Discuss: Activism’s Paradox Mountain

His conclusion is, I think, that the goal is the trying.

I’m with Deb Carey(#1); she’s put the whole thing very succinctly when a lot of us have trouble putting what we want to say into words. The problem is so intimidatingly huge, that we are too inclined to say the hard choices won’t accomplish the goal. But let’s not go out without giving it our best shot.

As a passive solar pioneer, living in sunny central SW Virginia, I am saddened by the lost opportunities of the last thirty years, when the enormous quantities of fossil carbon might have been used to make the transition finally being envisioned globally. I was a design consultant to some 400 projects, mostly homes, in the early ‘80’s, then nothing for 20 years, and only a few in the last three years.  However, I see the choice as keeping on keeping on, living one’s passion for the earth and her creatures, while somehow maintaining the capacity to function in this crazy world, or choosing to accomodate to the demands of this crazy world and tsk-tsking in an arrogant way at its insanity, as if the awareness of its insanity alone is redemptive.  I think the inability to live perfectly on every front is what has been described as the human condition or original sin.  I also think beating oneself up for one’s failure to live perfectly squanders the energy for effective action and compassionate and productive living.  I also think we are wonderfully unique and that every effort lived out of love is effective in empowering more such effort, as an example and in some universal karmic mystical way connected to the underlying structure of reality unacknowledged by our modern scientific perspective.  I’ve enjoyed immensely Rick Bass’s fiction and count among my friends Alan Weltzien, a literary scholar specializing in Rick Bass’s work. I’ve discovered the crucial importance of community, and the necessity of its cultivation as an important component of staying the course.  A seminal text for me on this cultivation is Ivan Illich’s Tools for Conviviality.

In many ways it comes down to a simple statement by John Muir, “Come to the woods for here is rest”. 

While the problem may seem large…the benefit is larger when we continue “keeping on”.  My deepest, most fervently held inspiration is that what I do for conservation may at some point allow my two sons, 5 and 8, to see what I have seen and feel what I have felt here in the deep North Maine Woods.

But what about the fiction? We’ve lost that, too.

When I asked E. O. Wilson why he kept on being an activist when he already knew the depressing facts, his answer was “What am I supposed to do? Sit back and eat pizza?”
Says it all, I think! We can’t give up…

Could Sally Zaino explain “...the fiction ... ?

Economy: its relationship to physical reality; Economy: a human construction of something ‘real’?

Perhaps a path to the future…...

It appears the predominant culture in the world, with its leviathan-like global economic engine, has a pernicious, inadvertent impact on biodiversity. Would you agree that if our culture chooses to keep growing the global economy as we are doing now, then the future for global biodiversity will eventually be jeopardized, perhaps massively extirpated?

The current organization of the predominant culture and its planful expansion, one that results in the rampant economic globalization we see today, also appears to give rise to something else that is unintended, extremely unfortunate and potentially ruinous.

If you will, please examine how the grotesque hoarding of wealth by millions of people leaves billions of people in the family of humanity hungry.

For a fortunate few people with obscene riches to conspicuously consume limited resources, while millions of unlucky children go without adequate food to eat, is a structure worthy of modification in a timely fashion.

Inequity is sad enough; grotesque inequity will one day be intolerable, I suppose.

If our predominant culture chooses to modify the way the currently unbridled global political economy grows and the way it distributes Earth’s resources, then perhaps we will find reasonable and sensible ways to assure a good enough future for our children as well as for the future of biodiversity.

I am assuming that we can all agree that the endlessly expanding scale of the global economy in a finite world with make-up and size of Earth will eventually, perhaps sooner rather than later, reach a point in human history when the global economy becomes patently unsustainable, resulting in some kind of unimaginable colossal wreckage.

Comments are welcome.

Sincerely,

Steve

Steven Earl Salmony, Ph.D., M.P.A.
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population, established 2001