Discuss: Climate Revelations

Hmmm…for me, Mr. Schindler has evoked here less of a significantly greater awareness of the so-called divinization of the climate change issue than he has the phenomenal capacity of people and corporations to rationalize their unsustainably distructive personal, industrial and commercial activities. 

First clue in his piece:  “I’m a climate guy.  I work for a ski resort.” 

Translation:  I make a living helping to rationalize and greenwash a business that makes a profit from shearing off mountain forests, destroying vital habitat and burning fossil fuels so humans can slide down hills on snow. 

Just that same ole lipstick and pig thing again, I guess. 

But as a wise friend of mine would tell Schindler after reading his piece: just remember, you gotta live in your own skin.

Man, we are so much more screwed than we even think we are.  But at least it’s clearer than ever who’s doing the screwing - need I even say it?

The main point I was trying to make in this article is that solving climate change offers humanity an incredible, all encompassing opportunity to achieve meaning in our lives. We haven’t been offered such a holistic shot at something we all crave since the creation of big religions. This is good news, because maybe that visceral drive for meaning will fuel the broad climate action that’s needed. That was the only point I was trying to make.

My essay wasn’t a defense of corporations (or of the existence of God) or a defense of my work. I find it naieve and simplistic for people to say “you work at a ski resort, so shut up—you’re a hypocrite.”  We don’t have a magic want to outlaw skiing, flying, expensive dinners, the American lifestyle, etc. and since we couldn’t draw the line anyway (you can’t ski, but you can fly…no, actually you can’t fly, but you can ride a taxi…the Japanese lifestyle is ok but not Americans…ban Americans!) we have to fix the whole system in which we live so that whatever you do—ski or subsistence farm—isn’t damaging to the climate. In the process of fixing the whole system (carbon taxation is part of a big fix) eventually skiing and flying go away, but in the interim, we do the best we can. Let’s fix the whole enchilanda, instead of unrealistically whining about how all business needs to go away, since it’s mostly destructive, or only people from “virtuous” businesses or occupations have the standing to talk. That’s so tired and so naieve because we’re all hypocrites anyway.

Thanks for the article.  Every job must be sustainable ... the ski lift operator, person skiing, and especially men and women involved in vacation/entertainment businesses.  With each person’s commitment, time, work and our new collective “consciousness” and “spiritual” relationships due to global climate change, human impacts and consequently, adaptations, are becoming apparent to all.  If we imagine a world with sustainable ski resorts as well as beachfront properties for another example, we can adapt.  Generally, it is renewing and connecting for city dwellers to visit the mountains, forests and oceans.  Why do people go on vacation anyway?  We can have abundance, prosperity and recreation in a sustainable way.  I hope vacations and recreation will change/adapt as necessary in the coming decades.  With workers like Mr. Schindler, recognizing the Spiritual on Earth, it will.

First, thanks to Auden for actually reading these comments. Most essayists, in my experince, refuse to engage criticicism, or act mortally offended when confronted by anonymous agitators.
His defense is not quite enough, though. 1. “Naive” is not spelled with an “e.” 2. His first sentence is bizarre. You don’t “solve” aclimate crisis, you only lessen its devastations,  and in case he needed reminding, economic inequality and genocidal militarism has been around all his life, and only gotten worse. The drive for “holistic” thinking is arrogant piffle - we are all small ants, operating in a gigantic supersystem that absorbs. To say so is not “naive” or “hypocritical,” and those epithets are sad. Yes, we are all hypocrites in the west, because we profit in innumerable ways from depredations of the corporate best, just some in more direct ways, like the egregious Amory Lovins.
No one wants to shut you up, Mr. Schendler - they just want to to examine yourself a little closer, make better arguments, and stop using nonsensical terms like “god.” Is that last term that got “naive” so lodged in your mind?
Still, you did a great service in trying to sort through some of your contradictions in print, and so you should be commended.

Does anyone have the feeling that our communication, here and now, appears to be convoluted and confused because many too many of us do not yet recognize that the family of humanity literally lives within a modern version of an ancient edifice, the Tower of Babel.  But the new leviathan-like, distinctly human construction is not made of stone, but instead built out as a “house of cards”.  This colossal, artificially designed structure is noticeably pyramidal in shape, duplicitously organized as a patently unsustainable pyramid scheme, and named the global political economy.

For the people who are the primary beneficiaries of such a scheme, the global economy is effectively an object of idolatry. Nothing else really matters. These people are the self-proclaimed Masters of the Universe among us. They could not care less about the natural world, life as we know it for the children and future generations, the integrity of Earth. You can readily recognize the idolaters as the leading, self-righteous elders of my “Not So GREAT GREED GRAB Generation”. Endlessly consuming and hoarding resources as well as power-mongering are regarded as religious rituals.

Nothing in this missive is new, I suppose.

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilityscience.org/content.html?contentid=1176

It’s a very good question - who benefits from us slashing at one another the way we are? Who benefits from us not being able to talk to each other across the divides of religion, economic or political philosophy, or occupation? Sure as hell ain’t me or my beloved places on this planet.

We’d all be better off listening and asking questions, IMHO, than in taking easy shots at one another’s vulnerabilities. I’d urge us to talk as though our lives actually depended on it.

For my part, as a Christian theologian, counselor, musician, writer, hiker, biker, and backpacker, I’m much more interested in hearing how and why people NOT like me are invested in the vision that Auden articulates.

In the online version, Barry Lopez is quoted but not referenced. So from what work of Lopez was the quote?

For me this article and discussion has raised many interesting issues. Not least is Schindler’s questioning of the nature of divinity/God/the divine/the sacred. I have made an intensive study in recent years of the thought of Gregory Bateson (biologist, anthropologist, psychologist, systems theorist, student of animal comunication and finally environmental thinker)who came, as a"fourth generation atheist” in his last years to see “the sacred” - “Call it God if you will!” as BEING the ‘going on’, the evolving inter-related process of life in ALL it’s forms. This great process is itself the divine. I think this insight is vitally important to us all at this time - and this is the core message of my recent book,‘Understanding Gregory Bateson: Mind, Beauty and the Sacred Earth’ - more info on my website: http://www.noelgcharlton.info

Bateson’s insights are close to those of Schindler and others here - close, I think, to a recognition of a path towards a reverent sanity and the possibility of ‘saving’ the Earth.