Discuss: From the Editors (Jan/Feb 2008)

The editors ask if we have any ideas. The word that you are looking for is in your excellent editorial, that is the word love! Imagine a world in which we love each other, ourselves, and our surroundings! Now that we have lost a healthy relationship with the above, we need a moral imagination to discover our connections with inner and outer realities. Thank you for raising our consciousness!

I agree.  Love it is.

I believe the community will more usefully address the issue if they understand the Dependence on Nature Law. Everything that society does and uses entails irreversibly drawing down on the limited natural bounty, both income and capital. It is inherently an unsustainable process summed up by this natural law.

Don’t forget “ecolacy” (Garrett Hardin, Two Cultures - or Three Filters?  On being ecolate as well as literate and numerate. The Social Contract, Spring, 1999):

“I have augmented C. P. Snow’s two paths to a culture (the literate path and the numerate path) with a third one, the ‘ecolate’ path… It is now clear that as the human mind processes the inputs from experience it uses three different filters, each connected with its characteristic question. -
Literacy: What are the appropriate words? Numeracy: What are the operational numbers? Ecolacy: And then what? More consistently than the first two filters, the ecolate filter is focused on time and the probable consequences of a proposed action. Ecolacy presumes a consequentialist ethics (which is often at odds with the motivational ethics produced by earlier, and predominantly literate, intellectuals).”

(See http://www.garretthardinsociety.org/ for more info.)

-pt

Biodynamic and organic farming enriches the soil even in the desert. The law of matter is death; we can’t forget that life forces sustain us. We must re-enliven the earth as true stewards of the land for our own good.
How can we promote Ecolacy?

When me and my friends are standing around at a protest someplace, we frequently end up talking about ‘re-balancing’.  When our culture has so skewed us from human needs and human values, we lose sight of the earth-friendly values that gave our lives meaning. By re-balancing our lives we re-balance our relationship to the earth and everything.

I like thinking that way since it doesn’t involve trying to get back to some ideal time before we’d screwed things up so badly. It’s more like the walker on the tightwire who pauses while he catches himself out of balance and goes on from there. Kind of reduces guilt and keeps focus on what needs to happen to keep in balance right now.

I really like the idea of this work “moving from the margins to the center of politics”, even though it’s still doing it slowly. It’s really important to search out the vocabulary that tries not to freak out people on the opposite margin.

It seems to me all words used in this whole and huge area become over-used, misused, misunderstood, abused and so on.  My area of interest is focussed on ‘sustainability’ in the hope participants endeavour to consider and act on all the complex inter-related and interdependent issues holistically; nothing is an island.
Some time ago I ‘played around’ with the ideas of cultural, environmental, social and economic i.e. the core components of ‘sustainability’ and came up with the acronym CESE.  When spoken it sounds like “See, easy.”  It could be easy; often-times it is not.  To me it has a ring of ‘positivity’ and even fun about it. Periodically I wonder if the idea has any merit.

I think “stewardship” and “responsibility” are good general terms for what we are working toward, and terms that people across the social and political spectrum can identify with.