killed and I'm having a tough time.  I'm wondering how a river feels to be alive.  I'm wondering how a river feels at all.  Where does this feeling take place?  In its water?  Along its banks?  Show me some evidence of these feelings that don't point back to your imagination or my imagination.  I'm not sure that you can because if you're honest, you know that the only feelings you actually know concretely are your own, and the only ones you have ever heard about that could possibly relate to your own have come from other people's descriptions.  Anything else, I think, is just you projecting your own feelings out onto this thing, nature.

"Where we differ is that I don't think that humans should kill anything they don't eat or should pollute anything."

I don't entirely disagree, but I don't think you entirely agree with this statement.   First, there are dozens of other activities out there in the world that have horrifying implications for biodiversity, ecosystem health, and the general thriving of life on earth that are neither killing nor polluting.  How do you presume to identify and control those?  Second, death and pollution are also part of nature.  Why are humans a special case for you?  What about the things that kill wantonly and are not human?  (Hurricanes, fires, tornados, lightning, earthquake, disease) should we punish and constrain all of those forces too?  Volcanoes create tremendous air pollution.  Should we banish them too...to where?  Or only death and pollution at human hands is wrong?  What about when humans cause the death of other humans by denying them access to their own lands?  Or is that ok becasue it protects the environment?  You accuse me of having different concerns than yours, which may be true in that it seems your concerns are about regulating the behavior of this thing humanity as it tries to act in this thing nature; mine is to solve our contemporary sustainability crisis.  Yours is solved when people are gone.  Mine is solved by people.  

Everyone makes their claims to poverty, but you are right, your poverty doesn't really count.  Nor does mine.  By dint of being here, having the technology that you do, and the time to stop and use it, by definition, you are not among the radically dispossessed.  So I stand by my claim.  Your footprint is huge.  You cannot help it, you are a United Statian with access to resources.  Most people aren't.  You end up looking a touch disingenuous and even somewhat callous making the kinds of judgements about aleviating poverty that you do (i.e. that it's a problem because it will just destroy your precious earth).

Your final point runs into the same problem of category reification that I have been pointing to thus far:  You claim to speak for some "nature" that the "human race" otherwsie does not know.  And your solution is to refuse to give "humanity" access to "nature" (even in this online discussion that poses no real world applications whatsoever).  Hmmm.  I'm am very certain that you are not a fascist and do not want to be spouting fascist ideology, but isn't the idea of having your rule over the rest of humanity so that you can create a idyllic nature of your dreams very much like the final solution?  If you do not let people decide (and our society by and large DOESN'T let people decide) then who will decide?  Some cadre of "experts?"  I have more faith in human nature and intentions than that.  I believe that you and the millions of environmentalists in the United States and around the world are much more indicative of the promise of human culture than the "humanity" that you imagine.  (I again return to the question: how do you explain yourself if people are so incredibly bad?)  When you give power to people, not to institutions, people take care of their homes.  Thats' what we want.  If you deal with human suffering and poverty, which requires that you also deal with human extravagence and wealth, you will get what you want AND you will not have to repress, oppress, or otherwise restrict the rights of normal individuals - ecological democracy, not environmental authoritarianism.

Sadly, your visions of wilderness is one that accepts the current capitalist world as is (wilderness is just the other side of the coin of land exploitation).  Mine doesn't.  We need to fix human habitat, because it is not working, and we need to do so democratically because anything else would be immoral and un-ethical.

I await your engaging resonses!  Eviscerate me!

Peace,
Kip

OK, this is my last post on this thread.  If you want to continue this discussion we can trade email addresses.

How other things feel:  Of course we can never even know how another human feels, but like I said, it goes back to attitude, not knowledge.  When I interned during law school, I worked on a case trying to stop an herbicide spraying program here in CA.  My mind wandered off to imagining how a plant would feel being sprayed with a poison: being rooted it could not move, so it's just stuck there dying.  I then imagined myself as that plant.  If you imagine yourself as just a minute part of the planet, connected to everything else, then you would strongly oppose killing of any other form of life aside from the need to eat.  (Because I agree with the indigenous view that everything is alive, industrial pollution is killing, too.)

