Democratic Forest Trusts (PDF)in Watson, Alan; Dean, Liese; Sproull, Janet, comps. 2006. Science and stewardship to protect and sustain wilderness values: Eighth World Wilderness Congress Symposium; 2005 September 30-October 6; Anchorage, AK.Democratic trusts with leadership elected by citizen-members promise to solve many of the problems afflicting both traditional government and corporate ownership of forestlands. This article explores these issues in some depth.Complexity and the Dream of Human Control of Eco-Systems (PDF)in Watson, Alan; Dean, Liese; Sproull, Janet, comps. 2006. Science and stewardship to protect and sustain wilderness values: Eighth World Wilderness Congress Symposium; 2005 September 30-October 6; Anchorage, AK.The title captures it. I then explore the kinds of institutions compatible with both nature and the modern world that are implied from this analysis.Rethinking the Obvious: Modernity and Living Respectfully With Nature (PDF)The Trumpeter: Journal of Ecosophy, Winter, 1997.Modernity is usually considered a wrong turn in terms of respect for and sustaining the environment. I argue the reality is more complex, for modernity has freed us from personal dependence on agriculture, ended the economic value of children, radically reduced the likelihood of large scale wat, and shifted much production to intellectual rather than material capital. This partially decouples society from nature, which gives us important opportunities as well as problems.Towards an Ecocentric Political Economy (PDF)The Trumpeter, Fall, 1996.This paper begins my effort at showing how liberal modernity can be harmonized with an ecocentric perspective on our relationship with the natural world. It is a corrective to much “free market environmental” literature that sacrifices Nature to money as well as to anti-liberal attacks by well-meaning but economically naïve environmentalists.Unexpected Harmonies: Self-Organization in Liberal Modernity and Ecology (PDF)The Trumpeter, Journal of Ecosophy, 10:1, Winter 1993This is my initial paper exploring how what I term ‘evolutionary liberal’ thought can be an important means by which society and nature can be brought into greater harmony. The other Trumpeter papers build on it.Deep Ecology and Liberalism: The Greener Implications of Evolutionary Liberalism (PDF)Review of Politics, Fall, 1996.Liberal thought and deep ecology are usually regarded as mutually exclusive. But the “evolutionary” tradition offers a way to integrate the two through commonalties in the work of David Hume, Michael Polanyi, Arne Naess, and Aldo Leopold, providing a stronger foundation for liberalism while strengthening the case for an ecocentric ethic.(Related subjects: Ecology)Saving Western Towns: A Jeffersonian Green Proposal (PDF)in Writers on the Range, Karl Hess and John Baden, eds., University Press of Colorado, 1998.Developmental pressures in the rural and small town West involve three groups: long term residents, new arrivals, and environmentalists. Today their interests often conflict. This conflict is in part the outcome of institutions which prevent harmonizing competing interests. The concept of developmental trusts, both for rural regions and for small communities offers a means whereby these interests can be harmonized for the benefit of all concerned.(Related subjects: Politics)Social Ecology, Deep Ecology, and Liberalism (PDF)Critical Review, 6: 2-3, 1992.Murray Bookchin is considered a leading radical environmental theorist. However, his analysis is incapable of leading humankind towards a more respectful and sustainable relationship with the natural world. Criticisms of Bookchin from both the deep ecology and evolutionary liberal perspective complement one another, pointing the way towards a better understanding of how modernity relates to the environment.The paper as a whole offers an early discussion of issues that are more clearly addressed in later papers, particularly Deep Ecology and Liberalism (1996) and the three Trumpeter articles in 1997, 1996, and 1993. However, there are other ideas in the article which have not been developed more thoroughly elsewhere.
I almost forgot! Today, Feb 12, is Charles Darwin’s birthday. And an illustrious day it is.
Why should I, a committed believer in the Gods and the Sacred, support a guy who has been used by atheists to debunk the existence of a sacred realm of any sort?
It’s actually pretty easy.
Because Darwin showed first that nature does not need a Divine Craftsman somewhere up above to bring forth the wonderful diversity of life we are blessed with on this planet. For the ‘modern’ mind, until Darwin the world was just a mechanical object, creativity being lodged elsewhere, in a transcendent deity and in the human mind to the extent it shared more in common with that deity than with the world. After Darwin, the argument among informed parties is between those of us who see the Sacred in the world, and those who attribute it’s abundance and beauty to chance and determinism. We advocates of Divine Immanence can at least hope for a seat at the table.
Second, Darwin situated us in the world, as its products every bit as much as butterflies, redwoods, and nematodes. We could no longer argue a deep and unbridgeable gulf separated and elevated us above everything else on this planet. That even scientists who accepted evolution still long argued that animals could not think or have subtle emotions, or even consciousness, says volumes about how deeply this disease of transcendent human uniqueness had afflicted even reasonably rational men (and some women).
