Ecological "State of the World"
by
George Sessions
Government leaders and economic elites
in Industrial Growth Societies continue to
push for endless economic growth and
development. Consumerism in the industrial
world is now both a way of life and an
addiction. New Age visions promote
megatechnology solutions to economic and
environmental ills, and propose massive
high-tech global management and development
schemes for the biosphere. Third World
countries are now entering global markets and
trying to become First World countries by
destroying their ecosystems and wild species
as they emulate the industrial and consumer
patterns of the ecologically destructive
unsustainable First World.
The leading ecotheologian Thomas Berry
recently claimed that modern people "just don't
get it. They don't comprehend how deeply rooted
it is, the crisis that confronts us!... the
order and magnitude of the present catastrophic
situation is... so enormous, so widespread, and
we don't know what we are doing." Berry further
claims that
reconciliation between [the developers
and the ecologists] is especially difficult
because the commercial-industrial powers have
so overwhelmed the natural world in these past
two centuries that there is, to the ecologist,
no question of further adaptation of natural
systems to the human. The oppression of the
natural world by the plundering of the
industrial powers has so endangered the basic
functioning of natural forces that we are
already on the verge of total dysfunctioning
of the planet. We cannot mediate the situation
as though there were presently some minimal
balance already existing that could be
slightly modified so that a general balance
could come into being. The violence already
done to the earth is on a scale beyond all
understanding.... The change required by the
ecologist is a drastic reduction in the
plundering processes of the commercial
industrial economy.... Never before has the
human community been confronted with a
situation that required such a sudden and
total change in life style under the threat of
a comprehensive degradation of the planet."
Berry is surely correct to point out that
the "opposition between the industrial
entrepreneur and the ecologist has been both the
central human issue and the central earth issue
of this late 20th century."
The 1992 Worldwatch Institute report
contained a lead paper by Sandra Postel entitled
"Denial in the Decisive Decade". Documenting the
continuing exponential deterioration of the
world environment -- the greenhouse effect,
ozone layer depletion, desertification,
exponential human population growth, air and
water pollution, the pollution of the world's
oceans, loss of topsoil, the continuing loss of
ancient forests throughout the world, and the
rate of species extinction (which she estimates
at 140 per day), Postel claimed that the 1990s
was the "decisive decade" to begin to turn
things around. What we are getting instead is
what Thomas Berry calls "microphase solutions to
macrophase problems" or, in most cases, no
realistic solutions at all. Most people, Postel
claimed, are in a psychological state of denial
concerning the seriousness and magnitude of the
global ecological threat. One measure of the
degree of this denial is how the industrial
media have been able to convince so many people
that if they just recycle they are "doing their
part" for the environment, while they continue
with their high-consumption lifestyles and all
the other environmentally destructive practices
that take place in industrial growth societies.
The distinguished ecologists Anne and Paul
Ehrlich have also recently discussed the
dimensions of the current environmental crisis
and proposed realistic solutions to our
environmental problems. They claim that "the
ravaging of biodiversity... is the most serious
single environmental peril facing civilization."
They further point out that the overall solution
to the environmental crisis is to "reduce the
scale of the human enterprise."
The major reform environmental
organizations have in some cases performed
brilliantly, and in other cases they have
compromised miserably, in their piecemeal
political / economic / legal / technological
approaches to protecting the environment. By
failing to take an ecocentric integrated
long-range perspective, by failing to be guided
by realistic visions of ecological sustainable
societies, and by failing to adequately address
the root causes of the eco-crisis, they have
managed only to delay some of the worst of the
environmental degradation. Overall their
strategies and efforts are failing to stem the
tide of global environmental destruction.
The crucial paradigm shift the Deep
Ecology movement envisions as necessary to
protect the planet from ecological destruction
involves the move from an anthropocentric to a
spiritual/ecocentric value orientation. The wild
ecosystems and species on the earth have
intrinsic value and the right to exist and
flourish, and are also necessary for the
ecological health of the planet and the ultimate
well-being of humans. Humanity must drastically
scale down its industrial activities on Earth,
change its consumption lifestyles, stabilize and
then reduce the size of the human population by
humane means, and protect and restore wild
ecosystems and the remaining wildlife on the
planet. This is a program that will last far
into the twenty-first century. The crucial
question is how much irreversible global
ecological destruction humanity will continue to
cause before existing trends can be
significantly reversed.
 This
article was excerpted from
Deep Ecology for the 21st Century,
edited by George Sessions. Reprinted with
permission from the publisher, Shambhala
Publications
http://www.shambhala.com .
Info/Order
book.
This article was
excerpted from
Deep
Ecology for the 21st Century
edited by George Sessions
Info/Order
book.
About The
Author
George Sessions is chairman of the philosophy
department at Sierra College in Rocklin, California. He is the coauthor
of
Deep Ecology: Living As If Nature Mattered, and coeditor of
Environmental Philosophy: From Animal Rights to Radical Ecology.
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