"[T]here are dozens of other activities out there in the world that have horrifying implications for biodiversity, ecosystem health, and the general thriving of life on earth that are neither killing nor polluting."

Name one.

Re killing:  Just because it's a part of life is no reason to add it.  Everything that's alive will die someday, but does that make it OK to murder someone?  Furthermore, the natural processes that you identify as killing "wantonly" are natural parts of the planet, without which there would be no life as we know it.  Humans killing non-humans for any reason other than eating is completely unnecessary for anything except to make humans more comfortable, and humans are the only animals that kill other than to eat, with a few extremely rare exceptions.

As to pollution, the Earth can generally deal with natural pollution from things like volcanoes and natural wildfires.  However, the Earth did not evolve to deal with unnaturally large amounts of pollution (for example, overpopulated humans making too many fires to stay warm) or industrial pollution, which is totally unnatural.

Re poverty, we have no common ground on which to base a discussion.  You also don't get overpopulation.  People who have more than two kids have a huge footprint, even if they're poor, though of course a much larger one if they're not.  Even though I'm rich compared to really poor people in the world, my lack of offspring greatly reduces my footprint, which is also eliminated when I die.  I'll just leave the poverty issue at Earth First!, humans after the Earth is taken care of.

Re humans and nature:  Well, if you don't have any idea of these concepts, you can't control human actions (whether by gentle guidance or by totalitarian means) or stop the destruction of the natural world.  There's no point in overthinking this, which is what you've done.  Just step back and try to look at what's going on, and has gone on, from the point of view of say, someone from another planet.  Look at humans as a whole, regardless of what some individuals do.  Individuals are irrelevant in determining what humans as a whole are doing to the planet.

Finally, we agree that the best solution to all this would be for humans to evolve enough to respect other forms of life as much as themselves.  (Traditional indigenous people evolved like this long ago, but civilization has killed almost all of them and destroyed their land.)  However, unless you feel that we should eliminate all laws because they're all facsist, we definitely need laws preventing people from destroying natural areas.  One type of these laws are those protecting wilderness.  People don't belong everywhere; in fact, a species as large and disruptive as us should only be in a few places, like other large land mammals.

BTW, "fascist" means big business running the government.  What you meant was "tyrannical" or "totalitarian."  Sorry, but this is a pet peeve of mine.

Jeff Hoffman

give up on this now, Jeff, it's finally getting good.  

 I can imagine how things in nature might feel; never said I couldn't.  But, like I said in my post before, that is my imagination.  It's an exercise in projection.  Not an exercise in knowledge.

 How do you decide whether something is "natural" or not?  Was hurricane Katrina "natural?"  Because I read that it was so intense becasue of warm seas, resulting from the greenhouse effect, which was caused, as you know, by people burning things.  And how do you decide what is pollution and what is not?  Volcanoes, for example, release enormous amounts of CO2 and have in the past radically changed the climate to the detriment of the then-evolved species.

 "You also don't get overpopulation."  Actually, Jeff, I do.  It's just not according to your simple equation of volume = impact.  I believe in the nuance of human culture and society and individuals; and that is where we are going to find answers to these problems.

 "I'll just leave the poverty issue at Earth First!, humans after the Earth is taken care of."  Right.  And who's going to "take care of" the Earth?  You?  The hundred or so other people who also hate humanity in the same way?  And how?  What are the political actions you can imagine that follow from this kind of proposal?

 "Individuals are irrelevant in determining what humans as a whole are doing to the planet."  Huhn?  Umm, so does that include you?  Are you are irrelevant to these questions?  Hmm...  That's a curious position to take if you want to make change, isn't it?  How am I to take anything else you say seriously if you are irrelevant?

 "Finally, we agree that the best solution to all this would be for humans to evolve enough to respect other forms of life as much as themselves."  Well, you believe this, which seems to be why you don't trust people.  I think a.) it's not a question of 'evolution" but education and b.) humans have already achieved this, but they are not free enough to express what it means.

 American Heritage Dictionary: "Fascism tends to include a belief in the supremacy of one national or ethic or ideological group, a contempt for democracy, an insistance on obediance to a powerful leader, and a strong demagogic approach."  Big business?  I don't get your peeve, Jeff, because this description sounds a lot like what your ideas about 'humanity' imply for political action.

