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.
Pagans stand in an interesting relationship to Christians and Secularists. Because we focus on the Sacred as it manifests in the world, we do not have the problems with science and knowledge of the world that the Christian Church has had since its inception. On the other hand, we agree with our Christian brethren and Sisteren that the Sacred is real, that the world cannot be explained either reductively or without including a context bigger than what can be described by experiment and rational argument alone.
Given this, we can celebrate Charles Darwin. He has been vilified by Fundamentalists for all sorts of horrors that have happened after he died, horrors committed by those who misunderstood his view of evolution, and evolution itself. A recent book powerfully argues that Darwin’s interest in evolution was powerfully influenced by his horror of slavery, providing one string answer to his contemporary critics. Darwin and his family were deeply abolitionist, and were closely associated with other abolitionists as well. Ironically given the moral self-righteousness of his Fundamentalist critics of today, slavery was strongly supported by many conservative Christians of his time and later. In Darwin’s Sacred Cause Adrian Desmond and James Moore show that his desire to see slavery ended was a powerful motivation underlying his work.
In 1837, long before he finally published, Darwin had aready sketched a genealogical pedigree that sought to show we were all descended from a common ancestor. He saw this as offering the final rebuttal to the specious arguments by slavery advocates that Blacks were a different species from while people. More than his critics then or now, Darwin was a deeply devoted humanitarian.
His humanity went well beyond our own species, to encompass life on a vastly broader basis. Darwin also strongly opposed vivisection and other ways of using animals cruelly in research. He advocated outlawing such practices. Again, Darwin held a position which his critics who claim evolution undermined morality have in most cases not come close to. Darwin thought evolution would strengthen our moral ties to one another, human and non human. For a book showing how this is so, see Larry Arnhart’s Darwinian Natural Right.
Darwin showed, as has been showed by others, that we do not need some deity above us to find solid principles of moral behavior. His critics today often show by their own actions that THEY need such a being for moral behavior, and even then fall rather far from any ideal.
posted March 14, 2009 at 8:43 pm
i couldn’t agree with you- or darwin- more…
many thanks for your enlightening article…
posted March 14, 2009 at 10:04 pm
“[...W]e [Pagans] agree with our Christian brethren and Sisteren [...] that the world cannot be explained either reductively or without including a context bigger than what can be described by experiment and rational argument alone.”
My Paganism is not an attempt to explain the world. It is my reaction to the world. I am careful to keep the two distinct.
posted March 14, 2009 at 11:35 pm
About Pagans and science, I wish more people would read “New Age Religion and Western Culture: Esotericism in the Mirror of Secular Thought” by Wouter J. Hanegraaff. It is a very scholarly examination of New Age (and Pagan) philosophy, and it’s place in the history of Western Culture.
One of his conclusions was that “All New Age religion is characterized by a criticism of dualistic and reductionistic tendencies in (modern) western culture, as exemplified by (what is emically perceived as) dogmatic Christianity, on the one hand, and rationalistic/scientistic ideologies, on the other. It believes that there is a “third option” which rejects neither religion and spirituality nor science and rationality, but combines them in a higher synthesis.”
posted March 15, 2009 at 10:46 am
Whatever it is that “New Age” thinks of itself (as it were), to me it has more and more come to appear to be little more than “Fluffy-Bunny Humanity” (or -Christianity, or -spirituality, or -scientism, or -confidence-art, or -cultism, or any number of other ways to fluffy-bunny-up any philosophic endeavor. The more I learn of it, the less I respect it, for it bears little resemblance to what was talked about back when I first began to find things in print about “new age” ideas.
And we must remember just WHO it was that tried to apply the concepts of the pseudo-science of “Social Darwinism” to the people living around them. Holding that the evolutionary concepts about “survival of the fittest” means that for humanity “fitness to survive” is meant to include “those of the blood royal,” or “the wealthiest,” or “most brutal,” or “most selfish,” or “most ideologically pure,” is really nothing but an attempt to excuse the excesses of the powerful in using and abusing those without power for their own gain.
I keep finding myself being referred to the book, “The Selfish Gene” along this train of thought.
posted March 15, 2009 at 3:50 pm
The question of Darwin’s ethics is not the same as the question of Darwinian ethics.
Furthermore, this attempt to make a saint out of Darwin forgets the basic dishonesty of Darwin, who didn’t really have a theory at all until he plagiarized Wallace (cf. Davies’ The Darwin Conspiracy)
http://darwiniana.com/2009/03/15/darwin-ethics-vs-darwinian-ethics/
posted March 15, 2009 at 8:56 pm
John, Darwin didn’t plagiarize Wallace. Darwin had come to his conclusions but was reluctant to publish because he foresaw the impact on religion, and didn’t want to distress his devout family members. When Wallace contacted him with the same idea they issued a joint paper and Darwin published.
Darwin certainly shouldn’t be made a saint but there’s no call to blackguard his reputation when he can’t defend himself.
posted March 16, 2009 at 2:18 am
While some members of the New Age community infuriate me at times, and blanket criticism about New Age people is as wrong as any blanket criticism of Pagans…and for exactly the same reason. There is an even greater variety among them than there is among us. Sure, there are a lot of poseurs. There are also people who have great power and highly refined ethics who are welcome in my Circle any time. I know and on occasion work with a few. Without their eternal optimism I would have had a much harder time enduring eight years of the Bush administration.