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.
When I read these two articles about how we are emptying our oceans and exterminating sharks not even on purpose, but as thoughtless “bycatch” while we exterminate other things, I was led into musing about the kind of world we live in. (Thanks to the Schwarz Report) Not at the political level, but far more deeply. More and more I am coming to the realization that we Pagans are pointing to a radical rethinking of humanity’s place in the world – if our society does not crash the ecosystem first.
All of modernity, and a great deal of Christianity, is based on the idea that nature is a fund of resources valuable mostly because we can turn them into something else: trees to paper, mountaintops to electricity and landfill, rivers into storage pools, animals into meat, oceans into fish farms, and so on. Nothing on this earth is valuable for what it is.
Corporations include human beings in this category of things valuable for other than what they are, and some moderns object. Economists, many of them, legitimize this attitude by claiming we don;t ‘owe’ the future anything. What, they ask, did the future ever do for us?
But this view is implicit in the modern world view that denies the intrinsic value of anything. From this perspective what is intrinsically valuable is subjective, like our preference for kinds of ice cream. What is ‘real’ is ‘objective,’ and does not include our mere ‘preferences.’ That our country could seriously debate whether torture is acceptable is a sign of just how deeply this pathology of the soul and rot of the spirit has infected our society.
Most Pagans realize this belief is false, and not just false. It is deeply destructive of any possibility of a right relationship between us two-leggeds and the rest of the world. As a society, we relate to the other-than-human the way sociopaths relate to the human. Small wonder that in time the sociopathic mentality begins to seep into how men and women of power see the rest of us.
When we experience the sacredness of the cycles of nature, see and feel the fields of life in which we are immersed, and discover that sometime even ‘inert’ nature responds to us in our rituals we know the more than human encompasses us.
Leaving our sacred spaces for the broader society more and more feels to me like leaving sanity and entering an asylum.
posted July 7, 2009 at 6:20 am
Maybe we could try to make every space sacred. Maybe we need to have a sense of humor about how screwed up things seem. Maybe we are over-alarmed. Maybe this world is a nightmare with hints of the divine woven within the fabric of things.
I’ve tried a lot of religious paths and practices, of which many still strike me as having noble elements.
I’m certainly not a benign presence on the planet where animals are concerned, I’ve never been disciplined to eat only vegetables.
I don’t know, do we obsess to the point of worrying about things like landfills? How much can we stop? Where should we focus postive energy?
I guess we all seek out avenues, despite the psychic conditions. Some of the time I succumb to negative psychic conditions, identifying myself with ‘em… maybe even acting them out and increasing their power on my brothers and sisters.
Has educating people on what we share in common, be it material, ancestoral, circumstantial, abstract, etc. made a difference? Is it really a new gospel or an ancient one that’s been obscured with obsessive tendencies to property ownership? Does it fall on deaf ears? Or do some want to seek and find?
What do we put stock in as a society? Thinking in terms of modern economics… Do we really compensate folks for the right sort of behaviors and outputs, be they tangible or abstract?
I don’t know. I don’t think I’ve suffered nearly as much as others have had to endure. I have had it pretty good.
My world’s okay. Although my mortality and that of my friends and family lurks.
And my friends and family are where I put my stock, most of the time. At the very least, I try to repay kindness in a way that evens the balance.
My early Christian ancestors must’ve thought the world was screwed up in their time as well to be so preoccupied with subjects like the apocalypse and sin.
posted July 9, 2009 at 8:22 am
I think we Pagans are involved some because worshipping the Earth itself leads to wanting to treat it as sacred, and some because we are willing to think, see, and believe in unusual manners…but we are not nearly the only ones.
Whether folks are unorthodox in their religious beliefs and practices, many people of all religions and of secular thinking are becoming aware that the behaviour of the human race is profoundly psychotic, and are attempting to orchestrate some sort of path to sanity.
Thermal
Gus said;
Leaving our sacred spaces for the broader society more and more feels to me like leaving sanity and entering an asylum.