In hopes of continued dialogue.

Peace,
Kip

I stand by my statement that we need to love the Earth, regardless of how soft and unspecific that sounds. And yes, we do hurt those we love, sometimes awfully, sometimes often. But the point is, if we truely love them then we change. We care and this care translates into change over time. Love is a powerful force and it has impacts in the physical world, not just the emotions.
   Re: your comments to birdboy. Go out into nature yourself. Find a quiet place and sit and breathe. You'll recognize harmony when you feel it. It exists everywhere in nature, even in places impacted by humans. Harmony exists in my garden soil, in a moss and lichen covered boulder. There are big harmonies -- the night sky, for instance, and little harmonies -- a hummingbird drinking nectar from the bee balm.
   Re: "Nature is not an individual, it is not a human beings, and as far as my experiences have revealed to me, there is no accessible conscience or consciousnes out there, only the one I have in here and you have in there." While you say "as far as my experiences have revealed to me" it's clear that you aren't really open to believing a different experience could be possible. You would chalk it up to imagination or wishful thinking. But my experience is very different. My experience is it is our human birthright to engage in life, not just in human life, but in the life around us. Everything in nature has consciousness, everything -- no exceptions. Just because we don't understand it, just because it feels unaccessible, does not mean it does not exist. Nature "communicates" with us -- the rock as a rock, the tree as a tree, the wolf as a wolf. If we choose to acknowledge this communication and engage, then we understand, each in our own unique way, and because we are humans we will feel the communication as humans and we will put words on it as humans. We are part of the web here, which means we have the innate ability to participat and to communicate.
   Finally -- if loving the Earth does not lead to action, then we do not truely love the Earth.

SML - Your posts are optimistic and inspiring and hopeful.  I really appreciate that.  I think we agree entirely except on one tiny point.  Whether all those things we are feeling when we "commune" with nature reach beyond our humanity.  I don't think that they do; but because I don't consider people anomalies or not nature, to me this is the wonderful thing about being human: The power of our imagination. (And, just between you and me, I think that our individual consiousness and conscience are also part of Nature.  But just as we cannot stand inside of someone else's skin, we cannot pretend to stand inside of Nature, either.)

As for harmony, here's my concern:  The long story of natural history is death and change and evolution (our present crisis is marked by a speed of species decline almost unprecedented in earth history, but there have been worse events; and the over all tally of extinction is staggering: 99 percent of all species that ever evolved have gone extinct).  There is no stability in nature, only change.  To bring it to your garden model, what happens when rabbits show up to kill the lettuce plants but only eat part of them or the birds show up to kill the worms and maybe only successfully pulls one in half and doesn't finish consuming it, leaving it writhing in the sun?  Has your garden suddenly become an immoral landscape in these cases?  The problem I see with turning to nature as the touchstone for our understanding of harmony is that nature is too incredibly complex and multifarious to provide us with a clear answer.  (Social Darwinists, for example, believed they are 'listening' tot he rules of nature).  Because of the character of human imagination, nature has tended to reveal to us what we want to find - thus bringing us back to our imaginations...

I believe that experiencing and engaging and paying attention to nature (really, to 'the wild,' since I am a Thoreauvian at heart)  and its miracles is crucial to maintaining a healthy ethical existance, but not because nature offers a perfect allegory for human behavior or some standard against which to judge our actions, but because it reminds us of the connectivity that you so eloquently describe.  Touching on this theme, Thoreau wrote in 1853, "If you would learn the secrets of nature, you must practice more humanity than others."  When we finally see ourselves in the miracle, our behavior will change.

I have been working to actively train people to love the earth for two decades, and if current trends mean anything, it turns out that loving the earth doesn't automatically lead to action - particularly since this construction tends to be somewhat paralyzing - can eat what you love?

Anyway, I am totally in favor of all of the ways in which you describe your relationship to the earth and totally in favor in finding ways to help people see the miracle that life is, just not as against humanity.  (And I'm pretty sure we see eye to eye on this.)

Thanks for your very thoughtful words (every time).

Peace,
Kip