It says much about the weak character of those who said because Darwin had argued for our emerging from the apes, he had eliminated any reason for moral principles applying to human beings. Darwin himself thought otherwise, that it would lead to extending moral principles to embrace our distant relatives.
In this very important regard Darwin was a much more spiritually wise man than a geat many of his critics. Not much has changed
posted February 12, 2009 at 9:45 pm
I am a bit sickened by the liberal use of the word pagan in your blogs. I guess you are a christian, maybe bigotry comes easy. Please look up this word’s meanings in the dictionary. It says anyone not belonging to the abrahamic faith and then the abuse begins – Heathen, hedonist, irrreligious, drunkard, uncivilized…. Makes me sick, makes me sicker is some people have parked under this abusive word and are giving legitimacy to this word. Please stop using it
posted February 12, 2009 at 11:06 pm
By the Gods, what have you been drinking? Or smoking?
If you get ‘sick’ by my calling myself by my own religion, one I have written two books about and practiced for over 20 years, then I really do not know how to treat your views with any respect. I have never before encountered arrogant ignorance on such a scale. You owe me an apology – or stay off this site.
I am sorry – I am not in a mood for responding diplomatically to posts such as yours. Go read some books on the subject of modern paganism, or NeoPaganism because you obviously do not know the fist thing about it.
posted February 13, 2009 at 3:55 am
Well, yes, somewhere in grey prehistory, “paganus” meant something along the line of “country bumpkin”. But words and their meanings are not static. They change, they – dare we say it – evolve. “Christian” itself was not complimentary when used by the Romans. It only became so when the Romans themselves became Christians. A dictionary is just a history book. If contemporary adherents of pre-medieval religious patterns (well, what would YOU call them?) choose to rehabilitate the word “pagan” then more power to them. Check with the dictionary again in 50 years and the definition you find may be quite different.
PS. Nice bit of writing about Darwin, Gus.
posted February 13, 2009 at 4:44 am
Great appreciation of Darwin — I first read Voyage of the Beagle as a schoolgirl and was struck by the accurate and careful attention to natural processes, the magnificent and poetic descriptions he wrote about what he was looking at so closley and lovingly. Geological formations, reproduction, plant diversity: Darwin observed them all and then patiently learned to interpret them in line with natural science.
Marya
You might want to use comment moderation to screen out the lunatic fringe.
posted February 13, 2009 at 10:39 am
I thought about doing that, Maya. Actually, this morning I went back intending to do just that, figuring whomever it was had had time to see my opinion of their drivel, but clasqm had already written an intelligent response that wasn’t as peeved as I was when I read it.
But I am disappointed that what could be a juicy discussion of Darwin, evolution, and spirituality got off on an utterly irrelevant note.
One other interesting point to me about Darwin. His approach to ethics was strongly influenced by the thinking of David Hume and Adam Smith. They located ethics, or their foundation, (the “moral sentiments,” as Smith put it) in our perception of ourselves, and by extension, others. They called it a sympathy based approach.
In my view this is the ONLY modern approach to the subject that seems to be deeply harmonious with a spiritual approach that is immanent in nature, and does not consist of laws or abstract principles as its startng oint. These latter theories mostly seem to me to reflect in secular terms a monotheistic command based way of looking at the world or, with utilitarianism, one that is ultimately atomistic and not enmeshed in relationships.
Perhaps that is why so many read Darwin as undermining morality rather than extending it. They could not see outside their own little box
posted February 13, 2009 at 11:23 am
I think your post is spot-on, Gus. I don’t believe in a creator or a creatrix; I believe that consciousness/ deities / spirit is/are an emergent property of the universe, and that this is a very liberating thought.
posted February 13, 2009 at 12:17 pm
I love you blog! I have come across it a couple of times, and each time I have agreed with what you have had to say. I too think Darwin is fantastic. I watched a special on him the other day, and he was an amazing man. He had the bravery to believe in something that was terrifying in his time. He actually had to hide his journals on his theory for years.
Darwin accepted nature in all it’s majesty. He was a great man with an open mind in a time where an open mind would get you killed.
posted February 13, 2009 at 2:57 pm
I didn’t know that about Darwin’s ethics — I remember Hume gives an example of sympathy that is very striking. He notes that if we sees insruments laid out for surgery, the sight excites fear and pain and empathy with the patient even if that unfortunate is unknoown to us.
Such subtle and warm observations.
In his talk the other evening at Darwin’s home the philosopher AS Greyling pointed out that Darwin’s ideas were at least a century before their time and so challenging that even today we are not ready to look at them and to begin recognising that most of our ideas about ‘humn nature’ are not just flawed but wrong. A friend of mine was there and remarked on how little we know about Darwin other than an elementary notion of his theories on evolution. His antipathy towards and critique of slavery was another breakthrough for the time.
Marya
posted February 14, 2009 at 2:49 am
And just because I can’t resist it — the last line from Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, a sentence I have copied into a notebook of great insights:
‘There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.’
Marya